his Annual Review (AR) of the European Union (EU) focuses on the events and developments of 2023. However, our editorial was crafted shortly after a critical turning point, that is, the institutional and political renewal process that began on 6–9 June 2024. During this period, nearly 400 million European citizens were entitled to elect the 720 Members of the 10th European Parliament (EP) Legislature. In the following weeks, crucial decisions were made regarding the EU's top leadership positions. Whilst this pivotal moment will be explored in detail in the next AR, dedicated to 2024, it serves as the backdrop for our reflection on the main developments and dynamics in European governance during 2023. Therefore, after outlining our editorial vision, we briefly reconstruct what can be seen as a choice point at which significant options shape the trajectory of the European project. The following section provides an overview of the AR before making some concluding remarks.
This article reflects on the origins and evolution of the ‘geopolitical Commission’. It discusses the Commission President’s personal style and entrepreneurship, the contingency that allowed for the concept’s expansion and the institutional conditions that were propitious to von der Leyen’s success. It concludes with a reflection on possible future developments. The article makes three main arguments. The first is that although the preceding Commission was styled as a ‘political Commission’, with mainly domestic policy priorities, the Juncker Commission took important steps that anticipated and laid the foundations for the ‘geopolitical Commission’. The second argument is that the von der Leyen Commission built on her predecessor’s legacy but also added new geopolitical elements, such as the reorientation of EU development policy through the ‘Global Gateway’, a ‘Global Human Rights Sanctions regime’ and working for peace and justice in the Middle East. The third argument is that the Commission’s success can be attributed to a combination of the experience and the energetic personal style of the President herself, a series of external challenges that put the EU into permanent crisis mode from early 2020 and the readiness of other key figures and institutions to allow the Commission President to assume a leadership role.
This article presents an ideational perspective on agenda-setting leadership, which it applies to the role played by President von der Leyen in the EU’s response to the crisis that followed the Russian full-scale military invasion of Ukraine that started on 24 February 2022. On a conceptual and methodological level, by searching for evidence of strategic framing, this study traces the process of President von der Leyen’s ideational agenda-setting leadership and how it influenced the overall development of the EU’s response during the initial ten weeks of the crisis. The empirical findings contribute to the academic debate on the Commission President’s leadership in a crisis context by revealing how her principled ideas enabled her to diagnose the situation precisely and devise clear priorities and tools to address it. The empirical analysis also suggests that President von der Leyen, in line with her geopolitical Commission, played a very active foreign policy role.
