This paper explores how security is understood and politicised when long-standing geopolitical reference points lose their stabilising power. Focusing on Czechia and Poland in the period 2022–2026, it argues that contemporary threat perceptions are shaped not only by military risks, but also by a deeper ontological insecurity produced by the erosion of familiar strategic patterns—most notably the taken-for-granted reliability of the transatlantic alliance as an anchor of order and protection. In an environment where neither “the West” nor “the East” appears fully predictable, citizens face a destabilising sense of strategic ambiguity that extends into everyday expectations about the future.

To conceptualise these dynamics, the paper applies ontological security theory and treats security as a need for continuity, trust, and coherent collective self-understandings. When geopolitical routines and assumptions are disrupted, anxiety becomes politically consequential: it increases demand for reassurance, clear alignments, and credible guarantees, while also making public debate more susceptible to polarising narratives and strategic framings. In this context, energy vulnerability and the green transition matter not primarily as technical policy agendas, but as additional arenas where uncertainty and distributional concerns are translated into broader questions of protection, sovereignty, and dependence.

Empirically, the paper compares Czech and Polish security narratives across three interconnected domains: (1) interpretations of the war and military threat, (2) perceptions of strategic alignment and reliability (EU, NATO, and the transatlantic relationship), and (3) socio-economic and informational pressures—including energy shocks and disinformation—that amplify mistrust and contestation. Methodologically, it combines analysis of policy developments with discourse analysis of political and media framing (supported by topic modelling), alongside public opinion evidence capturing insecurity, trust, and identity orientations.

The paper contributes to European security research by showing how the destabilisation of strategic anchors reshapes threat perceptions and security preferences, linking geopolitics to the societal demand for order under conditions of prolonged uncertainty.

The paper investigates why selected Indo‑Pacific partners are deepening cooperation with the European Union despite the EU’s limited military capabilities, ambiguous geopolitical identity, and longstanding normative frictions with parts of the region. Since 2021, and even amid the strategic absorption caused by Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU has expanded security‑centred partnerships with Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and intensified its economic security agenda across the Indo‑Pacific. This outward turn is puzzling for dominant accounts of European security, which emphasise capability deficits, internal fragmentation, and neighbourhood pressures as constraints on meaningful engagement beyond Europe. Yet Indo‑Pacific states increasingly treat the EU as a valuable partner in a regional environment shaped by US-China rivalry, supply‑chain vulnerabilities, and the search for diversified strategic options.

The paper adopts a relational, outside‑in conceptualisation of EU actorness, viewing the EU’s security and emerging 'geopolitical' role as constituted through external interpretations rather than material capabilities alone. This approach foregrounds how Indo‑Pacific actors construct the EU as a provider of economic security, regulatory stability, and political diversification - forms of security that matter in a region where hedging, autonomy, and sovereignty sensitivities shape national discourses. National narratives in Indo-Pacific partners reimagine the EU not as a traditional military power but as a complementary source of resilience amid great‑power pressures. These narratives simultaneously contest and reconstruct Europe’s role: the EU is portrayed as intrusive and normative, yet also as rules‑based and strategically useful.

Methodologically, the paper employs a comparative interpretive design combining discourse analysis of national policy documents, elite statements, and strategic debates with targeted expert interviews across selected Indo‑Pacific partners - namely Vietnam and Indonesia. This enables tracing how domestic narratives frame the EU’s utility, credibility, and strategic relevance, and how these interpretations condition patterns of engagement.

The findings contribute to debates on European security by demonstrating that the EU’s emerging mode of “geopolitical” actorness is recognised externally not through hard military power but through economic security instruments, supply‑chain diversification, and coalition‑building with like‑minded and hedging states. They also show how national discourses beyond Europe shape and constrain the EU’s evolving security identity as a global actor, revealing actorness as co‑constituted by external partners.

Russia’s war against Ukraine triggered unprecedented institutional responses as well as a profound recalibration of the European Union’s normative self-understanding and geopolitical orientation (Håkansson 2024a; Maurer et al. 2023; Orenstein 2023; Chaban and Elgström 2023; Rabinovych and Pintsch 2024). In this context, the EU’s communicative practices have acquired heightened significance, functioning not only as reflections of political action but also as constitutive mechanisms in the formation of its geopolitical identity. Solidarity has thus become established as a key discursive resource through which the EU legitimises its actions and articulates a collective identity in a period of sustained turbulence. Yet, our understanding of how the very notion of solidarity is discursively constructed within EU institutional communication remains surprisingly limited. This constitutes a significant research gap, as in a context where geopolitical urgency intersects with moral obligation, the articulation of solidarity profoundly shapes how the EU defines itself, positions Ukraine within the European moral imaginary, and sustains the legitimacy of its long-term stance.

To address this gap, the contribution focuses on an analysis of the metaphorical language employed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her public statements on the war in Ukraine since February 2022, with particular attention to the evolution of metaphorical patterns over time. Theoretically, the contribution is anchored in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, originally formulated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), which conceives of metaphor as a fundamental cognitive mechanism structuring not only language but also perception, reasoning, and everyday social practices. The analysis also draws on the concept of solidarity, often defined as “an inclination to collective concern and action” (Honohan 2011, 69). Methodologically, the contribution employs Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004), enabling a systematic examination of the metaphorical repertoires used by the Commission President in the discursive articulation of solidarity in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The study draws on a dataset of 136 speeches and statements by Ursula von der Leyen that explicitly address the war in Ukraine. By focusing on the metaphorical clusters of LIGHT/DARKNESS, FAMILY, JOURNEY/BRIDGE, and FORTRESS, the contribution demonstrates how metaphors of solidarity function as strategic discursive resources through which notions of European belonging, responsibility, and agency are sustained, contested, and recalibrated under conditions of prolonged crisis.

This paper examines the perceptions of defence policy actors regarding public opinion, as well as their understanding of public opinion as a determinant of Belgian defence policy. Belgian defence policy literature depicts defence issues as low-salience, presenting Belgian public opinion as pacifist, disengaged, or opposed to defence spending in favour of other priorities. Such disengagement or pacifism is regarded as a key determinant of Belgium's defence policy, accounting for both the country's past underinvestment in defence and its limited commitment to NATO's pledge. Yet, significant defence investments were approved by the centrist-left-green De Croo government (2020–2025), and spending is expected to continue rising under the subsequent government. These developments raise questions about how elites perceive and respond to public opinion in shaping defence policy. Literature on the elite's perception exposes that decision-makers depict public opinion negatively, treat it as a constraining force, and struggle to evaluate public preferences, particularly when they perceive an issue as low-salience to public opinion. These perceptions are politically consequential, as elite's beliefs about what the public thinks influence the decisions they ultimately make. Based on the concept of “strategic culture”, defence policy is considered to be situated within a specific cultural context structured by the elite's shared conceptions and transmitted norms regarding threats and the use of force. Accordingly, this research adopts an interpretative approach focusing on how public opinion is framed and mobilised by defence policy actors, highlighting the role of identity in shaping these perceptions. This paper explores the question: How do Belgian political elites frame public opinion on defence, and how do they mobilise this frame as an explanatory and justificatory factor in shaping defence policy? The research relies on 29 interviews with defence policy actors under the De Croo government, analysed through interpretative abductive frame analysis. Findings suggest that: First, public opinion is framed by elites as disengaged from defence issues, but also as malleable and capable of being persuaded to support defence spending. Second, public opinion is identified by elites as a determining factor to explain Belgium's limited expenditures. Third, public opinion appears to be embedded within a broader narrative, which connects Belgian identity to defence spending. This research aims to deepen the understanding of the elite's perceptions of citizens through framing and interpretative approaches regarding issues characterised by perceived low public salience and high ethical stakes.

Enlargement has long been celebrated as the EU’s most successful foreign policy tool. Its transformative power was put to the test in the 1990s and 2000s, as the end of the Cold War eventually led the Union to more than double in size, including through the addition of eleven formerly communist states. Ostensibly a great success, the legacy of the ‘big bang’ enlargement and its smaller-scale follow ups has been reevaluated over time, as a crisis-hit EU struggled to maintain unity and a sense of common purpose. Then, the February 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine shocked Europe - furnishing its leaders with new resolve and an admirable degree of solidarity. Enlargement, too, returned to the EU’s agenda for the first time in a decade, very much driven by perceptions of expansion as both a security imperative and normative obligation. This has the prospect of a renewed geopolitical enlargement comparable to that which began in the 1990s.

Building on an analysis of the discursive framing of enlargement by key EU actors, this article highlights the constraints that make such an expansion unlikely. In addition to the (re)emerging internal divisions that militate against a decisive break with the status quo ante on enlargement, the international context is also unfavourable. To put it provocatively, the world in which the EU could have thrived is no longer. The ‘liberal international order’ has been upended by a return to great power politics - epitomised both by Russia’s flagrantly illegal war of territorial conquest and by the second Trump administration’s ‘might makes right’ approach to international relations. The EU, coming up against the very real limits to its actorness, avoids difficult political decisions on enlargement by retreating into excessive proceduralism. Thus, Ukraine, alongside the other Eastern candidates, appears likely to follow the path of the Western Balkans states - that is, engaging in an ever-shifting process of conditionality and integration, while the prospect of full EU membership remains distant. The paper will address the consequences of EU indecision, not only for membership candidate states, but also for the EU’s own security.