As approaches to globalisation, international trade, and market governance are being overhauled to adapt to an increasingly fragmented liberal international order, the environment in which multinational companies operate is changing. The EU’s economic narrative has shifted from setting rules framed as universally and transnationally welfare-enhancing to actively designing an end-state of market development in pursuit of EU interests. While there has been growing scholarly attention to the implications of this shift, often referred to as the EU's geoeconomic turn, for business power and corporate strategies, the extent to which it has influenced patterns of corporate contestation remains less explored.

Building on Juncos and Pomorska’s (2021) observation that politicisation is not only an outcome of contestation but can also create an opportunity structure in favour of contestation, this paper inquires how geopoliticisation – as a specific type of politicisation – influences, if at all, coalitional behaviour of multinational firms in terms of discourse and membership as they contest EU strategic autonomy. The analysis extends to how these dynamics feed back into the EU’s policy debate, domestic political divisions and its international role. Using longitudinal discourse network analysis to trace changes in discourse coalitions over time, this paper puts forward an analytical framework that makes salient the role of interest group coordination in shaping ideas, delimiters, and frames for policy debates in the EU during periods of increased geopoliticisation.

This study offers a sentiment analysis of the concept of strategic sovereignty as presented in European political discourse, correlating it with foreign policy decision-making practices and the implementation of global leadership projects. The project adopts a critical juncture approach to the modern history of Europe in order to examine the evolution of expert narratives of European sovereignty since the 'pragmatic turn' in the European Union's foreign policy projects. The study highlights critical junctures in the activities of the EEAS (and especially DG INTPA) as meeting points between sovereignty-as-discourse and sovereignty-as-practice. The study further explores the integration of the concept of strategic sovereignty within initiatives aimed at ensuring the EU's global geo-economic leadership.

The presentation criticizes the Global Gateway strategy as a new approach, but questions its viability in Eurasia. It is clear that at the foreign policy level the EU wants to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative and other regional and global players and to (re)establish the EU’s global standing, yet the Global Gateway strategy appears to be representing the unfolding discourse of EU sovereignty at the interior level. The presentation provides an overview of the GG embedded in the macroregional context with further emphasizing the obstacles and discrepancies between the EU's short-term and long-term foreign policy strategies.