The Limits of ‘Geopolitical Power Europe’: Why the EU's Eastern Neighbours Keep Hedging

Abstract

This article examines the hedging strategies pursued by the European Union's (EU's) eastern neighbours – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – and asks why hedging has remained a recurrent foreign‐policy response despite the EU's intensified geopolitical engagement after Russia's full‐scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on 18 expert interviews and empirical data, it argues that hedging is shaped by three interlocking drivers: security vulnerabilities, economic interdependencies and regime‐survival concerns. These factors constrain the EU's ability to anchor the region decisively within its geopolitical orbit and help explain why strategic choices remain volatile, mixed and fragmented across cases. The article also shows that hedging is not always risk‐reducing. Under conditions of acute revisionist pressure, and where one power is willing to use force to enforce its sphere‐of‐influence claims, strategic ambiguity can become a source of vulnerability. Ukraine illustrates this danger in its most existential form, whilst Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus display different trajectories of adaptation, alignment, constrained diversification and imposed dependence. The article contributes to debates on EU geopolitical actorness and Europeanisation by showing how security, economic and domestic‐political constraints shape the foreign‐policy choices of small states in a contested regional environment.