This paper advances a “relational geopolitics” account of the European Union’s foreign policy, arguing that the EU exercises power through standards, markets, conditional finance, citizen-centered and institutional ties – not through classic state coercion (Anghel, 2025). Empirically, it anchors the argument in evidence on rising global risks to EU security, first mapped through expert reviews and now tested with embedded expert-survey experiments (Global Risks to the EU Project, 2025). The risk landscape is concrete – from a potential U.S. retrenchment to EU divisions – and exposes where EU instruments can affect governance.

The paper shows that the EU practices relational geopolitics because it operates as a system of common-pool resources, extending insights from Robert Keohane and Elinor Ostrom to an immaterial good – security. The EU began as a club producing non-rivalrous benefits for members, but has evolved into a regime that must manage rivalrous, partially non-excludable resources, where depletion and free-riding are real hazards. This shift is illustrated not only with the example of security but also with the single market, the single currency, and the integrated financial space (Anghel and Jones, 2025).