The Role of Energy in European Union Foreign Policy Course

Course Overview

Energy has become one of the defining arenas of European Union foreign policy. For decades, European integration assumed that energy markets would function in ways broadly compatible with political stability and that dependence on external suppliers could be managed through commercial relationships and liberal interdependence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the energy crisis that preceded and followed it demonstrated the fragility of those assumptions with extraordinary speed and force. The European Union has since pursued the most ambitious reorientation of its energy foreign policy since the 1973 oil shock, but the structural conditions that made it vulnerable — geographic concentration of supply, ageing infrastructure, fragmented internal governance, and the competing priorities of twenty-seven member states — are deeply embedded and yield to political will only slowly.

This course examines the relationship between energy and European Union foreign policy as a sustained analytical issue. It asks how energy shapes the European Union’s strategic interests, its external diplomacy, its use of regulatory and economic instruments, and its ambitions for leadership in global climate governance. Students analyse the full range of tools through which the European Union pursues its energy foreign policy: infrastructure agreements and sanctions, market regulation and carbon border mechanisms, climate diplomacy and strategic partnership agreements, diversification initiatives and critical minerals governance. The course also examines the deep tensions within European energy policy: between member state sovereignty and supranational coordination, between market liberalisation and strategic autonomy, between climate ambition and near-term security imperatives.

Teaching is organised around major analytical questions rather than conventional thematic surveys. Each week, students investigate a central problem through case studies, policy documents, strategic assessments, and primary sources, building towards independent analytical and policy-oriented work. Teaching combines seminar discussion, applied exercises, comparative policy analysis, and a structured simulation. Students are expected to engage seriously with European Union studies, international relations theory, and political economy as analytical tools.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain and critically evaluate major theoretical approaches to European Union foreign policy and energy security, including realist, liberal, institutionalist, and normative power perspectives.
• Analyse how energy shapes the European Union’s geopolitical interests, strategic vulnerabilities, and patterns of external engagement.
• Assess the effectiveness of the European Union’s energy foreign policy instruments, including infrastructure diplomacy, sanctions, market regulation, and climate governance.
• Evaluate the tensions between member state sovereignty, supranational coordination, and energy solidarity within the European Union.
• Interpret policy documents, strategic frameworks, energy data, and regulatory instruments with critical precision.
• Compare the European Union’s energy relationships with major global actors and regions, including Russia, the United States, China, the Gulf states, and the European neighbourhood.
• Construct independent, evidence-based analytical arguments in written and oral forms, drawing on primary and secondary sources.
• Develop strategic assessments and policy recommendations under conditions of geopolitical uncertainty.

Assessment

1. Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
2. Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
3. Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
4. Final Research Essay — 35%

Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
Students are assessed on the quality, consistency, and analytical depth of their contributions to seminar discussions throughout the semester.

Strong performance demonstrates:

• sustained engagement with weekly readings
• ability to apply theoretical and conceptual frameworks
• critical discussion of empirical cases and policy developments
• constructive engagement with the arguments of others

Students are encouraged to incorporate comparative perspectives, primary sources, and contemporary international developments into seminar discussions.

Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
This is a two-stage analytical assignment submitted in connected parts across the semester. Part II builds explicitly on Part I, and students may revise aspects of their earlier analysis in light of feedback received before incorporating it into the second submission.

Part I: Policy Instrument Analysis (Week 5) — 1,000 words — 15%
Students select a specific EU energy foreign policy instrument, agreement, or initiative from a list provided by the lecturer and produce a focused analytical paper. The paper should:

• identify the stated objectives and political context of the selected instrument
• examine the institutional actors involved and the interests at stake
• apply at least one theoretical framework from the course to explain how and why the instrument was developed
• assess its effectiveness against its stated goals

Part II: Policy Options Brief (Week 8) — 1,500 words — 20%
Building on the Part I analysis, students prepare a policy options brief addressed to a specified EU decision-making audience, which may be the European Commission, the Council, the European External Action Service, or a member state government. The brief should:

• define the energy foreign policy challenge to be addressed
• present and evaluate two or three distinct policy options
• assess the trade-offs, political feasibility, and implementation risks associated with each
• recommend a preferred course of action with explicit justification

Students may revise aspects of their Part I analysis in light of feedback before developing the brief.

Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
Students participate in an EU Council energy negotiation simulation held across Weeks 10 and 11. Each student represents an assigned member state or EU institutional actor in a structured scenario involving contested energy policy choices. Assessment has three components:

• Delegated position paper (500 words), submitted before the simulation — 5%
• Simulation participation and negotiation conduct — 5%
• Reflective commentary (750 words), submitted after the simulation — 5%

The reflective commentary should evaluate the student’s own strategic positioning during the exercise, the dynamics of negotiation and coalition-building that emerged, and the relationship between the theoretical frameworks studied in the course and the institutional logic of EU decision-making as experienced in the simulation. Role assignments and detailed instructions are distributed at the end of Week 7.

Final Research Essay — 35%
A research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words addressing a substantive question concerning the role of energy in EU foreign policy. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they engage with relevant theoretical and empirical debates, draw on EU primary sources and academic scholarship, and advance an original analytical claim. A one-page essay proposal with a preliminary bibliography is submitted at the end of Week 7 for formative feedback. The final essay is due in Week 13.

Submission, Formatting Requirements and Academic Integrity

• All written work must be submitted as a PDF file, regardless of the word processor used.
• Use font at 12 points Times New Roman or Arial. Pages must be numbered. Include your name, student number, course name, assignment title, and word count on the first page; a separate cover page is not required.
• The word count stated in the assignment brief is a guide to scope and depth, not a rigid threshold. Work within 10 per cent of the stated count in either direction. The word count covers the main body of the text, including in-text citations, but excludes the reference list, any tables or figures, and any appendices.
• All written work must follow APA 7th edition throughout. In-text citations use the author-date format: (Yergin, 2020) or Yergin (2020) argues that… For direct quotations, include the page number: (Yergin, 2020, p. 47). The reference list appears at the end of the document, ordered alphabetically by surname. Do not use footnotes for references; footnotes may be used sparingly for substantive clarifications that would otherwise interrupt the argument.
• Formal policies on academic integrity and the use of AI tools vary by institution and will be communicated where applicable. The question beneath those policies does not change: is the goal to understand, or simply to appear to have understood? A qualification obtained without the knowledge it is meant to represent is a transaction, not an education, and it shortchanges the holder as much as anyone else. I invest genuine effort in connecting students to scholarship, practitioners, and professional networks that extend well beyond any syllabus. Whether that investment meets a reciprocal commitment is, in the end, a question of character rather than compliance.

Literature

• Badell, D. (2025). Norm contestation in EU foreign policy. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Gstöhl, S., & Schunz, S. (2021). The external action of the European Union: Concepts, approaches, theories. Macmillan International Higher Education.
• Keukeleire, S., & Delreux, T. (2022). The foreign policy of the European Union (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.
• Leal-Arcas, R. (2024). Research handbook on EU energy law and policy (2nd ed.). Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Siddi, M. (2023). European energy politics: The green transition and EU-Russia energy relations. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Versolmann, I. (Ed.). (2025). The development of energy policy in the European Union: Continuity, critical junctures and change. Routledge.

Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:

• Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis.
• Policy documents — from European Union institutions, member state governments, international organisations, and think tanks — provide the primary material through which EU energy foreign policy is formulated, contested, and implemented.
• Energy data and strategic assessments, produced by bodies such as the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, and Eurostat, provide the empirical foundations for policy analysis.

Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.

Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.

Structure

Week 1 — Why has energy become central to European Union foreign policy?

Energy has been present at the foundations of European integration. The European Coal and Steel Community was built on the premise that shared management of strategic energy resources could make war between European states structurally impossible. Yet for much of the post-war era, energy remained a domain of national policy, its connection to foreign affairs treated as secondary to market logic and commercial diplomacy. That arrangement has unravelled. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the weaponisation of gas flows to Europe, and the subsequent emergency of REPowerEU have confirmed that energy is simultaneously a primary instrument and a primary vulnerability of European external action. This week establishes the foundational analytical vocabulary of the course: energy security, strategic autonomy, external action, and the contested question of what kind of geopolitical actor the European Union is and aspires to become.

Key Themes

• Energy and European integration: from the Coal and Steel Community to the Energy Union and REPowerEU
• Strategic vulnerability and the politics of energy dependence
• Energy security as a dimension of European Union external action
• The European Union as a geopolitical actor: theoretical frameworks

Case Studies

• The evolution of European energy cooperation: EURATOM, the Energy Charter Treaty, and the Energy Union
• European energy crises and their foreign policy consequences across five decades

Seminar Exercise

• Policy document analysis: students examine a set of foundational European Union energy security documents, including the 2006 Green Paper, the 2014 European Energy Security Strategy, and the 2022 REPowerEU Plan, identifying the assumptions, interests, and strategic logics embedded in each and how they shifted across moments of crisis.

Analytical Focus

• Situating EU energy policy within international relations theory; introducing the concept of strategic autonomy; establishing the analytical relationship between energy security and EU foreign policy

Week 2 — Can the European Union achieve strategic autonomy through energy policy?

Strategic autonomy has become the organising concept of European Union foreign and security policy since 2016, but its application to energy reveals the concept’s tensions and ambiguities. Autonomy in energy terms requires reducing dependence on unreliable suppliers, diversifying sources and routes, building storage and infrastructure, and developing domestic alternatives. Each of these strategies involves political costs, distributional conflicts, and new forms of dependency: LNG terminals create reliance on American and Qatari exporters; solar panels depend on Chinese manufacturing; critical minerals concentrate in a handful of states whose political reliability is itself contested. This week examines the strategic logic of European energy diversification, the gap between declared ambitions and structural realities, and the theoretical debate over what meaningful strategic autonomy would actually require.

Key Themes

• Strategic autonomy: definitions, dimensions, and the energy challenge
• Dependency, resilience, and diversification: concepts and trade-offs
• Geoeconomics and the limits of market-based energy governance
• Crisis-driven policy change and its structural constraints

Case Studies

• Russian gas dependence: how it was built, why it persisted, and what dismantling it revealed about EU governance
• REPowerEU and the diversification imperative: speed, costs, and new dependencies

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic vulnerability assessment: students map the European Union’s key energy dependencies across fuel types and regions, assess the degree of exposure in each, and evaluate the diversification options available, identifying where new vulnerabilities are created in the process.

Analytical Focus

• Applying strategic autonomy frameworks to energy policy; distinguishing commercial interdependence from strategic vulnerability; evaluating the feasibility and limits of diversification as a foreign policy tool

Week 3 — Are energy infrastructures instruments of diplomacy or coercion?

Infrastructure is where energy geopolitics becomes material. Pipelines, LNG terminals, electricity interconnectors, and maritime routes are physical systems that encode political relationships, create durable dependencies, and serve simultaneously as instruments of cooperation and coercion. For the European Union, infrastructure has been a persistent site of tension between market logic and strategic reasoning: projects such as Nord Stream were justified commercially while their geopolitical implications were contested or denied by the states that sponsored them. The post-2022 landscape looks markedly different. The rapid development of LNG import capacity, the accelerated construction of interconnectors across Central and Eastern Europe, and the Southern Gas Corridor each represent attempts to rebalance the infrastructure geography of European energy supply. This week examines how infrastructure functions as a diplomatic instrument, a strategic vulnerability, and a policy tool in European energy foreign policy.

Key Themes

• Pipeline geopolitics: strategic influence, transit politics, and the coercive use of energy infrastructure
• The Nord Stream projects: history, political controversy, and their destruction
• LNG infrastructure and the partial transformation of European supply geography
• The Southern Gas Corridor and energy diplomacy in the Eastern neighbourhood

Case Studies

• Nord Stream 1 and 2: the politics of construction, operation, and destruction
• The Southern Gas Corridor: Azerbaijan, Turkey, and the strategic diversification logic
• European LNG terminal development and the emerging American export relationship

Seminar Exercise

• Infrastructure strategy workshop: students analyse the geopolitical implications of a specified European energy infrastructure project, assessing the strategic interests of all parties involved, the dependencies created, and the conditions under which the infrastructure could become a source of leverage or vulnerability.

Analytical Focus

• Infrastructure analysis as a geopolitical method; connecting physical energy systems to patterns of influence and dependency; evaluating infrastructure choices as foreign policy decisions with long-term consequences

Week 4 — How do energy crises and sanctions transform European Union foreign policy?

Energy crises are among the most powerful catalysts of European foreign policy innovation. The 1973 oil embargo exposed the structural dependency of European economies and accelerated the search for alternatives and institutional frameworks. The Russia-Ukraine gas disputes of 2006 and 2009 produced new European solidarity mechanisms and infrastructure investment. The 2021 to 2022 energy crisis, culminating in the full rupture with Russian supply, triggered the most sweeping reorientation of EU energy external policy in the organisation’s history. Alongside crisis response, the European Union has developed energy-linked sanctions into a primary instrument of foreign policy coercion, deploying successive packages against Russia with significant economic consequences for both parties. This week examines crisis as a driver of EU energy foreign policy change, and sanctions as a tool of energy statecraft, asking what each reveals about the European Union’s capacity for strategic adaptation.

Key Themes

• Energy crises as drivers of European foreign policy innovation
• The 1973 oil shock, the 2009 gas crisis, and the 2022 energy emergency: comparative analysis
• Energy-linked sanctions: design, implementation, and strategic effectiveness
• Oil price caps and coalition diplomacy as instruments of economic coercion

Case Studies

• The 2022 European energy crisis: from market disruption to strategic rupture with Russia
• European Union sanctions on Russian energy exports: phasing, exemptions, and the politics of member state consensus
• The G7 oil price cap on Russian crude: design logic, implementation, and real-world effects

Seminar Exercise

• Crisis analysis workshop: students reconstruct the decision-making process of a specified EU energy crisis, mapping the institutional actors, competing member state interests, and policy instruments deployed, then assess what the episode reveals about the European Union’s capacity for strategic adaptation under pressure.

Analytical Focus

• Crisis analysis as a method for understanding institutional change; evaluating sanctions as foreign policy instruments; connecting economic coercion to broader geopolitical objectives and coalition management

Week 5 — Does the European Union exercise geopolitical influence through regulation?

The European Union is the world’s largest single market, and its regulatory standards, once set, tend to propagate across the global economy through a mechanism scholars have termed the Brussels Effect: firms operating globally find it more efficient to meet the most demanding standard than to maintain separate compliance regimes for different jurisdictions. In energy, this regulatory influence operates through market access rules, certification requirements, infrastructure standards, and climate legislation. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism extends EU climate regulation explicitly into trade policy with geopolitical implications that European trading partners have contested with considerable vigour. The externalisation of European market rules into the neighbourhood has been a sustained feature of EU energy diplomacy, and the limits of that process — states wishing to supply Europe on their own terms — are equally revealing. This week examines regulatory power as a distinct form of EU geopolitical influence, asking how far it reaches, where it stops, and what its relationship is to harder instruments of statecraft.

Key Themes

• Regulatory power and the Brussels Effect: theoretical foundations and energy applications
• EU energy market rules and their externalisation into the neighbourhood
• The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism as trade, climate, and foreign policy
• The limits of regulatory diplomacy: third-country responses and governance fragmentation

Case Studies

• The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: design, international reception, and geopolitical implications
• European energy market rules and their application to Norwegian, Azerbaijani, and Algerian supply relationships
• Competition between EU regulatory standards and Chinese infrastructure governance norms in third markets

Seminar Exercise

• Regulatory diplomacy exercise: students evaluate the effectiveness of a specified EU regulatory instrument as a foreign policy tool, identifying the actors it constrains, the incentives it creates, the third-country responses it has provoked, and the conditions under which its influence is strongest and weakest.

Analytical Focus

• Regulatory power as a form of geopolitical influence; connecting market governance to external relations; evaluating the conditions and limits of the Brussels Effect in energy policy

Week 6 — Is the European Green Deal a foreign policy strategy?

The European Green Deal was presented primarily as an environmental and industrial programme: a path to climate neutrality by 2050, structured around renewable energy targets, energy efficiency obligations, and the transformation of European industry. Its foreign policy dimensions were less prominently foregrounded but are no less consequential. The Green Deal reshapes the terms on which the European Union engages with fossil fuel exporters; it gives new urgency to the acquisition of critical minerals; it positions the European Union as a standard-setter in global climate governance; and it creates both opportunities and tensions in EU relationships with partners across Africa, the Gulf, and the Indo-Pacific. This week examines the Green Deal as a compound foreign policy strategy, asking which of its external effects are intended, which are incidental, and which are yet to be fully reckoned with by European policymakers and their partners alike.

Key Themes

• The European Green Deal: environmental ambition and strategic implications
• Climate diplomacy and the European Union’s global climate leadership claims
• The Green Deal’s effects on EU relations with fossil fuel exporters and developing economies
• Carbon border mechanisms, green trade policy, and diplomatic friction

Case Studies

• The Green Deal and its reception among African and Gulf energy partners
• European climate negotiating positions at COP: leadership, coalition-building, and structural limits
• Industrial policy dimensions of the Green Deal: state aid competition and transatlantic friction with the United States Inflation Reduction Act

Seminar Exercise

• Policy evaluation: students assess the Green Deal as a foreign policy instrument, identifying its primary intended effects, its unintended consequences for specific bilateral relationships, and the trade-offs it forces between climate ambition, energy security, and diplomatic partnership.

Analytical Focus

• Evaluating the Green Deal as a multi-level foreign policy instrument; connecting climate governance to geopolitical positioning; assessing the coherence and tensions between environmental and security objectives

Policy Analysis Report due at the end of this week.

Week 7 — Are hybrid threats transforming European energy security?

Energy infrastructure is among the most consequential targets of hybrid warfare. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 demonstrated that even the most strategically significant underwater infrastructure could be attacked in ambiguous circumstances, leaving attribution contested and the appropriate European response deeply unclear. Subsequent incidents involving Baltic and North Sea subsea cables, GPS jamming across Northern and Eastern Europe, and coordinated disinformation campaigns targeting public confidence in energy supply have confirmed that hybrid operations against energy systems constitute a deliberate and sustained dimension of the security environment in which European energy policy operates. For the European Union, whose legal frameworks, intelligence capacities, and collective defence arrangements were designed for different threat environments, hybrid operations against energy infrastructure represent a governance challenge as much as a security one. This week examines the hybrid threat landscape for European energy, asking what has been demonstrated, what remains genuinely ambiguous, and what institutional and policy responses are available.

Key Themes

• Hybrid warfare and the European energy dimension: concepts, actors, and instruments
• The Nord Stream destructions: what is known, what is contested, and what it changed for European security policy
• Cybersecurity threats to European energy systems and critical infrastructure
• Institutional and policy responses: the European Union, NATO, and member state approaches

Case Studies

• The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage of September 2022: evidence, attribution debates, and political implications
• Cyberattacks on European energy infrastructure: patterns, state actors, and governance responses
• Baltic subsea cable incidents and the challenge of collective response below the threshold of armed attack

Seminar Exercise

• Hybrid crisis simulation: students are assigned roles within European Union and member state institutions responding to a simulated hybrid attack on energy infrastructure, tasked with developing an attribution assessment, a coordinated response, and a communication strategy for allied audiences.

Analytical Focus

• Hybrid threat analysis applied to European energy systems; evaluating institutional frameworks for collective response; connecting infrastructure vulnerability to the broader architecture of European security governance

Simulation role assignments and instructions distributed this week.

Week 8 — Is the global energy transition redistributing geopolitical power?

The decarbonisation of the global economy is reorganising the material foundations of international power. States whose prosperity and foreign policy leverage depended on fossil fuel exports face profound strategic adjustment. States that dominate the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles have acquired new forms of industrial and geopolitical leverage. Critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements — have become the resource dependency of the transition era, and their geographic concentration reproduces the supply chain vulnerabilities that the energy transition was intended to reduce. For the European Union, the transition presents both an opportunity and a structural problem: an opportunity to displace reliance on politically unreliable fossil fuel suppliers with diversely sourced renewable energy; a problem because the manufacturing, processing, and raw material dimensions of the transition are dominated by actors — above all China — whose strategic interests diverge sharply from European ones. This week examines the geopolitics of the energy transition as a distinctly European strategic challenge.

Key Themes

• Renewable energy systems and the redistribution of geopolitical power
• Critical minerals: strategic significance, geographic concentration, and European supply chain vulnerability
• China’s dominance in green technology manufacturing and its implications for European strategic autonomy
• Green industrial policy and strategic competition: the European Union’s positioning

Case Studies

• The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act: strategic logic, gaps, and implementation
• Chinese dominance in solar panel and battery manufacturing: implications for European industry and supply security
• Hydrogen diplomacy: European ambitions, African and Gulf partnerships, and the competitive landscape

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic transition analysis: students evaluate the European Union’s critical minerals and green technology strategy, assessing the adequacy of current policy instruments, identifying the most significant supply chain vulnerabilities, and recommending adjustments that balance economic efficiency with strategic resilience.

Analytical Focus

• Connecting energy transition dynamics to geopolitical outcomes; evaluating European strategic responses to green technology dependency; applying strategic autonomy frameworks to the critical minerals and industrial competitiveness challenge

Final essay proposal (one page) due at the end of this week.

Week 9 — Why do neighbouring regions remain central to European energy strategy?

Geography shapes energy policy in ways that no amount of political will can entirely overcome. The European Union’s neighbourhood — the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, the Caspian basin, and the broader Middle East — contains the diversification options most immediately accessible as alternatives to Russian supply. Each of these regions presents the European Union with a distinctive combination of energy potential, governance challenges, political instability, and competing great power presence. Algerian gas is abundant but comes through a bilateral relationship structured on terms that strain EU market principles. Eastern Mediterranean hydrocarbons are geologically promising but entangled in unresolved sovereignty disputes between EU member states and third parties. The Caspian corridor reaches Azerbaijan but requires transit through Turkey, whose relationship with the European Union is itself contested on multiple fronts. This week examines European neighbourhood energy policy as a sustained exercise in managing the gap between strategic necessity and political constraint.

Key Themes

• The European neighbourhood as an energy strategic environment
• North Africa: gas supply, governance challenges, and the migration-energy policy linkage
• The Eastern Mediterranean: hydrocarbons, sovereignty disputes, and competing EU member state interests
• The Caspian corridor: Azerbaijan, Turkey, and the politics of strategic transit

Case Studies

• Algeria as a European gas partner: supply capacity, political conditionality, and governance concerns
• The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum and the management of overlapping sovereignty claims
• Azerbaijan and the Southern Gas Corridor: diversification achieved and its structural limits

Seminar Exercise

• Regional strategy workshop: students develop a European Union energy partnership strategy for a specified neighbourhood region, identifying the supply potential, the political and governance obstacles, the appropriate EU instruments, and the risks of reproducing dependency in new forms.

Analytical Focus

• Comparative regional analysis; connecting neighbourhood policy frameworks to energy security objectives; evaluating the coherence and limits of EU energy diplomacy in geographically proximate regions

Strategic Policy Brief due at the end of this week.

Week 10 — Can the European Union balance markets, sovereignty, and energy solidarity?

The European Union’s energy governance rests on a structural tension that two decades of integration have failed to resolve. Energy markets have been progressively liberalised and integrated at the supranational level, yet energy supply security remains a matter of intense national interest in which member states retain considerable autonomy over their own strategic choices. When crisis strikes — as it did with ferocity in 2022 — the gap between integrated markets and fragmented political authority becomes a strategic liability. Some member states maintained bilateral energy relationships that conflicted with collective EU positions; others resisted solidarity mechanisms that would have required sharing gas with more exposed neighbours; still others used the crisis to advance domestic industrial and political agendas at variance with European-level strategy. This week examines the internal governance dimension of European energy foreign policy, asking how far twenty-seven distinct national energy strategies can be coordinated into something coherent enough to constitute a genuinely collective geopolitical position.

Key Themes

The internal energy market: liberalisation, integration, and strategic limits
Energy solidarity: the legal framework, its political limits, and its performance under pressure
National energy strategies and their implications for EU external coherence
Supranational authority and member state resistance in energy governance

Case Studies

• The 2022 gas solidarity regulation: design, implementation, and the politics of burden-sharing
• German energy policy and its European consequences: Energiewende, Nord Stream, and the 2022 strategic reversal
• Central and Eastern European member states and the politics of coal phase-out and supply diversification

Seminar Exercise

• European Council negotiation simulation (Part One): students represent assigned member states in a structured negotiation over a proposed EU energy solidarity measure, advancing national position papers that reflect real distributional interests and political constraints, and engaging with competing proposals from other delegations.

Analytical Focus

• Multi-level governance analysis; evaluating the tension between national sovereignty and supranational coordination in energy policy; connecting internal governance capacity to external foreign policy coherence and credibility

Week 11 — Can the European Union become a global climate and energy power?

The European Union presents itself as the leading force in global climate governance and a constructive anchor of multilateral energy order. The ambition is genuine, but the gap between declared leadership and structural influence is equally real. In climate negotiations, European positions have frequently been more ambitious than the outcomes achieved; the COP process reflects the interests of major emitters whose calculus the European Union cannot fully shape. In energy diplomacy, the European Union competes with China, the United States, and Gulf states for partnerships and influence across Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and Latin America, deploying instruments — financial commitments, regulatory standard-setting, technical assistance — that are significant but frequently outpaced by competitors offering faster and less conditional engagement. This week examines the European Union’s global energy and climate ambitions alongside its structural limits, asking what kind of power it can realistically exercise and through which instruments it is most credible.

Key Themes

• The European Union as a normative and climate power: theoretical frameworks and empirical limits
• EU-China energy and climate relations: competition, selective decoupling, and negotiated interdependence
• EU energy partnerships with Gulf states: hydrocarbons, renewables, and hydrogen ambitions
• The Global Gateway and European competition with the Belt and Road Initiative in energy infrastructure

Case Studies

• The European Union’s Global Gateway energy commitments in Africa: scope, financing, and political conditionality
• EU-China relations in the context of green technology competition and multilateral climate negotiations
• European partnerships with Gulf states: LNG supply security, renewable energy development, and the politics of conditionality

Seminar Exercise

• European Council negotiation simulation (Part Two) and reflective presentation: students continue the simulation from Week 10, reaching or failing to reach negotiated outcomes, then deliver individual five-minute reflective presentations on their strategic experience and what it revealed about the European Union’s capacity for collective energy statecraft.

Analytical Focus

• Normative power analysis; evaluating EU instruments for global energy and climate influence; connecting internal governance capacity to external credibility and the strategic reach of European energy diplomacy

Week 12 — What will European Union energy diplomacy look like in 2050?

Strategic forecasting is a discipline of structured uncertainty. It cannot predict the future, but it can identify the forces most likely to shape it, map the scenarios in which different combinations of those forces produce divergent outcomes, and clarify the policy choices that make some futures more or less probable. For European Union energy foreign policy, the horizon of 2050 presents a genuinely open set of possibilities. A Europe that has achieved climate neutrality on its own terms will be a different geopolitical actor than one that has pursued decarbonisation in ways that generated new dependencies, industrial contraction, and political fragmentation. Hydrogen economies could redistribute energy power in ways favourable to European interests or reproduce old vulnerabilities in technically new forms. Artificial intelligence is reshaping energy demand in ways whose geopolitical implications are still emerging. This week uses European energy diplomacy as the lens through which to examine the challenge of reasoning about geopolitical futures, synthesising the analytical frameworks developed across the course and applying them to problems that do not yet have settled answers.

Key Themes

• European hydrogen diplomacy: ambitions, partnerships, and the emerging competitive landscape
• Artificial intelligence, data centres, and the reshaping of European energy demand and supply security
• Future infrastructure: smart grids, long-distance interconnectors, and the geography of a decarbonised European energy system
• Scenario analysis: European Union energy foreign policy in a post-fossil-fuel international order

Case Studies

• The European hydrogen strategy and its partnership implications for North Africa, the Gulf, and Ukraine
• AI energy demand scenarios and their implications for European supply security and import dependency
• Contrasting scenarios for European energy geopolitics in 2050: solidarity and strategic coherence versus fragmentation and new dependency

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic futures workshop: students work in teams to construct and present two contrasting scenarios for European Union energy foreign policy in 2050, specifying the key variables, driving forces, and strategic implications of each, then subject each other’s scenarios to critical scrutiny in open seminar discussion.

Analytical Focus

• Strategic forecasting methodology; scenario construction; synthesising the theoretical, historical, and policy-oriented frameworks developed across the course and applying them under conditions of genuine uncertainty

*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.

Updated – May 2026