Making European Union Sovereignty: militarism and figurations of sexuality in the strategic compass

While recent scholarship on the European Union’s security policies has shown how they are increasingly military and constituted and legitimised through gendered, racialised and colonial logics, an analysis of how ideas of sexuality shape the EU’s move towards military power and sovereignty is missing. This is important because sexuality has played a crucial role in both Europe’s history of colonialism and its contemporary politics. The contribution builds on the rich scholarship of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholars and in particular works with Weber’s (2016a) theoretical tools for studying figurations of the Other in world politics. It makes the case for paying attention to how representations of sexuality (intersecting with gender and race) of the other produce sovereignty through legitimising militarism. Studying the EU’s Strategic Compass with the help of a queer intertextual discourse analysis, I argue that the EU creates sovereignty through militarism rooted in figurations of the un/wanted migrant, the un/developable terrorist, and the un/trainable soldier, all tied up in ideas of un/developable and normal/perverse sexuality.