Emotions in EU Foreign Policy

This article examines how emotions are conceptualized and mobilized in the foreign policy of the European Union. Starting from the affective turn in the social sciences, the author reviews scholarship that treats the EU as both a normative actor and a potential “emotional actor.” The focus is not emotions as individual states, but emotional norms: socially expected affective responses to violations of political, legal, or moral norms. The article asks which areas of EU foreign policy have been studied through this lens, what methods and theories researchers use, and whether collective emotions can anticipate EU decisions.

The analysis covers studies of genocide recognition, security, armed conflicts, migration, European identity, climate policy, and sanctions, and compares their conclusions with opinion surveys in EU member states in 2022–2025. Special attention is paid to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Israel’s military operation in Gaza, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over NagornoKarabakh. The article shows that EU institutions seek to create a supranational emotional community, or emotional regime, in which member states share a common understanding of norms, their violation, and the need for collective action.

The findings are ambivalent. In the case of Ukraine, fear, insecurity, anger, sympathy, and solidarity have helped legitimize sanctions, humanitarian assistance, support for refugees, and stronger defense cooperation, although public support varies across countries and declines when the costs of solidarity increase, especially regarding arms deliveries and EU accession. The Gaza case demonstrates that bottom-up emotional mobilization does not necessarily produce an equally coherent EU response. The Nagorno-Karabakh case reveals weaker emotional resonance and highlights pragmatic constraints, including energy dependence and geopolitical interests.

The article concludes that emotions matter because they participate in the construction, interpretation, hierarchy, and enforcement of norms. Yet the EU lacks a unified emotional regime: collective reactions remain uneven and politically selective. Fear and insecurity increasingly push the Union from the identity of a peaceful normative project toward that of a geopolitical actor with a military component. Monitoring public opinion is therefore useful for predicting shifts in EU foreign policy, but only when national differences, norm hierarchies, and the costs of solidarity are taken into account.

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