The Arctic is a region that has seen exponential growth as a space of geopolitical interest over the past decade. This book analyses the Arctic interests of an international actor that is typically not referred to as Arctic actor: the European Union. Thus, it provides an in-depth analysis of the EU’s process to construct legitimacy and credibility in its ‘Northern Neighbourhood’ between 2008 and 2017.

Embedded in a conceptual and methodological framework using critical geopolitics, the book assesses the strategic policy reasoning of the EU and the implicit geopolitical discourses that guide and determine a particular line of argumentation so as to claim a ‘legitimate’ role in the. In doing so, it establishes a clearer picture on the narrated regional interests of the EU and the related developed policy and concrete steps taken in order to get hold of these interests.

Eventually, the book gets to the conceptual bottom of what exactly fashioned the EU with geopolitical agency in the circumpolar North.