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Introduction: European politics nowadays | 27 social media, and digital news platforms enables people to be information producers, critics, and consumers in parallel. In the future, filtering will be performed and perceptions be determined more and more by digital systems. As “we only experience a tiny fraction of the world, which fraction we are presented with will make a big difference. It will determine what we know, what we feel, what we want, and therefore what we do. To control these is the essence of politics” (Susskind 2018, 146, emphasis in the original). THE GLOBAL CONTEXT Finally, we cannot ignore that European politics are embedded in global political dynamics, shaping the external relations of the EU and its Member States with the rest of the world. Today, as Youngs rightly points out, these relations are increasingly squeezed between domestic European crises and a reshaped global order in the making (Youngs 2014, 2). As a result, “the narrative switched from one of the EU gradually taking the shape of an emergent superpower to one of minimising the fall-out from these twin challenges” (Youngs 2021, 12). The changing place of Europe in the world and the nature of the European Union as an international actor have been extensively discussed in the relevant literature, which I have no intention to repeat here. A point of scholarly consensus is that one cornerstone of the EU’s international influence is its power of attraction - though some commentators raise doubts as to whether the EU model is really replicable in other parts of the world, or the Union is facing its “Galapagos Syndrome moment’, meaning that “Europe's postmodern order has become so advanced and particular to its environment that it is impossible for others to follow” (Krastev 2017, 9). In any case, this power of attraction has suffered a heavy blow as a result of the European poly-crisis in the past decade. The Unions behaviour as an international actor is also rooted in its internal dilemmas regarding its raison détre and self-perception. While European integration was born from the desire for sustainable peace, the challenge of rebuilding Western Europe, and of reintegrating (West) Germany into the European and international order, a key reason for the EU’s existence in the globalised world today - beyond the domestication of European power relations, economic development, and the welfare of European citizens is its size, which makes it comparable to such global powers as the United States, China, Russia, or India. However, this size only matters if the Union is able to speak with a single voice in the world when needed. Achieving this is no easy task against the backdrop of centrifugal forces among its Member States, external policies, institutions, political families, and citizens themselves. But even if the single voice was achieved, there is the unsolved strategic dilemma: should the
