No 13, Issue 2       

BETWEEN BUDGETARY AMBITION AND GEOPOLITICAL AWAKENING: THE EUROPEAN UNION’S FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE AND ITS INTERNATIONAL ROLE IN 2025

Doru TODORESCU

pp. 69-77

Abstract

This article brings together two previous analyses. The first traces the way in which the Multiannual Financial Framework has been used to support European citizenship. The second analyses how the budgetary powers of the European Parliament have evolved in the context of the negotiations for the 2021–2027 MFF and for NextGenerationEU. Starting from these two directions, the study proposes a critical assessment of how the Union’s international position has changed in 2025. The central idea is that the EU’s financial architecture, initially designed to strengthen internal cohesion and democratic participation, has been very quickly reoriented towards geopolitical and defence objectives. This change is most clearly seen in the ReArm Europe Plan and in the proposal for the 2028–2034 MFF. Of course, this reorientation responds to real security needs, generated both by Russia’s war against Ukraine and by the weakening of American strategic guarantees. However, it also raises a series of important questions: how sustainable is the Union’s normative identity, to what extent do citizenship programs risk being pushed into the European background, and how much longer can the European Parliament exercise real budgetary control in a decision-making system increasingly dominated by intergovernmental logic.

Keywords: European Union budget; Multiannual Financial Framework; European citizenship; defence spending; European Parliament; NextGenerationEU; ReArm Europe; democratic oversight; geopolitics

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.