Anxiety and Fantasy: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Continuity of the EUʼs Sanctions Policy Regarding Russia and Myanmar

Abstract

This article employs Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain why the EU maintains its sanctions against Russia and Myanmar despite their questionable effectiveness. The framework moves beyond traditional identity, normative and interest-based explanations. By integrating existential concerns with psychoanalytic insights, this article illuminates the understudied emotional dimensions of the EU sanctions policy, offering a deeper understanding of the sanctions policy continuity through the nonconscious dimension. It explains that the EU experienced existential anxiety when its idealised discourses – “Integration and Eastern Enlargement” for Russia and the “normative economic partnership with Asia” for Myanmar – became fragmented. The hidden political enjoyment of each discourse, which provided the EU’s sense of existence, became disrupted. Concurrently, a new political enjoyment emerged through a political fantasy involving a clear identification of “Us” (the EU) and “Them” (the targeted regime). Another central aspect of the political fantasy is narratives about the sanctions. These narratives function as transgressive elements of narratives of identification. Through the sanctions implementation, the EU repeatedly tried to actualise this new political enjoyment.