Abstract The European Union (EU) is undergoing a geoeconomic shift driven by concerns over its global position, geopolitical tensions and the need for strategic autonomy. Scholars have studied various parts of this ‘geoeconomic turn’ aiming to secure Europe's position in the world. Whilst research has not reached a consensus on the timing of this geoeconomic shift, it is largely depicted as a novel phenomenon through analysis of emerging strategies and policy instruments. This article departs from the analytical perspective of geoeconomic practices and how lower level bureaucrats engage in what we label ‘everyday geoeconomics’: the routinized practices through which agents such as civil servants and industry actors enact, reproduce and negotiate geoeconomic agency in ordinary activities. Through studying the evolving interplay of a complex set of ideas, actors and preferences, we find that these geoeconomic practices have longer roots and have been present throughout the 2000s. We illustrate this through an in‐depth case study of EllaLink, a 5900‐km‐long optical submarine cable between Portugal and Brazil. We provide three contributions to the study of geoeconomics. First, we introduce and illustrate the saliency of a ‘bottom‐up’ approach to the geoeconomic turn in the EU that we call everyday geoeconomics. Second, we show how actualizing geoeconomic ambitions depend on complex processes of marshalling broad coalitions of actors for strategic purposes. Third, we offer a detailed historical case study of a key infrastructure that only recently has begun to receive sustained scrutiny for its strategic implications, namely, subsea communications infrastructure.
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