Half-Hearted or Pragmatic? Explaining EU Strategic Autonomy and the European Defence Fund through Institutional Dynamics (original) (raw)
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Routledge eBooks, 2022
The European strategic autonomy concept became a buzzword in 2016 after the European Union released "A Global Strategy for the European Union's Foreign and Security Policy" (EUGS) after the Brexit referendum. The increasing international uncertainty, worsening relations with the United States of America during the Trump Presidency, and (re)emerging security challenges like dependence on external supply chains of strategic products and pharmaceutical manufacturing during the COVID-19 pandemic, dependence on digital technologies of the People's Republic of China and the US, instability in the southern and eastern neighbourhood, illegal migration, energy dependency, informational insecurity, and grey zone activities of other states had put ESA at the front of the EU agenda. At the same time, the ambitions of the French President Emmanuel Macron to limit the US role in Europe, illustrated by his very intensively discussed comments about NATO being "brain dead" and suggestions to increase European sovereignty (Politico, 2020) from the US, further established ESA within the debates on European security architecture. Unfortunately, the ongoing discussions, resulting in numerous political speeches, scientific articles, and exhaustive analytical studies, have failed to push the ESA beyond its loose definition of "capacity to act autonomously when and where necessary and with partners wherever possible" (Council, 2016), casting doubts wherever EU member states will eventually agree on its precise objectives and scope while questioning its conceptual utility. Moreover, Russia's largescale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 provided additional questions if the EU should be autonomous and in which areas? The chapter presents the evolution of ESA, exposes its main drivers, and underlines the contemporary issues, defining its transformation from abstract political rhetoric to concrete policy action. It argues that ESA is not a new concept in its content, even though it has received more attention only since 2016. The archaeology suggests that ESA's origins can be traced back to the first initiatives of Western European countries to cooperate in the defence policies after Second World War. After that, the concept of ESA deepened and expanded at varying rates of success as it was affected by two main variables: the systemic pressures and the interests of European powers, namely France, Germany, and
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on European Integration, 2022
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Some member-states of the European Union~EU! want a supranational foreign and security policy, while other member-states oppose any significant limitation of national sovereignty in this domain+ What explains this variation? Answering this question could help us to better understand not only the trajectory of European unification, but also the conditions and prospects of consensual political integration in other regional contexts and territorial scales+ The main research traditions in international relations theory suggest different explanations+ I examine the roles of relative power capabilities, foreign policy interests, Europeanized identities, and domestic multilevel governance in determining the preferences of the fifteen EU member governments concerning the institutional depth of their foreign and security policy cooperation+ I find that power capabilities and collective identities have a significant influence, but the effect of ideas about the nature and locus of sovereignty, as reflected in the domestic constitution of each country, is particularly remarkable+ the editors of IO, and three anonymous reviewers+ I am responsible for any mistakes+