Simon Rio
European Strategic Autonomy (hereafter referred to as ESA) has often been seen as a “buzzword”, encompassing several meanings and realities revolving around Europe’s security and foreign policy (Järvenpää et al., 2019). Its ambiguity and interchangeability with other concepts such as “European Army” or “European Sovereignty” led several policymakers and scholars to try to precisely define and conceptualise it (see Anghel et al., 2020; Mauro, 2018), but no consensus has been reached: European countries—when they do not oppose it—fail to agree on ESA’s precise meaning, scope, and end (Arteaga et al., 2016; Franke & Varma, 2019; Libek, 2019; Jarpenvaa et al., 2019). Different reasons are invoked to explain such disagreements. As we shall see later in this paper, these positions relate to the wider theoretical debate on European integration in foreign and security policy, a debate on which all three major traditions of IR theory—respectively Realism, Constructivism, and Liberal Institutionalism—have a view.
Some scholars believe that these diverging positions can be explained more easily through rationalist and materialist considerations about states’ interests (Krotz & Maher, 2011; Monaghan, 2023). Others argue that the diversity of national “strategic cultures” in Europe—which Meyer defines as principles, values, and perceptions regarding a state’s global responsibilities and its understanding of security challenges (Meyer, 2006)—accounts for the lack of convergence over ESA (see Zandee et al., 2020). Finally, some contend that the main challenges to ESA are coordination between European states over security policies, a gap between rhetoric and actions and the difficulties in identifying common European Union (EU) policy objectives for security and foreign policy (Dorosh and Lemko, 2023).
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