Description
The question of European actorness in foreign and security policy has been recently revisited by scholars trying to understand what kind of actor the European Union (EU) is (Youngs 2021; Gstohl, Schunz 2021). The development of the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy from its beginning has been associated with the notion of European Strategic Autonomy (ESA). Originally, it denoted primarily operational capabilities for crisis management. However, following the adoption of the EU Global Strategy of 2016, the concept of ESA has been radically broadened to include new sectors, from digital to health, leading to the emergence of a new understanding of European actorness that comprises multiple policy sectors and indicates a new type of political ambition for European integration.
This paper claims that there are two main meta-narratives on European actorness, that define the same concept of ESA in significantly distinct ways, express different political projects (autonomy vs sovereignty), operate within different logics (intergovernmental vs supranational) and have different ramifications for European integration. This paper is based on interviews conducted with EU officials and representatives of the European think-tank community engaged in the debates on ESA, as well as on qualitative content analysis supplemented by quantitative methods, of key documents and contributions to the debate on ESA produced by the European institutions and think-tanks in the period 2016-2021.
