Description
European strategic autonomy as become a popular motto since the EU Global Security Strategy (EUGS) published in June 2016 and the geopolitical orientation of the European Commission since Ursula von der Leyen, former German defence minister, became head of the Commission in July 2019. Even though the concept seems blurred, it has been presented as an anchor for European defence policy’s relaunch in the last half-decade. France and Germany particularly played a leading role in promoting the concept. This papers thus aims at analyzing the role of French-German military cooperation in the spreading of this concept by relying on a double legitimacy-criteria inspired by Scharpf (1997; 2009): input legitimacy (procedures) and output legitimacy (efficiency). Analysed in the light of this dual criterion of input and output legitimacy, we can shed an interesting light on how the French-German “motor” really delivers in terms of pushing forward European strategic autonomy. Theoretically we rely both on the concept of legitimacy (input and output legitimacy) and on discursive institutionalism as developed by Vivien Schmidt (2002; 2006; 2008; 2010a; 2012). Here we consider European strategic autonomy in its operational dimension, meaning the development of European military tools and capabilities enabling the EU to act without depending on third parties in international security. Thus the aim of this paper is to understand how France and Germany intend to develop collective military tools at the EU level to develop European strategic autonomy as defined by the EUGS in 2016 and in the context of a changing world order.Three empirical examples will be developed in particular: the case of the Military Planning Staff created in Brussels in 2017 (MPCC) ; the case of permanent structured cooperation, and the Strategic Compass to be adopted under the French presidency of the EU in 2022. We will first explain our use of the concepts of input and output legitimacy. Then we will assess the gap between the strong input legitimacy of French-German initiatives within European strategic autonomy since the publication of the EUGS in 2016. Last but not least we will analyse the reasons explaining the gap between the string input and limited output of the French-German engine by looking at our three examples and conveying explanations variables using the concept of strategic culture.
