Description
This paper aims to interrogate the European Union’s pursuit of strategic autonomy as a process of identity construction and discursive ordering in post-Brexit, post-Trump and post-Ukraine European security landscape. While the EU’s efforts to strengthen its defense capabilities and lessen dependence on the United States are often treated in material or institutional terms, this paper will argue that strategic autonomy operates as a discursive project as well, that is, as a way of “speaking Europe into being” as an autonomous and credible security actor.
Drawing on constructivism, the paper conceptualizes security and autonomy as socially constructed practices shaped by collective meaning-making and recognition. Through discourse analysis of EU strategic documents, policy speeches, and official communications (including the Strategic Compass, PESCO framework, and EU–NATO joint statements), it will explore how Turkiye is represented within the EU’s security discourse -as both a necessary partner and a normative outsider and unpack broader struggles over the boundaries of Europe’s geopolitical identity and its normative order. These tensions, it will be argued, reveal how the pursuit of autonomy simultaneously reproduces and contests hierarchies of legitimacy and belonging within the European security community.
By problematizing strategic autonomy as discourse and situating the EU-Turkiye relationship within debates on the future of the post-American European security architecture, the paper aims to offer a nuanced understanding of how Europe’s search for autonomy is intertwined with its efforts to define -and differentiate- itself in relation to its strategic partners.
