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154 | Zsolt Nagy, Zoltán Simon, Viktor Szép, and Tamás Dezső Ziegler
Another fear factor is the decreasing European trust in the United States as a
reliable partner, aggravated by the Trump presidency, but also some unilateral
actions by the Biden administration, in the cases of the painful experience
of the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan or the Aukus security deal
deal, for instance. Though some European leaders tend to downplay this
factor, Nathalie Tocci, the penholder of the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy, refers
to it as a main driver, suggesting that the EU cannot rely on the US as it once
did because “the wounds in US democracy are deep” and “the US will be
preoccupied principally with itself for some time and will invariably look to
Asia as its main area of foreign policy interests” (Tocci 2021, 12-13).
A third fear factor involves the internal political troubles within the Union
itself. This internal-external link makes Giovanni Grevi claim that a failure
to substantially advance its strategic autonomy “would be a symptom and
a multiplier of centrifugal forces within the EU” (Grevi 2019, 4). Domestic
turbulences undermine the Union’s global self-confidence and reduce its
appetite for external adventures beyond its territory, with a significant impact
on its external action. As Richard Youngs also notices: the ethos in EU foreign
policy has become one of protecting internal European security and stability
as opposed to the Union remoulding conditions outside its borders with a
view to longer-term and more diffuse benefits (Youngs 202 1a, 32).
Against this backdrop, even if the concept of strategic sovereignty is gaining
ground in the EU’s external relations discourse — which we can consider a
welcome development - it remains an essentially defensive idea in many
ways. For this reason, it also remains limited to an essentially conservative
idea for the time being, aimed more at preserving the global status quo, and
Europe's place in it, than generating a genuine transformation in EU external
policies (see also Youngs 2021b). This defensive character - and the conflicting
desires of continuing to benefit from the existing world order and leading
global change at the same time - contributes to an elusive concept of strategic
sovereignty, resulting in a persistent lack of clarity.
The current journey of the concept in European public discourse started
with the speech delivered by French President Emmanuel Macron at the
Sorbonne in September 2017 (Macron 2017), followed by an expanding debate
about strategic autonomy in the field of security and defence. So much so
that, in his speech at the Bruegel Institute in September 2020, President of the
European Council Charles Michel referred to European strategic autonomy
as “the aim of our generation” (Michel 2020).
Debates have led to a multitude of diverging interpretations of strategic
autonomy. A commonly used definition is the formula established by the
Council, referring to the EU’s “capacity to act autonomously when and where
necessary and with partners wherever possible” (Council of the EU 2017),
or ina slightly different way: “the ability to act, together with partners when
possible, alone when needed” (Zandee et al. 2020, 1).