Beyond the Westphalian Mirage: Europe’s Quest for Open Strategic Autonomy

Europe has rediscovered geopolitics. Russia’s unjustified war against Ukraine, growing uncertainty surrounding the transatlantic relationship, intensifying US-China competition and the weaponisation of economic and technological interdependence have transformed the strategic environment within which the European Union operates. The response has been an increasingly ambitious vocabulary of European sovereignty, economic security and strategic autonomy.

But there is a danger in taking that vocabulary too literally in ‘speaking the language of power’.

In my article, “The Union’s Westphalian Mirage: Geopolitics and EU Foreign Policy,” I argued that attempts to imagine the European Union simply acquiring the attributes of a conventional sovereign great power misunderstand the distinctive character of European integration and the EU’s own constitutional DNA. The EU is neither a state in waiting nor merely an international organisation serving its member governments. It is a hybrid political order combining supranational institutions, national sovereignty and functional cooperation.

This matters because much contemporary discussion of European strategic autonomy risks reproducing precisely this Westphalian mirage. Autonomy is too easily equated with independence: producing more at home, reducing external dependencies and acquiring the capabilities necessary for Europe to act alone.

Certainly, Europe needs greater capacity. The war in Ukraine has exposed significant weaknesses in European defence production and military capability, just as earlier crises revealed vulnerabilities arising from energy dependence and fragile supply chains. The EU has responded with new defence, industrial and financial instruments, building upon initiatives such as PESCO, the European Defence Fund and the SAFE programme. Indeed, one of the most significant manifestations of Europe’s geopolitical turn has been precisely this effort to strengthen its defence-industrial base in support of the military capacities of its member states.

But greater European capacity cannot mean European self-sufficiency. The EU’s prosperity, technological development and security are constructed through interdependence. Europe cannot realistically – or desirably – extricate itself from the global networks upon which its economic and political influence has been built.

The more interesting question is therefore not whether Europe should be dependent, but upon whom, for what, under what conditions and at what cost?

This distinction lies at the heart of QUEST – The EU’s Quest for a Relational Open Strategic Autonomy, a new Horizon Europe research project to which I am contributing. Rather than treating autonomy and interdependence as opposites, QUEST starts from the proposition that European autonomy is necessarily relational. The central challenge is how to preserve the capacity for autonomous political choice while remaining deeply embedded within international relationships.

This requires us to distinguish between different forms of dependence. Reliance upon a potentially hostile supplier for a critical resource is clearly different from reciprocal interdependence with a trusted partner. Even relationships between close allies, however, can become problematic when dependence is profoundly asymmetric or when political commitments prove less durable than expected.

Strategic autonomy therefore requires more than simply reducing dependencies. It entails identifying vulnerabilities, building sufficient indigenous European capacity to ensure meaningful choice, and diversifying relationships so that no single external actor possesses an unacceptable capacity to constrain European action.

This also suggests something more counter-intuitive: relationships themselves can actually be sources of autonomy.

Partnerships with countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan or South Korea need not dilute European strategic autonomy. Under the right conditions, cooperation in defence production, critical technologies, energy, raw materials or resilient supply chains can increase the EU’s capacity to act. Diversification can reduce asymmetric dependence, while institutionalised relationships with reliable partners can provide capabilities that would be prohibitively expensive or inefficient to reproduce entirely within Europe.

Open Strategic Autonomy might therefore be understood less as a destination than as the continuous political management of interdependence: deciding where European capacity must be strengthened, where boundaries need to be established, and where deeper relationships can increase collective room for manoeuvre.

There is a wider implication here. The international system need not necessarily resolve itself into increasingly closed economic and security blocs organised around competing great powers. For Europe—and potentially for other strategically minded actors, including India—the alternative may lie in building diversified networks among states and regional actors that wish to preserve their political agency without choosing either isolation or exclusive alignment.

Europe’s strategic challenge, then, is not to reproduce the sovereign state on a continental scale. Nor is it to retreat behind a wall of protectionism. The EU needs sufficient internal capacity to make meaningful choices while simultaneously constructing external relationships that expand rather than constrain those choices.

In this sense, Strategic Autonomy is not about escaping interdependence. It is about governing it. And that may ultimately prove to be a more distinctively European form of power.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.