Fellowship Policy Paper by Song Lilei
The policy paper defines the concept of strategic autonomy as a means and process that can help the EU achieve effective foreign policy governance at the EU level, and the interests it pursues are beyond the national interests of each EU member state. The use of the term ‘strategic autonomy’ is still mainstream in China’s domestic academic circles. Chinese academic circles summarize the EU strategic autonomy into five aspects. First, EU strategic autonomy includes not only the autonomy in the military field, but also the autonomy in all fields of foreign affairs. The goal of EU’s strategic autonomy is that the EU can determine which issues are related to its core interests in foreign affairs and take independent actions on these issues, but this does not mean isolationism; Secondly, strategic autonomy is relative. Absolute strategic autonomy does not exist. The EU still needs to rely on partners to achieve its goals in some strategic areas (e.g. intelligence sharing and economic development), which is why the EU has to pursue ‘an appropriate level of strategic autonomy’; Third, strategic autonomy hopes to move away from the EU’s security and defense dependence on the United States, as well as from economic and trade dependence on China, while gaining sovereign authority over more member states; Fourthly, the EU strategic autonomy is a means to coordinate EU’s essential resources and strengths, which can ensure that the EU will not be marginalized in the future geopolitical game; Fifthly, the EU strategic autonomy requires that the EU foreign policies should proceed from the overall interests of the EU to safeguard its interests and values, which is not only the requirement of external actions, but also the inevitable requirement of promoting European integration. The EU’s focus on strategic autonomy has been influenced by three factors. First, the strategic competition between China and the US has raised the EU’s awareness of geopolitical competition while it feels its position and interests are threatened. Second, the Russia-Ukraine conflict at the regional level has made the EU’s security threat from Russia more tangible. Third, the internal crisis of the European Union in recent years not only shows the problem of EU governance, but also highlights the contradiction between the expansion and deepening of EU integration. The EU has undertaken many practices to enhance its strategic autonomy, including two main areas: defense and economy, with technology becoming an essential area for EU measures in the economy. As the new member states of EU, The V4 countries are more concerned with policy issues that are conducive to their development than the interests of the EU, which makes them more interested in developing dependency relationships with countries outside the EU and therefore contribute less to the EU’s strategic autonomy in general. Considering the Visegrad cooperation has always been linked to external factors, it remains to be seen whether the debate on the EU’s strategic autonomy is an opportunity to strengthen V4 cooperation or yet another challenge to weaken it. The EU’s strategic autonomy is still in the process of development, both in conceptual and practical terms, and it is an excellent challenge for the EU to achieve it in the true sense. The different attitudes of the V4 countries on the issue of EU strategic autonomy illustrate that the realization of EU strategic autonomy ultimately depends on the development of European integration, the most important of which is a unified EU policy.
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