EU Strategic Autonomy after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Europe's Capacity to Act in Times of War
本文分析俄乌战争如何影响欧盟战略自主的辩论，考察欧盟在军事、经济和规范三个维度上的集体行动能力，并评估其与美中关系的互动。
Only a few concepts in the debate on the European Union's (EU's) foreign and security policy manage to evoke as many passionate reactions as the notion of strategic autonomy. For some, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, it represents a futile and ill-guided ambition of the EU to follow a third way, independent of the United States, in an emerging multipolar order – futile because the EU is missing by a long shot the military capacities to deter aggression without US support and ill-guided because the strength of the EU in global affairs is the close partnership with the United States. For others, such as France and with reservations Germany, strategic autonomy is a necessary agenda for the EU to develop its own voice in international affairs and to hedge its bets in an international environment of growing uncertainty. Since 24 February 2022, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine provides a new turn in the debate on strategic autonomy. Lingering questions on US commitment to European security are – at least for the time being – muted, as the United States considerably stepped up its deterrence efforts on European soil and provided essential military and intelligence support to Ukraine. On military questions, the war showcases the gulf between ambitions and realities of European strategic autonomy. It also confirms and elevates critical voices that have been sceptical of the French-led aspirations to make the EU an independent power centre. Whether one leans more towards Europeanism or Atlanticism, the concept of strategic autonomy remains relevant as both a frame in the policy debates and a prism to study the EU's capacity and role in international relations (Helwig and Sinkkonen, 2022). The reason for the persistence of the term is not only that one can always rely on the French President Emmanuel Macron to stir up the debate on strategic autonomy once more after everyone thought that it was settled. 1 The concept of strategic autonomy remains central because it has managed to ‘travel’ and ‘stretch’ (Csernatoni, 2023) in ways that it now covers a broad scope of the security and economic policy debate, from the EU's industrial strategy (Tagliapietra, 2023) to health (Bayerlein, 2023) and cyber (Calderaro and Blumfelde, 2023). The term is also ‘ambiguous’ enough that it can serve as a rhetorical device for calls for a more value-oriented, security focused or economically resilient EU (Helwig, 2022). The debate on strategic autonomy can be conceptionally divided into separate dimensions based on Isaiah Berlin's (1969) two concepts of liberty. His concept of ‘negative liberty’ describes a state in which a person frees itself from external constraints. The idea of freedom as the absence of obstacles can be detected in the strategic autonomy from debate with calls for decoupling from the United States or China. However, the debate often hits a dead end, as sceptics are quick to point out that the United States is an “indispensable” (Morawiecki, 2023) military partner and that the EU relies on China to sustain its economic model (Seaman et al., 2022). An interpretation of freedom as the absence of interference is widely seen as too simplistic (Taylor, 1985). A positive account of liberty also considers the agency of the individual and its ability to act within the constraints of its environment. This idea is captured in the debate on strategic autonomy to, which focuses on the various capacities of the EU to act in a competitive global arena and to manage its interdependencies. Rather than focusing on the competitive elements in the interaction between actors, the focus is on the mutually supportive elements of relationships (Ojanen, 2021). In other words, the EU gains strategic autonomy on global issues not necessarily by reducing dependencies on the United States or China, but primarily through investments in the transatlantic partnership and the effective management of the risks of economic ties. This article argues that the focus of the EU's activities is on this positive agenda of strategic autonomy, which has emerged in three dimensions – with regard to the capacities to protect the EU from foreign aggression or influence, to provide the economic basis amidst a more competitive environment and to project norms and values in global co-operation (Helwig, 2021). The remainder of the article will analyse to what extent the EU's capacities for joint and autonomous action have lived up to the challenges of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the first year of the war. Capacities here are not understood as material factors, such as defence spending or economic indicators. The focus is on the EU's ability for collective and impactful decision-making. Laffan (2023) recently argued that through past crises, such as Brexit and COVID, ‘the EU has gained the capacity to mobilize resources and get things done – in other words to display “collective power”’. However, the question remains how this collective power is used and to what extent it enables the EU to influence global developments based on its own preferences. In the following, the focus will be on co-ordinative, political and legislative capacities of the EU to generate strategic autonomy. Co-ordinative capacity refers to the ability and resources to align the activities horizontally between various EU actors and vertically between the EU and member-state governments. Political capacity is conceptualised here as the ability to collectively take decisions that guide and predetermine the further strategies and choices of EU actors on certain policies. Finally, the EU's ability to legislate refers to the appropriate regulatory and budgetary framework to address challenges and support global activities. The invasion of Ukraine and Europe's initially sluggish military response raised questions in the expert community whether European strategic autonomy is over (Dempsey, 2023). Indeed, the war underlines the dependence on US security guarantees and drives EU members to go on a buying spree for ‘off the shelf’ (often American) military technology. Politically, Europe tied itself consciously to the United States, as shown by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz' decision in early 2023 to deliver ‘Leopard’ battle tanks only if the Biden administration promises equivalent US-made ‘Abrahams’ tanks. Given the EU's military dependence, it is hard to reject that strategic autonomy from the United States is anything but a ‘perennial pipe dream’ (Cameron, 2022). At the same time, one cannot deny the growing capacity – in some respects even a potential ‘quantum leap’ (Koenig, 2022) – of the EU on defence issues. A growing political capacity to deal with the crisis of this magnitude could be witnessed from day 1 of the invasion. The declaration by the heads of state and government on 24 February placed the full responsibility on Russia, declared solidarity with Ukraine and underlined the historic proportion of the aggression (European Council, 2022). This triad predetermined the building blocks of the EU's future strategy, which was further developed in subsequent leader summits. In the Versailles declaration, leaders acknowledged Ukraine's EU membership aspirations for the first time and tasked the European Commission to form a respective opinion (European Union, 2022). The summit also underlined the need to ‘substantially’ and ‘in a collaborative way’ invest in defence capabilities. This line was echoed in the hastily rewritten ‘Strategic Compass’, which underlined defence capability-related commitments and counter-hybrid warfare policies in response to the crisis. However, preparations were too far along to make any bigger changes to the strategic document, and the strong focus on external crisis management activities remained (Koenig, 2022). The challenge for the EU's response to the crisis is that its authority in the field of security and defence is limited (Costa and Barbé, 2023). On the legislative side, the EU has no option to amend its budget to provide military aid, given that the treaties exclude EU budget expenditures with military or defence implications [Art. 41 (2) TEU]. The EU had to geopolitically repurpose its existing instruments and deploy the off-budget European Peace Facility (EPF). Created a year earlier to streamline financing of joint crisis management operations and to allow, for the first time, lethal support to third parties, the EPF provided a ready framework to finance member states' military support to Ukraine (Karjalainen and Mustasilta, 2023). The use of the EPF would once have tested the political capacities to align diverse national security cultures. However, Austria, Ireland and Malta, all militarily neutral countries, applied the rarely used treaty option of ‘constructive abstention’ and cleared the way for lethal military aid. The EU also started to contribute to the training of Ukrainian military with the first military training mission on its own territory. From the perspective of the EU defence integration process, The EU Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine (EUMAM Ukraine) can be interpreted as a qualitative change in the EU's military role, as it prepares soldiers for ongoing warfighting with the largest country in its neighbourhood. Despite disbelief in how much the EU can adapt in a crisis, strategic autonomy is only useful to evaluate in relation to how it meets the challenges of its environment. Given the seismic shifts in Europe's security architecture, ‘the goal-posts themselves of what is required for the EU to retain its actorness are moving’ (Costa and Barbé, 2023, p. 442). After all, it is not only the EU but also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that undergoes a sizable transformation. NATO significantly enhanced its deterrence efforts on Europe's eastern flank with additional battalions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia and upgrades in size and readiness of existing forces. Finland's NATO membership and Sweden's imminent application (at the time of writing) bring consequential changes to alliance politics and reduce organisational fragmentation in the Nordic-Baltic region (Pesu and Iso-Markku, 2022). As Denmark decided to abolish the opt-out from the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), all eight Baltic EU member states belong now to NATO and take part in EU defence co-operation. Given the increasing membership overlap and lingering questions of the extent of future military support to Europe, EU-NATO relations could become a decisive factor for EU strategic autonomy. Whilst the January 2023 EU-NATO declaration did not provide a new momentum in the co-operation, the joint work intensified on practical level to the extent possible given the remaining tensions between Turkey and Cyprus, which block any deepening of formal relations (Clapp, 2023). The declaration underlined once more in clear terms that ‘NATO remains the foundation of collective defence for its allies and essential for Euro Atlantic security’ (EU-NATO, 2023), giving tailwind to arguments for a stricter division of labour in which the EU should focus on ‘soft’ security issues, capability development and crisis management. Thardy (2021, p. 4) argues that the division would ‘not imply that the EU would no longer aspire to become strategically autonomous’, albeit he concedes that the agency would rather rest with member states that operate freely in both organisations and in coalitions of the willing. Others disagree with the idea of downgrading EU ambition (Ojanen, 2022). According to this view, the list of functional overlaps between the two organisations is long – ranging from defence planning and hybrid threats to questions of military mobility – making calls for a strict division of labour unrealistic. Strategic autonomy of the EU will unlikely be developed independently from NATO, but by contributing and shaping the course of the alliance. Despite the political capacity to formulate a strong response in the first phase of war, questions linger with regard to the long-term alignment of visions of European security across the EU. For Baltic and Central and Eastern European countries, the prospect of agency of the EU on security and defence other than supporting national and NATO efforts remains very limited. For them, the risk of decoupling from the United States – and with that from the only security guarantor that they trust – is too high that they would willingly sign up for an aspirational French-led agenda. On the other hand, France appears to have a limited understanding of why a more self-reliant defence planning and industrial policy is difficult to square with the deep security ties that most other European NATO member have built with the United States. Consequently, the lingering Europeanism-Atlanticism divide remains the main obstacle for a more proactive European security and defence policy that would be able to set – at least in parts – the transatlantic agenda. 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