No 13, Issue 2       

EUROPEAN UNION STRATEGIC AUTONOMY IN THE INDO-PACIFIC: CONCEPTUAL. EVOLUTION, AUTONOMY LEVELS, AND POLICY COHERENCE 

Hasan ULMULK

Abstract

This article theorises the European Union’s (EU) strategic autonomy through the concrete prism of its Indo-Pacific engagement. Rather than treating autonomy as a slogan, the analysis reconstructs its trajectory from treaty provisions, Arts 21, 31(1), 42(7) and 44 TEU, and the 2016 EU Global Strategy to more recent milestones, including the Strategic Compass adopted in March 2022 with its Rapid Deployment Capacity objective of 5,000 troops, and the European Economic Security Strategy published in June 2023. The article distinguishes autonomy from sovereignty claims and from defensive decoupling by specifying four levels, political decision, operational military, industrial technological and normative ideational, and by showing how each level is instrumented in practice, for example constructive abstention, scenario based planning, EDIRPA or EDIP, and regulatory diplomacy. Applied to the Indo-Pacific policy frame endorsed by the Council and the EEAS in 2021, the framework indicates partial coherence. Legal institutional flexibility and economic security logics have advanced, industrial instruments are maturing, whereas force generation and sustained long range readiness still lag. The Indo-Pacific therefore functions as a laboratory of strategic maturity in which identity, capacity and partnership must align if autonomy is to remain open and deliverable.

Keywords: European Union; Strategic Autonomy; Indo-Pacific; Policy Coherence; Actorness; Strategic Culture; Normative Power; Economic Security

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.