The EU’s quest for European sovereignty

In the recent years, the EU has increasingly presented itself as a security provider in response to the various crises to which the EU was confronted. The EU replied to these crises with the help of new concepts, which should reorganize the EU’s capacity to act in order to prevent or to respond to crises. ‘Strategic autonomy’ and ‘European sovereignty’ are both serving as conceptual frameworks in this regard. In particular the notion of sovereignty has been part of narratives and counter-narratives of the European integration process pointing to the conceptual requirement that sovereignty goes beyond the Westphalian order of the nation states. The main goal of the paper is the investigation of the construction of European sovereignty as ‘speech act’. Consequently, this paper aims to analyse how these conceptual notions are applied in EU strategic communications and how these concepts are interrelated with specific self-imaginaries of the EU. With help of a narrative analysis, which is structured by Maxqda, I outline the development of European sovereignty over time. The empirical analysis is based on more than 100 documents from the EU institutions but also takes into account speeches and work programmes from 2013 to mid-2021.