Protecting, Transforming, and Projecting the Single Market. Strategic Autonomy in the EU’s Trade and Digital Policies

Talk of strategic autonomy and European sovereignty has become ubiquitous among Europe's politicians and pundits. Charles Michel, for example, has declared European strategic autonomy the EU's 'number one goal'. And for Thierry Breton, digital sovereignty is key to his mission 'to protect, transform, and project the single market'. But what explains this rather radical discursive departure from the market-centered and efficiency-oriented rhetoric that has dominated European policymaking for the last decades? The existing literature has only begun to address this question. Here, we argue that the discursive turn towards autonomy is part of a larger renegotiation of the European project. We understand this project as the evolving compromise between three different factions: a neoliberal faction that wants to institutionalize competition and 'encase' economic freedoms in supranational institutions; a neomercantilist faction that wants to safeguard the competitiveness of European companies; and a socially-oriented faction that wants save and scale the 'European model of society' by re-embedding markets transnationally. Looking at the cases of trade policy and digital policy, we argue that a changing global environment have provided an opening to challenge the existing, neoliberally dominated consensus. Through a combination of process tracing, interviews, text-as-data methods and discourse network analysis, we show how the notions of open strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty are used as coalition magnets in forging a new compromise that also provides the EU with new policy tools and capacities to assert itself in an increasingly geopoliticized world.