EU Enlargement and Open Strategic Autonomy: Discursive Linkages in European Parliament Debates

Heightened geopolitical instability provoked by the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the expanding competition of global powers has fundamentally reshaped the EU’s global position and underscored the need to strengthen its security and resilience. In this context, the pivotal yet contested concept of open strategic autonomy (OSA) has gained prominence in European political thinking. Amid the perceived geopoliticisation of EU policies, EU enlargement has also moved to the forefront of European political discussions and has increasingly been shaped by security considerations. While EU enlargement has long been viewed as a successful foreign policy instrument for stabilising the EU’s neighbourhood, in the current geopolitical environment, it may be considered as a means of strengthening the EU’s strategic autonomy. Despite the prevalent framing of a new enlargement as a strategic imperative, the relationship between enlargement and OSA in European political debates remains underexplored. This paper examines how the relationship between EU enlargement and (open) strategic autonomy is discursively constructed in European political discourse. Methodologically, it employs qualitative discourse analysis to examine a pilot sample of selected European Parliament (EP) debates on EU enlargement. The EP is treated as a key arena for political deliberation over EU policies, where competing perceptions of enlargement’s role for the EU and interpretations of (open) strategic autonomy are articulated and contested. The study explores whether, and in what ways, European parliamentary actors interpret, articulate, and link enlargement to the EU’s quest for open strategic autonomy. It investigates whether such discourses move beyond rhetorical references to geopolitical necessity and substantively emphasise enlargement’s role in enhancing the EU’s capacity to act autonomously. The results of a pilot study demonstrate that references to enlargement’s geopolitical significance were mostly rhetorical and were rarely constructed explicitly as a means of enhancing the EU’s internal capacity or its external agency. Nonetheless, enlargement plays a notable role in sparking discussions about reforming the EU’s institutions and decision-making in foreign policy, which can be interpreted as implicitly influencing the evolution of the EU’s strategic autonomy. Conceptually, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of how OSA is articulated and interpreted in EU political discourse and proposes an operationalisation for analysing how OSA is implicitly expressed in political debates. More broadly, the paper contributes to the growing scholarship on the geopoliticisation of EU enlargement.