Between Strategic Autonomy and Strategic Cacophony: How Member States Navigate the European Commission’s Influence on EU Defense Policy

While the idea of European strategic autonomy has been around for some time, its salience has increased rapidly since 2022 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The concept itself, for Europe to become independent enough to act autonomously, has been further stressed as the European Union’s (EU) various dependencies on energy, critical raw materials, and security guarantees increasingly have been jeopardized. The European Commission has taken an active role in coordinating EU-level responses on different policy sectors, even those which historically have been strongly intergovernmental, such as defense. New policy initiatives targeting the defense industry and various strategies for how the European defense market can ramp up its production have been put forward for the EU to become more autonomous and resilient. Because defense still is a predominantly intergovernmental policy sector, the Commission faces the challenge of balancing both national governments’ preferences and industrial interests. This paper seeks to answer two main questions regarding the Commission’s increased involvement on EU defense policy. First, how do member states respond to the Commission’s expanded role on EU defense since 2022? Secondly, why do some member states support the Commission’s expanded role on EU defense, while others engage pragmatically for financial or industrial benefits, and others oppose the Commission’s influence? The analysis draws on national defense strategies, official statements and press releases, as well as semi-structured elite interviews with national and EU officials. It emphasizes how sovereignty concerns, threat perceptions, and defense industrial interests and capacity shape member states preferences towards the Commission’s role on EU defense. Member states’ diverging responses to the Commission’s expanded role point to the emergence of a ‘transverse’ governance pattern (Dyson & Marcussen, 2010) where national preferences, supranational ambition, and industrial interests overlap. The paper further demonstrates how EU defense integration and the quest for strategic autonomy unfolds in an incremental and cross-cutting manner. In doing so, the paper contributes to the literature on European strategic autonomy by showing how the Commission’s expanded influence on the sector is shaped, and oftentimes contested, by diverging member state preferences and industrial interests.