Strategic Autonomy” as Narrative Engine for Policy Change in the EU’s Digital Sector.

Digital infrastructures (DI) have become central to the European Union’s (EU) strategic agenda, as evidenced by increasingly state-interventionist approaches in EU DI policy. This marks a clear departure from the traditional market-making foundations of the field and aligns with the EU’s broader shift towards industrial policy (IP). While in other sectors where exogenous shocks – such as the COVID-19-pandemic in health of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – have served as powerful sources of legitimation, no comparable external event accounts for the policy shift in the DI sector. This renders the transformation less self-evident and calls for further explanation. We argue that greater attention should be devoted to potential cognitive- discursive drivers of policy change – ideas, frames, or storylines through which actors interpret problems, attribute causality, and legitimise solutions.To this end, this study draws on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to show how the concept of „Strategic Autonomy“ (SA) functioned as a narrative engine of the policy change. Through computational text analysis of six decades of Commission, Council and legal policy documents, combined with qualitative cross-validation, we show the SA concepts’ role a as causal driver of the ongoing EU DI policy change.