Beyond Strategic Autonomy: Relational Power, Cultural Politics, and Europe’s Eastern Entanglements

This paper offers a critical analysis of the EU’s turn towards strategic autonomy by contrasting its logics with a relational understanding of power. Grounded in empirical research of EU cultural politics conducted in Brussels and Georgia in the South Caucasus, the paper challenges strategic autonomy as a technocratic or defensive adjustment to geopolitical uncertainty, and outlines a relational, dialogue-based approach to engage with the neighbourhood countries. Drawing on empirical research conducted in policy-making arenas in Brussels, the paper examines how strategic autonomy is articulated and normalised within EU cultural politics. This is juxtaposed with an understanding of the EU’s actorness, based on ethnographic immersion in Georgia, where EU policies are encountered as external governance and foreign policy practices, revealing limited understanding and use of relational ‘power’. The analysis demonstrates that strategic autonomy operates through hierarchical imaginaries of capacity and security that re-centre decision-making power within the EU core, while reframing neighbouring regions as sites of risk management rather than political partnership. From a relational power perspective, these dynamics obscure the mutual dependencies linking the EU, Central and Eastern Europe, and the South Caucasus, and marginalise alternative forms of solidarity based on co-constitution and reciprocity. The paper argues that strategic autonomy risks deepening internal East–West divisions within the EU while simultaneously reproducing asymmetrical relations with its eastern neighbourhood. By foregrounding cultural narratives and everyday practices across EU and non-EU contexts, the paper contributes to debates on strategic autonomy by revealing its unintended consequences for European cohesion and the EU’s external relations, and by outlining the analytical and political potential of relational power as an alternative framework.