From Concept to Story: “Strategic Autonomy” as Poli-Cy Narrative in the EU’s Digital Infrastructure Sector.

Strategic autonomy (SA) has become a pervasive reference point across European Union (EU) public policies. Scholars have shown, first, that SA now features across multiple policy domains; second, that its rise coincides with the EU’s broader turn towards industrial policy; and third, that, under conditions of external pressure, its conceptual malleability enables SA to function as a cognitive-discursive driver. This paper advances SA research by closing two gaps in the contemporary literature. First, the literature remains misaligned: the strand examining SA’s cognitive-discursive functioning does not relate its findings to the industrial-policy correlation highlighted by the second strand. Second, although existing scholarship explains how SA shapes policy, it leaves under-theorised why it does so in a consistent direction – largely because the question of agency, namely who employs SA and to what ends, remains insufficiently theorised. To overcome these limitations, we adopt a research strate-gy that departs from predominantly qualitative-interpretative approaches. Using the Narrative Policy Frame-work, we retain a constructionist perspective while applying objective narrative criteria to a longitudinal corpus of more than 8,600 European Commission documents (1975–2025). Focusing on the digital-infrastructure (DI) sector – a least-likely case for spontaneous narrative emergence – we show that the Commission deliberately construct-ed a policy narrative in which SA is set as a principal objective, embedded in specific plotlines, character roles, and industrial-policy solutions. Fully articulated by 2015, this narrative precedes the DI sector’s policy shift, suggesting a potential causal influence. Our findings suggest that SA not only legitimises individual measures but establishes a durable narrative foundation through which an emerging industrial mode of EU policymaking can be justified and sustained.