"Strategic sovereignty" and "Strategic autonomy" in the EU’s official discourse: a morphological analysis of ideology

Abstract

The article focuses on the two concepts that have become increasingly common in the official discourse of the EU in recent years - “strategic sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy”. Top public officials, politicians and bodies of the European Union and of member states refer to each of these terms, depending on the circumstances or the established tradition of using the concept in a particular area of the EU's policy. However, there is still no clear understanding in the academic and expert community of how they relate at the semantic level - in other words, whether these terms are interchangeable with regard to their meaning, adjacent ones or they differ radically from each other. The author uses the morphological analysis of ideology by M. Freeden with the special emphasis on the process of decontestation as a theoretical and methodological framework of the study in order to compare these two concepts and discover their semantic content. The empirical evidence of the article includes speeches of EU’s top public officials, politicians, as well as key documents of the EU during the period of active dissemination of concepts in the discourse of Brussels. The analysis reveals that the two concepts occupy related semantic positions, but they are not completely synonymous. It is difficult to predict the further evolution of the concepts within the EU’s semantic system, but they have already taken an important place in the foreign policy discourse of Brussels that will inevitably affect all the EU counterparties, including Russia.