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European Foreign Policy Think Tanks and ‘Strategic Autonomy’: Making Sense of the EU’s Role in the World of Geoeconomics

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The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World

Part of the book series: International Political Economy Series ((IPES))

Abstract

During the past decade, European foreign policy has undergone a significant shift away from the notion of Normative Power Europe, culminating in the present ‘geopolitical Commission’ and a geoeconomic understanding of strategic autonomy as the hegemonic foreign policy discourse. European foreign policy think tanks, national and Brussels-based, have played a key role in shaping the policy and discursive content of this shift. Operating in the interstitial field between the world of politics, academia, media, and business, think tanks are at the centre of the power-knowledge nexus. Acting in a transnational space, they Europeanise debates in this traditionally intergovernmental domain by convening elites, (re-)articulating interests and developing a common worldview in a fragmented world of European foreign policy. As such, think tanks present a fruitful but overlooked entry point for providing a non-derivative analysis of European foreign policy(-making) focused on actors and mindful of its social purpose. Illustrating the potentials of focusing on think tanks, this chapter traces the evolution of the concept of strategic autonomy using qualitative content analysis of think tank publications and official policy documents. Think tanks and individual think tankers have been closely involved in producing the EU’s main strategic document, the 2016 European Global Strategy (EUGS). They have helped spur and moderate consequent debates on strategic autonomy that saw a redefinition of the concept from its narrow meaning of favouring state support for European defence industries to a hegemonic and geoeconomics-permeated foreign policy discourse covering an ever-greater array of issues.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The ‘claim to autonomy’ condition means that I exclude consultancies. They sometimes have significant research capacities which, however, are put in the direct service of their customers. Political foundations at both European and national levels, while producing policy-relevant knowledge, are excluded on similar grounds—the absence of claim to intellectual autonomy.

  2. 2.

    Here, transnational does not denote a specific level akin to the domestic or supranational one. It is precisely a phenomenon—created and reproduced through, among other things, practices of think tanks—extending across, and thereby linking as well as transcending, different (territorial) ‘levels’ (van Apeldoorn 2004, p. 144).

  3. 3.

    This assessment is shared by Steven Blockmans the head of CEPS’s EU foreign policy unit: ‘Here at EU level, organizing events, doing the rounds of receptions is a lot of tanking but not necessarily a lot of thinking’ (quoted in Gilroy, 2019, p. 94).

  4. 4.

    The think tanks in question were the Istituto Affari Internazionali (Rome), Polish Institute of International Affairs (Warsaw), Real Instituto Elcano (Madrid) and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Stockholm).

  5. 5.

    For a detailed account of the process that resulted in the EUGS see (Morillas, 2019; Sus, 2021; Tocci, 2017).

  6. 6.

    See for example reports by the ARES Group (e.g. Arteaga et al., 2016). The Armament Industry European Research Group was created in 2016 by The French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (Iris). This forum for the European armament community brings together top experts from across European universities and think tanks. Its steering committee includes representatives of large European armament firms, including Airbus Group, Nexter Group, Thales and MDBA.

  7. 7.

    As part of this post-European Parliament elections push for debating strategic autonomy, ECFR conducted a survey in several member states and produced a widely discussed report (Franke & Varma, 2019) on divergences and commonalities in understandings of strategic autonomy.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the section on geoeconomics at the 2021 ECPR General Conference, especially the discussant Luuk Schmitz for the constructive feedback. I am also grateful to Imogen T. Liu, Milan Babić, Adam D. Dixon, Urban Jakša and Dieter Plehwe for their valuable comments and encouragement. All errors are mine.

Research for this chapter is part of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script’ (EXC 2055, Project-ID: 390715649), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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  1. SCRIPTS, Berlin Graduate School for Global and Transregional Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jaša Veselinovič

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  1. Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Milan Babić

  2. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Adam D. Dixon

  3. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Imogen T. Liu

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Veselinovič, J. (2022). European Foreign Policy Think Tanks and ‘Strategic Autonomy’: Making Sense of the EU’s Role in the World of Geoeconomics. In: Babić, M., Dixon, A.D., Liu, I.T. (eds) The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01968-5_4

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