European strategic autonomy revisited: Europeanisation, identity and limits to defence integration

Despite renewed political momentum after Russia’s war against Ukraine, European strategic autonomy continues to display a persistent gap between ambition and implementation. This article examines why projects of European defence integration regularly advance at the level of discourse, strategic documents and institutional innovation, yet remain uneven in practical delivery across European Union member states. Building on Europeanisation theory and security identity scholarship, the article addresses two central questions: why is strategic autonomy implemented unevenly across the EU, and to what extent do identity, domestic political factors and historical alliance patterns constrain defence integration beyond material capability gaps alone? The article argues that strategic autonomy is limited not only by insufficient means, procurement fragmentation or incomplete institutional design, but also by divergent national security identities, historically embedded threat perceptions and path dependencies formed through the long evolution of EU–NATO relations. Methodologically, the study relies on qualitative policy analysis of major EU defence initiatives, strategic documents and debates on procurement and institutional overlap. The findings suggest that strategic autonomy is better understood as a differentiated process of Europeanisation in which EU-level ambitions are selectively mediated through domestic politics, alliance preferences and institutional inheritance. As a result, autonomy emerges not as a singular policy outcome, but as a contested and uneven process of negotiation within a historically entrenched Euro-Atlantic order.