THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. Reforming Europe in a time of war

THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 94 purpose of this paper, there are three levels that need to be taken into account and three functional definitions, that are helpful in understanding the different dimen- sions of Strategic Autonomy The three levels inside the European Union are the political, the institutional and the functional level (Grevi 2019: 10). That means, that to achieve Strategic Autonomy, the EU needs politically a common understanding of the main goals not only on paper, but also in practice, which would entail a high level of trust between the member states or even the “sense of shared destiny” (Grevi 2019, 10). Sven Biscop (2022) describes this, from a different angle as a mindset shared by the member states. On a second level the EU needs a set of institutions that can foster this common mindset and create processes for the EU to act on its political will. These institutions would need to provide efficiency, legitimacy as well as flexibility. The third level entails capabilities of the EU to act autonomously and implement its decisions. That would mean the provision of adequate economic and military resources (See for all three levels of Strategic Autonomy: Grevi 2019: 10). These three levels look at the internal preconditions and processes necessary for the EU to achieve Strategic Autonomy. However, there also needs to be a definition of the ambition of the concepts in terms of what it should aspire to achieve in security and defence. Looking at the development of the strategic debate in Europe, there are three aspects of European Strategic Autonomy, that need to be differentiated (for all three aspects of Strategic Au- tonomy, see Mauro 2021). First, there is the ambition to provide international crisis management.This stands at the beginning of the Common Security and Defence Policy and marks the aim of the EU to deal autonomously with crises in its neighbourhood. It thus describes the lowest level of ambition. Secondly, there is StrategicAutonomy understood as military independence. This is a later definition of the concept, that was introduced into the strategic debate in the past ten years and found its way into the Global Strat- egy of the Union (EEAS 2016). It aims at providing security inside and outside the EU as well as an autonomous and competitive European defence technological and industrial base. Politically the latter concept was directed at least by some towards the United States, aiming for a more auton- omous EU form NATO and the US (Borrell 2020).Third, the latest and broadest understanding of StrategicAutonomy is the above described rather indiscriminately used autonomy in the broader sense. As the High Representative for the CFSP, Josep Borrell, himself acknowledged in an aim to clarify the concept:“…the stakes of strategic autonomy are not limited to security and defence. They apply to a wider range of issues including trade, finance and investments.” However, the High Representative was rather clear, that this might prove unhelpful and tried to redirect the debate to the narrower sense of security:“Since then, strategic auton- omy has been widened to new subjects of an economic and technological nature, as revealed by the Covid-19 pandem- ic. However, the security dimension remains predominant and sensitive.” (Borrell 2020) The focus on security will guide the following parts of this chapter, since it allows for a clearer analysis of the achievements of the EU towards Strategic Autonomy as well as the potential for further developments. We will therefore concentrate mostly on crisis management, with only a glance at military independence, always bearing in mind the political, institutional as well as the functional dimension. Strategic Autonomy in practice? The idea for a European Union was conceived in times of war and conflict. The “peace project” of a cooperation between former war parties like Germany and France seemed to be the right way out of the chaos of suc- cessive world wars, that had coined the first half of the 20 th century. Over time, the rationale of peace became more and more the pathos-laden part of grand speeches, whereas other aspects like democracy (at first) and then the promise of prosperity became the drivers of EU inte- gration. However, questions of security became salient again, after the end of the Cold War, when the Yugoslav wars reminded Europeans, that war in Europe was still a