The development of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and the problem of EU strategic autonomy

Abstract

The article examines the evolution of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), from its institutional emergence in the late 1990s to the present stage marked by a substantial reassessment of security priorities following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The relevance of the topic stems from the fact that the war against Ukraine has effectively tested the EU's capacity to act as an autonomous security actor and has raised doubts about the feasibility of the strategic autonomy concept that has featured in EU discourse since 2016. The purpose of the study is to determine to what extent the rhetoric surrounding EU strategic autonomy in security and defence is backed by real institutional and financial change as of the mid-2020s. The study applies the historical-comparative method to trace the stages of CSDP formation, content analysis of the EU's programmatic documents, and a quantitative analysis of statistical data.

The positions of sixteen academic sources, both domestic and foreign, regarding the correlation between "strategic autonomy" and "transatlantic solidarity" were separately systematised.

The results show that despite a considerable increase in member states' defence expenditure and the expansion of PESCO to 83 projects, most of the analysed studies characterise strategic autonomy predominantly as an institutional and discursive phenomenon rather than an operational military one.

The article discusses the gap between financial and rhetorical growth, on the one hand, and the EU's continued structural dependence on NATO in matters of collective defence, on the other. The scientific novelty lies in combining qualitative institutional analysis with quantitative empirical data within Ukrainian-language academic discourse, which allowed for a more precise delineation of the applicability of the term "strategic autonomy" to the defence sphere.

The practical significance of the work is seen in the possibility of using the obtained conclusions to analyse the prospects of Ukraine's integration into the EU's defence structures, including participation in PESCO and access to the European Defence Fund in the context of future enlargement.