Who Governs EU Strategic Autonomy? Understanding Power Behind Europe’s Digital Ambitions
The European Union increasingly speaks of strategic autonomy as a central objective for navigating a world characterized by geopolitical rivalry, technological dependence, and growing uncertainty. Although the concept initially gained prominence in security and foreign policy debates, it has increasingly extended into economic, technological and digital policy. In particular, the EU has linked strategic autonomy to reducing strategic dependencies, strengthening technological capabilities and preserving the Union’s ability to act in a rapidly changing international environment (Borrell, 2020; European Council, 2020; Broeders, Cristiano and Kaminska, 2023). But an important question remains: who actually governs EU strategic autonomy in the digital domain?
Much of the existing literature on EU digital policy has examined the subject through legal, regulatory, or Commission-centred perspectives. While these approaches are important, they can overlook a fundamental feature of EU governance: strategic policy objectives are rarely controlled by a single institution. Instead, they emerge through interactions among institutions with different competences, resources and political priorities (Tsebelis and Garrett, 2001; Peterson, 2001; Kreppel and Oztas, 2017). My research therefore approaches EU digital strategic autonomy through a hybrid governance framework combining three dimensions of power: political steering, technocratic expertise and intergovernmental bargaining.
The European Council plays an important role in defining the broad political direction. Article 15 of the Treaty on European Union assigns it the role of providing the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and defining its general political directions and priorities (European Union, 2016). In recent years, European Council conclusions have increasingly connected competitiveness, technological sovereignty, resilience and strategic autonomy. For example, the European Council has called for reducing strategic dependencies, strengthening European technological capabilities and developing a more sovereign digital transition (European Council, 2025a, 2025b). The European Council therefore contributes significantly to the political framing and prioritisation of strategic autonomy, even though it does not exercise legislative functions. Yet political direction alone does not produce policy.
The European Commission plays a different but equally important role. Under Article 17 TEU, the Commission promotes the general interest of the Union and takes appropriate initiatives to that end, while also exercising important executive and coordinating functions (European Union, 2016). Its institutional position gives it substantial influence over policy formulation and legislative initiatives. Research on EU agenda-setting has highlighted the Commission’s capacity to act as a policy entrepreneur and to connect agenda-setting with policy formulation (Kreppel and Oztas, 2017; Leppänen, 2022). This role is particularly visible in digital policy. The Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and European Chips Act illustrate how broader strategic objectives can be translated into concrete regulatory and industrial initiatives (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022a, 2022b, 2023). These instruments demonstrate that strategic autonomy is not simply a political aspiration; it can also be pursued through the EU’s regulatory and industrial capacities.
At the same time, the Council of the European Union and the member states remain essential to the process. Under the ordinary legislative procedure, Commission proposals are negotiated and adopted by the Council and the European Parliament. The Council consequently provides an important arena for intergovernmental bargaining in which national preferences, economic interests and different assessments of strategic dependencies can influence the final shape of EU legislation (Tsebelis and Garrett, 2001; Tallberg, 2008).
This means that EU digital strategic autonomy cannot easily be attributed to one institution. Instead, it is produced through a continuous process of interinstitutional interaction and negotiation. The European Council can establish broad political priorities; the Commission can translate those priorities into legislative and regulatory initiatives; and the Council, together with the European Parliament, participates in negotiating and adopting the resulting legislation. The distribution of influence therefore varies across stages of the policy process rather than being concentrated in a single institutional actor. This perspective is also consistent with scholarship on digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Broeders, Cristiano and Kaminska (2023) show that the EU’s digital sovereignty agenda combines internal-market considerations, fundamental rights and geopolitical concerns. Rather than representing a single policy logic, digital sovereignty involves a combination of regulatory, economic and geopolitical objectives. This makes the institutional question particularly important: different institutions may exercise different forms of authority over different dimensions of the same strategic objective.
Presenting this research at UACES provided an opportunity to test this argument before an international audience of scholars working on European politics and governance. The discussion following the presentation was particularly useful for thinking about how different forms of institutional authority interact and how the concept of strategic autonomy can be distinguished from related ideas such as digital sovereignty, technological sovereignty and technological independence. One of the broader lessons I took from the conference is that strategic autonomy should not be understood simply as an outcome or policy label. It is also a governance process. Understanding who defines priorities, who possesses the expertise to formulate and implement policies, and who has the authority to negotiate their final form is essential to understanding how the EU responds to strategic vulnerabilities.
The European experience therefore raises a broader question that extends beyond digital policy: when strategic objectives emerge in complex and multi-level political systems, where does the authority to pursue them actually reside? Examining the answer requires looking not only at what policies the EU adopts, but also at the institutional relationships and power dynamics through which those policies are produced. In this sense, studying EU strategic autonomy is ultimately also a study of institutional power: who sets the agenda, who translates political priorities into policy instruments, and who shapes the compromises through which those instruments become European policy.
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