Coordinative Discourse of Strategic Sovereignty Tilting the European Union’s Institutional Balance

Abstract

The article studies how a discursive contestation among the EU institutions (the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union) of the concept of "strategic sovereignty" ("strategic autonomy") affects the institutional balance among them. Institutional balance is a dynamic process in which institutions challenge each other's authority. This process is conceptualized in the article in terms of discursive neo-institutionalism as a coordinative discourse, which forms, challenges and justifies the idea of “strategic sovereignty”. The article uses the cases of the EU industrial, trade policy, and the common security and defense policy to demonstrate the changing institutional balance.The results of the study show that the main institutional beneficiary of "strategic sovereignty" is the European Commission. Most likely, there will be a strengthening of the Council, which reserves broad powers in crisis management and foreign policy. The position of the Parliament is ambivalent: although the growth of its institutional weight is possible, it will depend both on the Parliament’s own initiatives and on whether the European Commission will succeed at communitarizing new issues and spheres. The findings demonstrate that under crisis, the institutional balance of the EU will continue to tilt in favor of the supranational level of regulation.