L’AUTONOMIE STRATEGIQUE EUROPEENNE ENTRE MODE DISCURSIVE ET BESOIN GEOPOLITIQUE
EUROPEAN STRATEGIC AUTONOMY: BETWEEN DISCURSIVE TREND AND GEOPOLITICAL NECESSITY

Summary/Abstract: European Strategic Autonomy: Between Discursive Trend and Geopolitical Necessity. This article examines how the concept of European strategic autonomy circulates and is appropriated across institutional and media discourses in the French-speaking public sphere. Drawing on discourse analysis and the framework of discursive appropriation, the authors investigate whether strategic autonomy is summoned by current events or represents a distinct discursive moment in European political communication. The study proceeds in two stages: first, a genealogical analysis of strategic autonomy’s presence in official European Union documents since its emergence in the 1994 French White Paper on Defense, and second, a computational discourse analysis applied to a corpus of French-language newsmedia articles. The research reveals that while EU institutions employ the concept in limited and relatively sparse ways, strategic autonomy has become increasingly salient in media discourse and public debate, particularly following renewed geopolitical tensions. The article argues that strategic autonomy functions as a metaphorical concept that operates simultaneously at political and metapolitical levels, serving to reconfigure European identities, institutional relationships, and the boundaries of public debate. By comparing institutional and media appropriations, the study demonstrates how different discursive instances cooperate in stabilizing or destabilizing the meaning of strategic autonomy within the broader European public space.

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