The renewed emphasis on EU strategic autonomy following Russia’s war against Ukraine has brought long-standing disagreements over European defence integration back to the fore. While France has consistently promoted strategic autonomy as a means of strengthening European defence-industrial capacity and reducing external dependence, Poland has emerged as one of its most vocal and influential critics. This paper places Poland at the centre of the analysis to examine how Polish security preferences, and those of other Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states, challenge Franco-led interpretations of strategic autonomy and expose persistent power asymmetries within the EU.

The paper focuses on Poland’s engagement with key EU defence initiatives, including debates on defence procurement, industrial cooperation, and third-country participation. It traces recurrent points of tension between France and Poland over the role of NATO, the strategic importance of the United States, and the risks of industrial protectionism in European defence markets. Drawing on qualitative analysis of policy documents and official statements, the paper shows how Poland articulates a security agenda shaped by proximity to Russia, historical experience, and a strong emphasis on territorial defence and military readiness.

The analysis demonstrates that these disagreements are not simply ideological but reflect structural differences in defence-industrial capacity and political influence. France’s vision of strategic autonomy prioritises long-term industrial sovereignty and European leadership, while Poland approaches the concept pragmatically, supporting EU-level initiatives that deliver immediate capabilities, financial resources, or opportunities for industrial development, and resisting those perceived as weakening NATO cohesion or marginalising CEE interests. Other CEE member states often align with Poland on these issues, although with varying degrees of intensity and consistency.

This paper argues that EU strategic autonomy functions as a site of contestation rather than consensus, where East–West hierarchies are renegotiated rather than dissolved. The Franco–Polish divide highlights how strategic autonomy reconfigures dependencies and solidarities within European defence integration, raising broader questions about leadership, inclusion, and the future balance between European and transatlantic security.

Title: Strategic Autonomy as Relational Practice: Reconfiguring the East-West Divide in the EU

Abstract

The EU’s pursuit of strategic autonomy has become a defining response to the polycrisis of war, technological disruption, and global economic fragmentation. Yet, this paper is not unfolding evenly across Europe. This paper examines how strategic autonomy initiatives in defense, digital regulation, and trade both deepen and reconfigure the East-West divide within the EU. Drawing on discourse analysis and empirical evidence from coalition-building and intergovernmental negotiations, the paper argues that strategic autonomy is best understood as a relational practice, a process that redefines hierarchies and solidarities rather than a fixed institutional goal. Defense initiatives such as PESCO and the European Defense Fund reveal CEE states’ dual positioning: reliant on NATO for security guarantees, yet increasingly pressured to invest in EU-led frameworks. In digital regulation, CEE actors often adopt Western narratives of sovereignty and resilience, while simultaneously mobilizing distinct concerns about technological dependence and market access. Trade and industrial transitions, whereas CEE governments emphasize integration into global value chains and competitiveness. By foregrounding the agency of CEE actors, the paper challenges dominant accounts that cast Eastern Europe as a passive recipient of Western-led projects. Instead, it shows how CEE governments, businesses, and civil society actively contest and reshape the meaning of strategic autonomy, which does not erase the East-West but transforms it into new patterns of interdependence, contestation, and negotiated solidarity.

Pursuing EU strategic autonomy implies coordinated technological and industrial upgrading at the member state level. In this endeavour, CEE countries seem to represent a weak link. While these economies are now members of the group of advanced economies, many studies in political economy still emphasise their semi-peripheral status, a result of deep dependency on inward foreign direct investment and integration into lower value-added activities within global value chains. The literature shows that these economies are usually not among frontrunners when it comes to making use of EU-level transformative industrial policy instruments, such as Important Projects of Common European Interest. Instead, some of these countries have been actively directing their industrial policy attempts towards cooperation with partners outside of the EU, such as in the cases of Korean and Chinese EV batteries in Hungary or Taiwan semiconductors in Lithuania.

This brings us to the question of what state capacity for transformative industrial policy CEE countries possess. More specifically, how do political actors in these counties mobilise support towards the choice, design and implementation of such policies?

The earlier literature linked the capacity of the state to achieve its transformative development goals notwithstanding opposition of some powerful groups to a variety of socio-political configurations. Notable examples of these configurations include strong, often autocratic, developmentally minded state leaders, as in the case of late industrialisers in East Asia, or state-business-labour concertation, as in the case of small states in West Europe. Many of these forms of state capacity, however, have become less feasible in the 21st century due to growing democratisation, the decline of unions, and changing conditions for development brought by globalisation of production, trade and finance.

Given such a context, a specific focus of the paper is on how CEE countries are capable to implement transformative industrial policies given that they lack important prerequisites of the state capacity of earlier successful developers from East Asia and North Europe. To answer this question, the paper synthesises the existing literature to investigate ideational, institutional, political and international conditions in CEE countries that have shown conducive for transformative industrial policy.

The proposed paper is a part of an ongoing research project that aims to develop a conceptual framework and a typology of state capacity for transformative industrial policy tailored to the specific contexts of the CEE region. Consequently, the presentation will include preliminary theoretical and empirical findings from the project.