EU’s renewed emphasis on strategic autonomy in defence is reshaping European security governance, yet policy debates and empirical research continue to focus predominantly on large Western member states. This paper examines how defence-related strategic autonomy is developed and implemented beyond the EU’s formal membership boundaries by analysing the case of North Macedonia—a NATO member and EU candidate country embedded in emerging European defence architectures. It asks how EU defence initiatives associated with strategic autonomy reconfigure East–West hierarchies, dependencies, and solidarities when they involve peripheral and candidate countries.

The paper draws on analysis of EU and national policy documents, defence procurement data, and data regarding participation in EU-led security missions. Empirically, it traces North Macedonia’s engagement with key EU defence initiatives linked to strategic autonomy, including regulatory alignment with the European Defence Fund, contributions to Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions, and participation in regional and bilateral defence cooperation with Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states.

The paper assumes that while EU strategic autonomy is framed in policy discourse as enhancing collective resilience and solidarity, its defence implementation often reinforces asymmetric governance relationships. North Macedonia is primarily positioned as a security contributor, regulatory adopter, and operational partner, with limited influence over agenda-setting and industrial priorities. Defence cooperation thus reduces external dependencies while simultaneously reproducing intra-European hierarchies between core EU states, CEE members, and candidate countries. At the same time, the paper identifies targeted coalition-building efforts by North Macedonia with CEE member states that seek to leverage defence cooperation to enhance political credibility, interoperability, and claims to future inclusion within EU defence structures.

By offering a policy-oriented analysis of defence strategic autonomy from a candidate country perspective, the paper contributes to debates on EU strategic autonomy by highlighting its differentiated effects across Europe. It argues that a sustainable and credible EU defence autonomy strategy requires greater attention to how hierarchies and dependencies are produced at the Union’s margins—and how peripheral actors can be more meaningfully integrated into Europe’s evolving security architecture.

The European Union has accelerated its pursuit of strategic autonomy in response to the war in Ukraine, the uncertainty surrounding the US’s long-term security commitments and the intensifying geoeconomic competition. Recent initiatives, including Security Action for Europe (SAFE), the revived EU–Mercosur agreement and negotiations on a free trade agreement with India, demonstrate how strategic autonomy is being advanced in defence, trade and industrial policy. However, these parallel efforts also highlight internal contradictions concerning inclusion, hierarchy and political conditionality. Turkey occupies a pivotal yet contested position within this landscape. Although SAFE aims to bolster Europe’s defence and industrial capabilities, the exclusion of Turkey — despite its formal interest, NATO membership, and integration into European defence production networks — reveals that the EU’s autonomy agenda is susceptible to intra-EU veto politics, particularly the objections raised by Greece and the Republic of Cyprus. This exclusion contrasts with the EU’s willingness to pursue expansive trade partnerships with Mercosur and India, highlighting a selective approach to strategic partnerships that prioritises geoeconomic pragmatism in trade while imposing strict political gatekeeping in security cooperation. This tension raises a central question: How does the marginalization of Turkey from EU defence initiatives affect the credibility and effectiveness of EU strategic autonomy, and what does it reveal about the reconfiguration of power and hierarchy within Europe’s security governance? Turkey's defence industrial capacity, operational military experience and strategic position in the Black Sea and Europe’s eastern neighbourhood suggest that its exclusion represents a diplomatic impasse and a strategic limitation. This paper discusses Turkey’s potential role as a key contributor to European autonomy, highlighting the strategic costs of excluding capable non-EU partners from the EU’s evolving security architecture.

While the profound transformation reshapes the international system in the 21st century, one of the developments that concretizes and shapes this process is the war in Ukraine. The ongoing multiple crises (Brexit, global economic crisis, the rising trend of authoritarianism in Europe and around the world, the migration crisis) and developments facing the West, such as the questioning of US hegemony and the rise of China, have triggered and continue to exacerbate the international disorder and uncertainty. In addition, the war in Ukraine, intensifying global uncertainty, has placed the European Union at a critical threshold. It has profoundly affected not only the European security order but also the EU's global security and diplomatic perspectives. However, the war in Ukraine is not only important because of the threats it poses to the EU in terms of security. It is also significant in relation to the very notion of integration itself. This is because the war in Ukraine is not only a security issue, but also a paradigm shift that requires us to rethink integration. The founding vision of integration is based on peace and prosperity. Today, however, it is undergoing a security-oriented transformation. To this end, this study analyses how the geopolitical developments triggered by the War in Ukraine have transformed European integration into a security-centred formation. This analysis seeks to reveal that European integration must now be understood as a process shaped not by linear functional spillover, but by adaptive responses to systemic uncertainty and geopolitical fragmentation. The evolving security landscape confronting Europe has catalysed a transformation of the European Union from a predominantly economic entity into a strategically oriented political actor with a pronounced focus on security and defence.

This research aims to analyse the relation between EU’s narratives and its actorness in the Eastern Mediterranean. For this purpose, the author examines EU’s narratives which have been crystalized and evolved with the concept “geopolitical Europe” since the formation of Ursula von der Leyen’s first commission in 2019. After analysing the discourse of “geopolitical Europe” in EU institutions’ documents and speeches of key actors, the paper elaborates on the borders and geographical proximity of the EU in the Eastern Mediterranean which reveals unique picture regarding member states, candidate/accession countries and neighbouring countries in the region. The complex picture of the region together with the narratives of geopolitical Europe brings a litmus case for the EU’s actorness. Implementing John Vogel’s concept of actorness with its three main characteristics namely; opportunity, presence and capability, this research elaborates the EU’s actorness regarding two key cases from Eastern Mediterranean. One is governance and securitization of immigration in the international area and other is state building in Syria. This comparative empirical work of EU’s actorness provides novel insights about the relation of strong narratives lacking means for the action.