“Strategic autonomy” can sound like the sort of phrase designed to survive any conference panel while committing to nothing.
I prefer a simpler definition: capacity to choose.
A person is not autonomous because nobody else exists. A country is not sovereign because it imports nothing. Europe will not become stronger by trying to manufacture every screw, chip, medicine, watt and idea behind a wall.
Interdependence is normal.
The question is whether dependence becomes so concentrated that another actor can turn it into coercion — or whether Europeans discover, at the moment a crisis arrives, that an important political choice was never really ours to make.
So strategic autonomy is practical.
Can Europe defend itself and contribute seriously to collective security? Can it keep critical infrastructure functioning? Can it diversify essential supply chains? Can it produce, obtain or substitute crucial technologies and energy? Can democratic governments make choices without a single external dependency deciding the answer in advance?
Alliances can strengthen that capacity. Partnerships can strengthen it. Trade can strengthen it. Autonomy does not require solitude.
But partnership works best when it is chosen from capability rather than accepted from helplessness.
There is another half to the idea: capacity must remain accountable.
Security is not permission to abandon the rule of law. Resilience is not an excuse for permanent secrecy. Industrial policy is not automatically wise because it uses the word “strategic”. European power should be real enough to matter and democratic enough to answer for itself.
Strategic autonomy is therefore less glamorous than the slogan.
It is infrastructure, skills, defence, energy, technology, institutions, redundancy, investment and political will.
In other words: the unromantic work that makes choices real.