Rethinking the EU’s Strategic Shift: A Critical Review of the Literature

This essay reviews a decade of literature on the EU strategic shift, encompassing efforts to forge a common vision of strategic autonomy, to integrate the European defence industry, and increase military spending. Mainstream approaches grounded in integration theory and IR are shaped by ontological assumptions that constrain the treatment of relevant actors, preference formation, and the relationship between economic and security dynamics. Combined with disciplinary entrenchment, these assumptions yield theoretically partial and often empirically underdeveloped accounts of the shift and may contribute to the legitimisation of a significant process of rearmament. This review argues that international political economy (IPE) frameworks are better suited to examining how global geopolitical and geoeconomic transformations interact with European security and industrial restructuring, including how security priorities reshape industrial policy while industrial interests and structures influence strategic priorities. It further advocates critical interdisciplinary research on European rearmament, drawing on historical materialist IPE to examine how this economy-security relationship is historically constituted and sustained through particular configurations of social forces, institutions, and material interests.