We consider a steady state $v_{0}$ of the Euler equation in a fixed bounded domain in $mathbf{R}^{n}$. Suppose the linearized Euler equation has an exponential dichotomy of unstable and center-stable subspaces. By rewriting the Euler equation as an ODE on an infinite dimensional manifold of volume preserving maps in $W^{k, q}$, $(k>1+frac{n}{q})$, the unstable (and stable) manifolds of $v_{0}$ are constructed under certain spectral gap condition which is verified for both 2D and 3D examples. In particular, when the unstable subspace is finite dimensional, this implies the nonlinear instability of $v_{0}$ in the sense that arbitrarily small $W^{k, q}$ perturbations can lead to $L^{2}$ growth of the nonlinear solutions.
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