Beyond the regulatory state? The European Defence Fund and national military capacities

Abstract

ABSTRACT The European Union’s competences in armament policy have increased and its policy instruments have shifted towards military capacity-building. Illustrative of this, the European Defence Fund (EDF) finances cooperative research and development programmes in defence. Given military capacity-building’s centrality for statehood, I investigate the EDF to analyse the extent to which it challenges national prerogatives. I argue that the EDF represents a change away from the European Union’s regulatory role, and yet, does not correspond to a ‘positive’ supranational security state. Instead, the EDF represents a hybrid military capacity-building instrument, combining national ownership and EU (co-)financing of defence capacities. This argument builds conceptually on the state-building scholarship’s distinction between the centralisation of military and financial resources and adapts it to the EU multilevel governance. Theoretically, I build on constructivist public policy and core state power scholarship and demonstrate that the EDF’s hybrid design is the result of policy frame competition. The Commission-driven ‘efficiency’ frame, pushing for supranational centralisation of financial and military resources, was effectively tamed by member-states, whose preferences regarding defence and fiscal policies (‘distribution of competences’ frame) excluded EU ownership of defence assets and limited its financing role.