The everyday life of a security project: the “Security Union” in the EU’s “engine room”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 2015, the European Commission has sought to highlight the EU’s promise of protection by introducing the idea of a “Security Union”. This article examines how officials and bureaucrats within the European Commission make sense of this project. So far, the few explicit studies on the Security Union focus on its historical genesis and formal policy outputs and tend to view it as a symbolic and diffuse initiative that lacks coherent implementation and potentially undermines fundamental rights. The article goes beyond that by analysing how officials and bureaucrats in the EU’s “engine room” perceive and deal with the Security Union. Drawing on research on the everyday dimensions of European integration and administrative bureaucracy, the article explores officials’ views and self-understandings as well as their routines and interactions in their daily work. For this purpose, it uses novel empirical data from personal interviews with administrative officials in Brussels. On this basis, the study highlights the importance of skilled individuals and personal interactions that can have lasting impact even when formal institutional structures erode. Moreover, it shows how everyday exchanges and experiences within the Security Union context can change officials’ self-understandings as security actors based on a broad security narrative.