The rise of the regulatory security state in Europe?

The ‘regulatory state’ has prevailed in almost any sector of public policy and in almost any region of the world – with one prominent exception. The provision of security, in a broad sense, is still widely viewed as being monopolized by the ‘positive state’, which draws on political authority to build and use autonomous capacities. This paper, together with the other contributions to the panel, challenges this presumption. Our key claim is that, today, expertise combined with rules-based policy instruments have come to shape European security provided by both national and supranational polities. The papers in this panel, which are at the same time prospective contributions to a 2023 special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, map the uneven and contested rise of the ‘regulatory security state’ in Europe. They analyze the drivers and constraints of reforming security states; and, they discuss the implications for the power politics, effectiveness, and legitimacy of European security policy-making. In our introductory framework paper, we lay out the conceptual and theoretical framework and report key findings of the larger project. Overall, we advance the research program on the regulatory state not only by taking it into a core state power domain, but also by fleshing out the key role of expertise. This contributes to a better understanding of who governs security in Europe through what means and on what legitimatory grounds; and what this implies for the political organization of force worldwide.