From Norm-Setting to Securitization: Legal Governance and the Sustainability Contradictions of the EU's Energy Security Turn

The European Union's climate diplomacy has relied on projecting regulatory norms and legal standards as soft power instruments. The European Green Deal epitomized this approach, positioning the EU as a normative power towards global sustainability governance. Yet the Second Von der Leyen Commission's pivot toward energy and supply chain security has altered the governance architecture underlying EU external climate relations, creating tension between sustainability commitments and geopolitical imperatives. I apply securitization theory to assess how reframing climate and energy issues as security threats has transformed external sustainability governance. I argue that securitization operates bidirectionally: while invoking supply chain vulnerabilities as existential threats legitimates fast-track legal instruments for resource extraction, it simultaneously de-securitizes sustainability commitments that previously anchored EU external relations. The securitization of energy renders sustainability governance insecure, subject to interruption and subordination to geopolitical imperatives. The paper demonstrates this "governance paradox." While the EU advances ambitious climate and human rights standards internally, it constructs exceptional legal regimes externally, whereby partner countries receive conditional development support contingent upon rapid resource extraction under relaxed scrutiny. This bifurcated architecture reveals how existential threat claims function as institutional catalysts restructuring the relationship between security, law, and sustainable development, thereby undermining the normative foundations of European governance. However, the European Parliament, Court of Justice, national courts, and civil society litigation can limit exceptionalism through proportionality review and transparency requirements, facilitating counter-securitization dynamics. The paper employs energy justice as its primary evaluative framework, operationalizing distributional, procedural, and recognition dimensions anchored in the EU Charter and Aarhus acquis. Empirically, it examines provisions on accelerated renewables and grid permitting under the recast Renewable Energy Directive, ancillary legal instruments, and emergency Council regulations. Externally, it examines the EU's strategic partnerships sustainable raw materials under Global Gateway, focusing on the cases of Kazakhstan and Namibia. The data corpus includes Commission and Council communications, emergency regulations, Parliament positions, state aid decisions, and partnership memoranda and legal texts. Indicators are coded across three categories. Exceptional measures are identified by legal basis outside ordinary codecision, and scope of derogations from assessment and consultation timelines. Procedural justice is measured by notice length, standing, disclosure obligations, and remedy deadlines. Distributional justice includes benefit sharing, effects on energy-poor households, and just transition alignment with exposure indices. Recognition focuses on whether instruments identify vulnerable groups and provide accessible grievance mechanisms. Each receives a justice scorecard enabling comparison. Three testable mechanisms organize the analysis: instrument substitution (security framing correlates with emergency tools exhibiting weaker procedural safeguards), venue shift (emergency measures display lower justice scores than ordinary legislation), and externalization gap (external partnerships embed thinner participation provisions than internal analogues, conditional on partner bargaining power). The paper concludes that the EU faces a critical juncture: either recommit to desecuritized, governance-centered sustainability frameworks as sources of soft power and institutional legitimacy, or accept that transition to securitized geoeconomic competition requires fundamental recalibration away from normative power. This choice will shape not only EU climate diplomacy but the trajectory of European integration amid contested multilateralism.