The Political Psychology of EU Security and Defence Policies: Anxiety and Hope in Shaping Policy Choices

The escalation of Russian aggression since 2014, culminating in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has intensified the EU's concerns regarding its capacity for self-defense. These concerns have been aggravated since the Trump II administration’s declining commitment to NATO and to European security. In this context, the EU took a series of institutional and policy initiatives for furthering cooperation in the realm of defence among member states. While Versailles Declaration in March 2022 set the scene for the EU’s defence agenda, a series of developments ranging from steps towards building a common market for European defence, the restructuring of the European Commission under the second von der Leyen Commission with a new Commissioner in charge of defence, Commission’s initiative The ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030 Europe Plan, to Commission’s White paper on European Defence Readiness 2030 indicate a new term in the EU’s search for enhancing its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). This paper examines these developments through the lens of political psychology, and argues that the EU’s evolving defence collaboration cannot be understood solely through material threats or institutional dynamics. Instead, emotions—especially anxiety and hope—play a constitutive role in shaping the Union’s choices in security and defence. Building on insights from emotions research in IR and political psychology, the analysis conceptualises anxiety as tied to perceptions of status loss, vulnerability, and uncertainty, while hope inspires the choice of capability development, collective resolve, motivates action, and sustains a future-oriented belief in the Union’s capacity to act autonomously. Empirically, we focus on the developments in CSDP since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Russia. Methodologically, we use emotion discourse analysis (EDA) of primary documents produced by EU institutions, complemented by interviews with member state representatives to the Council. In this way, we systematically analyse how emotions, and in particular anxiety and hope, are articulated in official narratives, and how they frame, justify and enable policy options. By linking emotional expressions to concrete policy outcomes, the paper uncovers how anxiety served both constraining and enabling function, while hope played a crucial role in legitimising more ambitious defence integration. In this way, the paper demonstrates the complex role emotions play in underpinning the EU’s capacity to take unprecedented steps in defence cooperation following the outbreak of the war, and how the usages of anxiety and hope ultimately contribute to expanding the Union’s room for manoeuvre in responding to the security crisis. By shedding light on the emotions that drive and constrain the EU’s defence cooperation, the paper contributes to the emerging literature on the drivers of change in security and defence policy after Russia’s full-scale invasion from an innovative theoretical angle.