Conceptualising the European Defence Ecosystem: between integration and autonomy

When European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, uttered the term “European Defence Ecosystem” it signalled a policy change within the EU as a new approach to the recent geopolitical challenges in the continent. While the term has not been politically clarified, this paper uses it within the context of UK-EU defence capability development to create an analytical framework for the European Defence Ecosystem since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Conceptualised as the system of actors, institutions and processes engaged in European defence, we envision the Ecosystem as the policy environment in which European and international security and defence actors operate. Existing approaches have focused on individual components of the broader European Defence Ecosystem at the expense of the whole and have comparatively little to say about how different institutions shape outcomes and interact with one another. In answering the question, how can we conceptualise and operationalise the European Defence Ecosystem, we integrate an agent-centred approach focusing on how actors navigate the institutional complexity which characterises the Ecosystem. The approach emphasises the role institutions play in shaping actors’ preferences and channelling individual agency, drawing on research from both new institutionalism and the public policy toolkit. Our perspective also captures the ways in which individual agents navigate and shape institutional complexity, allowing us to highlight core relational dynamics in the European Defence Ecosystem and better understand the broader security landscape in which the UK and EU operate.