Governing Through Crisis: Crisisification of Common Security and Defence Policy After the Ukraine War

Recent scholarship increasingly contends that the European Union has transitioned from governing through crises to operating in a perpetual state of crisis (Rhinard 2019; Nugent, Paterson, and Rhinard 2023; Riddervold, Trondal, and Newsome 2021). Building on this premise, the present paper examines how "crisisification"—the institutionalization of crisis-oriented logics, tools, and procedures within EU policymaking (Rhinard, 2019)—has transformed Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) governance, with a particular emphasis on the post-Ukraine crisis context. While crisisification has been explored across various EU policy domains (ibid 2019; Nugent, Paterson, and Rhinard 2023; Garančovská, Meislová 2025), its effects have not been thoroughly investigated concerning core state powers such as the CSDP. Rhinard (2025) demonstrates how successive emergencies have engendered a condition of "permanent crisis governance," wherein actors, rules, and practices across the EU system are increasingly oriented towards anticipation, early warning, and rapid response rather than deliberative policymaking. Consequently, even policies explicitly designed as crisis management tools—such as the CSDP—have become subject to expedited decision-making, urgency framing, and exceptional procedures. This paper posits that these dynamics also permeate CSDP governance following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on recent contributions highlighting crisis-induced institutionalization (Moloney & Rhinard, 2025), the analysis reveals how the European Commission has leveraged repeated crises to expand its role in defense capability development, procurement coordination, and defense industrial policy—mirroring patterns observed in economic governance where earlier crisis responses became embedded and subsequently informed EU action during COVID-19. This logic of inter-crisis learning (Angelou, 2024) further elucidates how institutional preferences, tools, and power relations forged in one crisis migrate and re-emerge in subsequent ones, shaping the governance of defense initiatives such as ASAP, EDIRPA, the proposed European Defence Industrial Programme, and the SAFE Regulation. Finally, following Manners and Whitman (2016), the paper contributes theoretically by situating crisisification within broader debates about dissident and polyphonic approaches to EU integration research. By examining crisisification in a core state power and through original elite interviews with EEAS, European Commission, and Permanent Representations’ officials, this study demonstrates how crisis-driven governance reshapes not only institutional behavior but also advances both the empirical understanding of EU defense transformation after the Ukraine war and the conceptual debate on how the EU’s "permanent crisis mode" is redefining policy-making trajectories, actor constellations, and legitimacy claims within the EU. Crisis framing enabled the EU to fast-track procedures and milestone decisions, such as launching a CSDP mission within European territory and providing lethal weapons to Ukraine. Although unanimity remains the formal rule, crisisification has normalized faster and more informal decision-making. The Commission has gained greater influence, while the European Parliament is striving to enhance its role as a foreign policy actor (Baracani 2025). Finally, the post-2022 environment has encouraged selective participation formats, flexible coalitions, and industrial partnerships, reflecting broader trends in differentiated integration. The dynamics of CSDP financing tools, primarily, suggest that crisisification may reinforce this approach characterized by differentiated cooperation (Klose and Perot 2022).