The Reframing of European Security: Legitimacy, Actorness and Governance Tensions in the Post-2022 EU

The paper presents interim findings from an ongoing two-year research project and analyzes the process of discursive reframing through which the European Commission has progressively re-legitimised security and defence as areas of political action of the Union in the period 2019–2024, with particular attention to the Russian-Ukrainian war. The central argument is that the war in Ukraine does not constitute a new trigger for the so-called “European Security Union,” but has acted as a factor accelerating discursive and institutional trajectories already underway even before 2019 and made explicit by the agenda of the “Geopolitical Commission.” Through a qualitative analysis based on process tracing and discourse analysis of official Commission communications, Presidential speeches, and strategic documents on security and defense, the paper reconstructs how security has been progressively reframed as an area of legitimate political responsibility for the EU. This process has contributed to strengthening specific dimensions of European agency – particularly authority and autonomy – but has also produced growing tensions between the integration narrative promoted at the European level and the absorptive capacity of existing governance. The paper questions the ambivalent nature of this acceleration, showing how the discursive strengthening of European security action has made more visible misalignments between political ambition, available instruments, and interinstitutional coordination – impairing other aspects of the internal dimension of actorness, such as cohesion. The paper advances the hypothesis that these misalignments represent a crucial factor in understanding the risks of internal fragmentation of European security integration in the medium term.