This policy paper discusses how the war in Ukraine has started to transform and strengthen the role of the European Commission in European Union security and defence policy, in particular in the defenceindustrial domain. It also outlines the longterm ambitions of the EU and the European Commission in this area. Finally, it sets out some new ideas on EU defence cooperation.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strengthened its foreign, security and defence policy in a remarkable way. Several new supranational security and defence initiatives have been launched and implemented, which have given the European Commission a new and central role in European security and defence policy. These swift developments are puzzling, since foreign policy and security and defence policy have long been understood as the ‘last bastions of sovereignty’ for EU member states and have thus been regarded as the least-likely cases for supranational integration. This thesis shows how the Commission has been the central driver behind these changes; it does so by conducting three focused case studies/articles to explore and explain the evolution of a new and enhanced role for the European Commission in EU security and defence cooperation during the period 2014–2023. By researching the establishment of the European Defence Fund, the EU Military Mobility project and the new policies and initiatives developed after Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, this dissertation analyses new competences for the European Commission within EU security and defence policy. This dissertation conceptually and analytically builds on diverse strands of integration literature, drawing on neofunctionalism, the Commission’s policy entrepreneurship and agenda setting, and crisis pressure to retrace in detail these three important empirical processes. The main contribution of this dissertation is to show how the European Commission’s initiatives and strategies have been indispensable in the strengthening of EU integration within security and defence.

This thesis consists of an introduction outlining the overall research agenda and three stand-alone articles: 

1. Håkansson, C. 2021. The European Commission’s new role in EU security and defence cooperation: The case of the European Defence Fund, European Security, Vol. 30:4, 589-608.
2. Håkansson, C. 2023a. The strengthened role of the European Union in defence: The case of the Military Mobility project, Defence Studies, Vol. 23:3, 436–456.  
3. Håkansson, C. 2023b. The Ukraine war and the emergence of the European commission as a geopolitical actor, Journal of European Integration, 1-21.

This article retraces and reconstructs the process of developing and launching the European Union’s Military Mobility project. Situated in the agenda-setting and policy-transfer literature, this article explicates the establishment and implementation of the Military Mobility project and helps to explain the entire policy and development process around the Military Mobility initiative to date. By drawing on process tracing, this article methodologically unpacks the process surrounding this policy development at the EU level. The results show that the European Commission has expanded its competences within the defence field by purposefully and politically acting upon the worsened security situation in and around Europe, while actively building coalitions and managing good working relations with the actors involved in the project. Moreover, the findings show that the EU services have learned from NATO in the defence domain. Thus, this analysis contributes to a greater understanding of the new role of the European Commission in the field of EU security and defence policy. 

The European Commission has traditionally held a weak position in the policy domain of EU security and defence policy and has been seen as a ‘least likely’ case of supranational integration. Nevertheless, in recent years, the Commission has steadily expanded its role and ambition within this policy field – a process which gained in momentum after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Thus, this article investigates how the war in Ukraine has led to the establishment of new security and defence initiatives and to a stronger geopolitical role for the Commission. This paper theorises that the war in Ukraine is serving as an engine of integration. The article traces how the Commission seizes the windows of opportunity created by crises to strategically expand its mandate on security and defence policy and in the development of the sanctions policy regime. 

In 2021, the European Union presented its new Indo-Pacific strategy, which outlines the Union’s ambition to increase its interactions with the Indo-Pacific region in order to create partnerships to strengthen the so-called ‘rules-based international order’. However, the Union’s strategy also emphasises the intensifying competition that has been occurring in the Indo-Pacific in recent years due to geopolitical dynamics. This paper hence seeks to analyse the role of the European Union in the Indo-Pacific region through the lens of the Union’s ambition to achieve the goal of European strategic autonomy. In the past few years, the European Union’s ambition for strategic autonomy has become the foremost leitmotif for the Union. Consequently, this paper discusses and outlines the ambition of the European Union and analyses how it has fed into the work of building partnerships and greater connectivity with Asian states while responding to the increasingly Sino-US geopolitical competition in the region.

This article outlines some of the major EU security and defence policy initiatives and the role of the European Commission within these. The article focuses especially on those initiatives outlined in the draft document for the EU Strategic Compass that have a bearing both on the Commission’s role and on other defence-related initiatives in 2022. The article also discusses the role of technological development and geo-economics in this new era of great-power competition. It concludes by discussing some of the implications of these developments for the political role of the European Commission and for the democratic and political accountability of the Union.

EU:s förmåga att hantera interna kriser och hävda sina intressen globalt har varit ett centralt samtalsämne under det senaste decenniet. Strategisk autonomi har blivit ett samlingsbegrepp för en diskussion om hur EU ska kunna säkra grundvalarna i europeisk integration, samt bli en mer effektiv aktör på den internationella arenan. Diskussionen inleddes inom utrikes- och säkerhetspolitiken, men har vuxit in i allt fler policyområden såsom näringspolitik, grön omställning, teknologi, handel, hälsa och euron. Utvecklingen accelererade under Coronapandemin då EU lanserade ett gemensamt räddningspaket av historiska mått som kopplades till flera av dessa områden.

För de nordiska EU-länderna har diskussionen och visionen om europeisk strategisk autonomi varit komplicerad. Danmark, Finland och Sverige är alla hängivna vänner av frihandel och strikt konkurrenslagstiftning samtidigt som man av olika skäl tvekar till ökad samordning och fördjupning av europeiska försvarsstrukturer. Detta går inte sällan på tvärs med kommissionens höga ambitioner på exempelvis på industriområdet.

I denna antologi redogör författare från Danmark, Finland och Sverige för hur regeringarna i de respektive länderna ställer sig till de centrala beståndsdelarna i strategisk autonomi och dess policyinnehåll. Baserat på intervjuer med centralt placerade tjänstepersoner och officiella dokument beskriver författarna hur de olika länderna uppfattar omvärldsförändringarna och hur dessa påverkar EU-samarbetet. Dessutom beskrivs hur man uppfattar att det egna landets intressen är kompatibla med de förslag som lanseras för att stärka europeisk strategisk autonomi.

Analysen är på engelska och är en del av Sieps forskningsprojekt EU och omvärlden.

This article addresses Sweden’s more ambitious and forward-looking approach to EU security and defence cooperation. This approach represents, in part, an adaptation by Sweden to the post-Brexit political landscape. However, Stockholm is also reacting to the more ambitious policy initiatives coming out of Brussels. This article will look at some of the major developments and initiatives on the EU level and discuss how Sweden has reacted and tried to influence them. It argues that 2021 could be another watershed year for EU security and defence cooperation as the process of developing the Union’s new Strategic Compass is in a formative phase. It concludes that it is welcome news that Stockholm is raising its level of ambition and actively attempting to influence this process.

European Defence is in a new and formative phase in which the European Union’s long list of defence acronyms has steadily grown. One of the most noticeable new policy initiatives is the European Commission’s European Defence Fund (EDF). This article consequently investigates and outlines the establishment of the European Defence Fund and the European Commission’s new role within the field of security and defence through the lens of revised neofunctionalism. This article thus asks how and through what steps did the EDF come about; and secondly how can neofunctionalism explain the dynamics involved in the establishment of the European Defence Fund. The analysis uses a process-tracing method and draws on interviews with relevant policymakers and officials in Brussels as well as official EU documents. The conclusions argue that the ever-increasing involvement of the European Commission in a policy field close to national sovereignty is starting to blur the traditional dichotomy between intergovernmental and supranational decision-making. In this way, this study contributes to the growing literature on the weakening of intergovernmentalism within the EU security and defence policy field.

The European Union (EU) has for a long time had ambitions to achieve some form of ‘Strategic Autonomy’, often understood as a capability to conduct security pol- icy independent of the United States. With the EU’s Global Strategy (EUGS) from 2016, this objective, albeit without a clear definition, is part of the public EU strat- egy. This new level of ambition places high demands on the independent intelli- gence capacities for the member states as well as for the EU at the collective level. at national level as well as for the EU at the collective level. As the world moves towards multipolarity and the geopolitization of the economic sphere, the ambi- tion for strategic autonomy has a broader meaning, such as the ability to conduct an independent trade policy or to choose a supplier of 5G infrastructure. In light of this, this article aims to analyse strategic autonomy as a security policy objective and the various intelligence needs it raises. We analyse autonomy in three different functions, or areas of application: political autonomy, operational autonomy and industrial and digital autonomy. We will then make an overview of how these needs currently are meet and how additional intelligence capacity could be created.