Speaker
Description
This paper challenges the conventional assumption that EU political development lacks a bellicist foundation. I argue that external threats have been a necessary condition driving EU integration throughout its history, and that the EU can be understood as a 21st century regulatory security state. Drawing on original archival research from the Jean Monnet archives, I demonstrate that European integration entrepreneurs were explicitly motivated by security threats from the Soviet Union in the 1950s, contradicting claims that the EU emerged purely from economic logics. I trace bellicist dynamics across a longer durée starting with WWI coordination institutions through the 1940 Franco-British Union proposal to contemporary defense integration following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The paper makes five interrelated claims. First, European integration has been driven by bellicist logic during key periods, particularly the early to mid-20th century and post-2014. Second, external threat is necessary but not sufficient for EU defense institutionalization; it also requires prior informal institutional layering. Third, bellicist state formation theory has been conceptually stretched beyond its original logic. Returning to Hintze and Tilly, I clarify that their theories predict systemic competitive pressures drive state formation, not direct warfare experience. Fourth, 21st century bellicist state formation operates through different mechanisms than earlier centuries. Modern states generate military capacity through debt financing, multinational weapons programs, and regulatory coordination rather than taxation and standing armies. Fifth, the EU possesses the infrastructural, monetary, judicial, and regulatory powers characteristic of contemporary security states. The EU's regulatory authority over defense industrial markets represents a distinctive but comparable form of security statecraft to traditional nation states.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | Yes, I have included all required information (see below). |
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| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | Yes |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | Political Science |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | Associate Professor |
| In which country is your home institution? | United States |
| What is your gender? | Female |