The everyday life of a security project: the “Security Union” in the EU’s “engine room”

ABSTRACT

Since 2015, the European Commission has sought to highlight the EU’s promise of protection by introducing the idea of a “Security Union”. This article examines how officials and bureaucrats within the European Commission make sense of this project. So far, the few explicit studies on the Security Union focus on its historical genesis and formal policy outputs and tend to view it as a symbolic and diffuse initiative that lacks coherent implementation and potentially undermines fundamental rights. The article goes beyond that by analysing how officials and bureaucrats in the EU’s “engine room” perceive and deal with the Security Union. Drawing on research on the everyday dimensions of European integration and administrative bureaucracy, the article explores officials’ views and self-understandings as well as their routines and interactions in their daily work. For this purpose, it uses novel empirical data from personal interviews with administrative officials in Brussels. On this basis, the study highlights the importance of skilled individuals and personal interactions that can have lasting impact even when formal institutional structures erode. Moreover, it shows how everyday exchanges and experiences within the Security Union context can change officials’ self-understandings as security actors based on a broad security narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• security
• Security Union
• European Commission
• interviews

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge helpful research assistance by Lara Islinger, Maria Vitoria Santana Catharino and Franziska Wunderlich.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work for this article was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung] as part of the research project “Solidarity through Security? Discourses, Interactions and Practices of European Solidarity in the Field of Security (ZUSE)” [grant number 01UG2109A].