The regulatory security state in Europe

ABSTRACT

The ‘regulatory state’ has prevailed in almost every sector of European public policy. The provision of security, however, is still widely viewed as the domain of the ‘positive state’, which rests on political authority and autonomous capacities. Challenging this presumption, we argue that expertise – as foundation of authority – and rules – as policy instruments – also shape the provision of European security by national and, in particular, supranational ‘regulatory security states’, namely the European Union (EU). We lay out a framework for mapping the uneven and contested rise of European regulatory security states; analyzing drivers and constraints of security state reforms; and grasping the implications of the regulatory security state for the effectiveness and democratic legitimacy of European security policy-making. We advance the research program on the regulatory state and contribute to an innovative understanding of who governs security in Europe’s multi-level polity, by what means, and on what legitimatory grounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Regulatory state
• authority
• expertise
• regulation
• European security

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank, first of all, Berthold Rittberger, Jeremy Richardson, all the contributors to this special issue, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this introduction. In addition, we are highly grateful to Felix Biermann, Michael Blauberger, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Hugo Meijer, Katharina Meissner, Chiara Ruffa, Andrea Schneiker, Bernhard Zangl, Eva Ziegler, the participants of panels at the Academic Convention of the German Political Science Association (DVPW, online, 2021), the 11th Biennial Conference of the SGEU in the ECPR (Rome, 2022), the Annual Conference of the European Initiative for Security Studies (Berlin, 2022), the Convention of the Political Economy Section of the DVPW (Berlin, 2022), the colloquium of the DVPW’s Foreign and Security Policy Group (online, 2021) as well as research colloquia in Munich, Salzburg and Odense for their great feedback. Kathrin Will, Aliaa Aly, Maya von Ahnen and Simon Zemp provided excellent research assistance. We gratefully acknowledge generous workshop funding from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Some scholars of regulatory governance adopt a narrower understanding of rules as confined to ‘bureaucratic and administrative rulemaking’ (Levi-Faur, 2011, p. 6; Koop & Lodge, 2017).

2 We may ask whether a particular polity in toto is predominantly an RSS or a PSS. Yet, more frequently, contributors study whether a polity is an RSS or a PSS with regard to a specific sector of security. A sovereign state or the EU can be an RSS in one policy field, but a PSS in another.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a workshop grant of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (‘Conference: The Rise of the Regulatory Security State in Europe’).

Notes on contributors

Andreas Kruck

Andreas Kruck is a senior lecturer in Global Governance and Public Policy at the LMU Munich.

Moritz Weiss

Moritz Weiss is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the LMU Munich.