The EU’s collective securitisation of climate change

Abstract

Climate change is a firmly established and prominent issue of concern for the European Union. The EU became a collective agent of securitisation over time, increasingly engaging in speech acts defining climate change as a threat. These speech acts have driven forward agreed European policy measures and have informed EU positions in international climate negotiations. This piece examines how climate change became securitised and traces the historical development of the EU as an agent of collective securitisation in this domain. It argues that the EU has become a more unified, collective actor over time, that it has engaged in recursive interaction with multiple (internal and external) audiences to drive the securitisation of climate change, and that a new securitised status quo had been achieved by the mid-to-late 2000s. This new status quo positions climate change as central to the EU’s security agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• European Union
• securitisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Dupont

Claire Dupont is Assistant Professor of European and International Governance at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Climate Policy Integration into EU Energy Policy: Progress and Prospects (Routledge, 2016) and co-editor of Decarbonization in the European Union: Internal Policies and External Strategies (with Sebastian Oberthür, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her work on the EU and climate security has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary European Research, International Spectator and European Integration online Papers.