Rearming Europe, Reinforcing the State: EU Capacity-Building without State-Building in Defence

By Samuel B. H. Faure  

1. EU Capacity-Building without State-Building

Since 2022, Russia’s war against Ukraine has accelerated the supranationalisation of European Union (EU) defence-industrial instruments (Andersson and Britz, 2025). Beyond regulation, the EU has institutionalised new budgetary capacities, mobilising more than €9 billion over 2021–2027, plus €150 billion in guaranteed loans under SAFE.^[1]Such capacity-building is remarkable in a domain of “core state powers” long governed through intergovernmental and regulatory arrangements (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2013), and marks, for some, a “geoeconomic turn” beyond the “regulatory state” (Majone, 1996) and toward an EU defence-industrial policy (Fiott, 2024).

The European Commission has acted as an active institutional entrepreneur through its successive Commissioners in charge of the defence industry (Thierry Breton, 2019–2024, then Andrius Kubilius since 2024), their cabinets and the Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DG DEFIS) (Haroche, 2023; Hakansson, 2024). It has set the tempo of the agenda and framed defence as a matter of industrial policy, positioning itself as a “strategic facilitator” serving member states and, through them, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the aim of deterring Russia, what EU jargon calls “European readiness” (Faure, 2025a).

Yet since 2022, this capacity-building has not transformed the EU’s political order (Bora, 2026). The Commission’s room for manoeuvre remains constrained by the intergovernmental framework in which it operates, which distributes power in a weakly centralised way and makes it difficult for the EU to become even a “transformational state” (Di Carlo, McNamara and Moschella, 2026). Competences have not been further centralised, nor has political authority substantially shifted: the EU remains far from the “supranational security state” anticipated by some (McNamara and Kelemen, 2022). Nor has capacity-building integrated defence markets (McNamara, 2026), which remain fragmented along national lines and dependent on the United States (Brooks and Meijer, 2022). The current negotiations over the reform of the Defence and Security Procurement Directive (Directive 2009/81/EC; see Blauberger and Weiss, 2013; Faure, 2019), part of the so-called “defence omnibus” package,^[2] illustrate this.

These national and transatlantic path dependencies are also visible in the organisation of the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB), which remains weakly Europeanised. The EDTIB is still characterised by a heterarchical structure, with no single centre of coordination (Faure, 2025b). The competitiveness and convergence agenda championed by Mario Draghi (2024) and Enrico Letta (2024), which identified the European level as the right scale to meet the geoeconomic challenges raised by the war in Ukraine, has had no observable effect on member states’ preferences.

Why, then, has EU capacity-building not produced state-building? How has the war increased EU capacities without transforming the political architecture that governs EU defence policy?

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^[1] The European Defence Industry Reinforcement through common Procurement Act (EDIRPA, 2023) supports joint purchases by member states; the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP, 2023) funds the ramp-up of ammunition production; the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP, 2025) extends these instruments over the longer term; Security Action for Europe (SAFE, 2025) provides up to €150 billion in loans to member states for defence procurement; AGILE is a more recent instrument dedicated to defence innovation.

^[2] A package of proposals presented by the European Commission in 2025 to simplify EU rules on defence investment and procurement (see https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-industry/defence-readiness-omnibus_en).

2. How EU Capacity-Building Reinforces National Political Centrality

The answer lies in a paradox: EU capacity-building has not eroded member states’ political centrality; it has reinforced it (Genschel, 2022; Genschel et al., 2023). Rather than accelerating vertical integration, expanding EU budgetary capacities has maintained, and even strengthened, the political role of states (Genschel and Schimmelfennig, 2022). Contrary to what one might have expected, the supranationalisation of policy instruments has not increased the political centralisation of the EU’s institutional order. EU capacity-building can instead reinforce states and their national or transatlantic practices of producing and acquiring military equipment.

Three mechanisms account for this paradox: (i) states institutionally control EU capacity-building; (ii) states use EU capacity-building for national priorities; and (iii) rising defence capacities fuel competition among national actors rather than political convergence (e.g. less fragmented EU governance or a more integrated European defence market). EU capacity-building thus grows precisely because states remain politically central: they control it, use it as leverage, and structure rearmament according to national logics (Table 1).

Table 1. Three mechanisms linking EU capacity-building to national political centrality

Mechanism	Core question	What states do
Control	Who controls EU capacity?	Control its scope, budget and strategic direction
Resource	Who benefits from EU capacity?	Capture EU resources for national strategies
Competition	Where does capacity-building take place?	Build national capacities, compete for markets

Control. First, states, backed by their national defence companies, have capped the envelopes of the European Defence Fund (EDF) and of EDIRPA, ASAP and EDIP, while confining the Commission to a primarily managerial role rather than that of a conductor orchestrating Europe’s defence-industrial effort. DG DEFIS has around 400 staff, only about half of whom work on defence-industrial issues, the other half covering space. This is a small administration even by Commission standards: the Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) employs more than 1,000 staff. By way of context, France’s defence procurement agency alone, the Direction générale de l’armement (DGA), employs around 10,000 people. Under these institutional conditions, the Commission’s agency remains constrained: it acts as an intermediary, between NATO and member states and between defence firms and member states, rather than as an autonomous source of political authority.

Resource. Second, states support EU capacity-building because it provides resources that complement national budgets. States mobilise EU resources for national industrial and political strategies. Four states captured more than half of EDF funding between 2021 and 2023, while five account for more than 70% of SAFE loans (Faure, 2026b). EU capacities thus function less as autonomous power than as leverage for national defence policies.

Competition. Third, EU capacity-building takes place within a broader movement of national and transatlantic rearmament that intensifies competition rather than consolidation. In 2025, nearly one euro out of two spent on defence procurement in Europe still benefited non-European suppliers (European Defence Agency, 2026). Collaborative European procurement accounted for only 24% of member states’ acquisitions in 2026, against a 40% target for 2030 (Faure, 2025c). National capacity-building is therefore progressing faster than EU capacity-building, reducing incentives for European industrial cooperation.

3. From Capacity to Collective Capability: What Should Change

EU capacity will not translate into collective military capability by default. The decisive stage is national implementation, once the dust of European Council summits has settled. Each of the three mechanisms calls for a distinct response (Faure, 2024; Chopin and Faure, 2026).

First, since states control EU capacity-building, cooperation must be Europeanised at the national level itself, through more frequent bilateral and minilateral ministerial meetings and dedicated “European mobility” positions within national administrations.

Second, as states channel EU resources toward national ends, EU capacity should be made more conditional: EU funding should reward, not merely accompany, cooperative procurement.

Third, rising national and transatlantic spending fuels competition rather than consolidation. Europe therefore needs to build scale, starting with making the EU’s 40% cooperative-procurement target binding (against a current level of 24%) through progressive earmarking of national budgets.

The choice is therefore not simply between nationally driven rearmament and deeper political integration. It is also between capacity-building that reproduces national fragmentation and capacity-building that uses nationally controlled resources to generate collective European capability. The persistence of these trends explains why the Readiness 2030 objective remains far from within reach.

Bio

Samuel B. H. Faure is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM) in Paris and an Associate Professor of Political Science, teaching European Defence Policy at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles and Sciences Po Paris. For more information, see https://samuelbhfaure.com

Acknowledgements

The author warmly thanks Randall Hansen and Tommaso Pavone for their invitation to speak at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy (University of Toronto), as well as Frédéric Mérand and Kaija Schilde, with whom he shared the panel, for their stimulating exchanges. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces.

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