Paper Titles & Abstracts

The 'securitisation' of European energy has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention in recent years, in light of growing governmental concern about energy dependence and the intensification of EU policy activity and activism within this issue area. However despite this, the precise nature of this process remains poorly understood. Little attention has been paid to the diverse ways in which energy has been constructed as an object of security and how this has manifested itself within EU policy. This paper focuses on the European Commission as the major policy initiator and interest mediator within the EU policy process and aims to do two things. Firstly, it analyses four landmark Commission documents between 1995 and 2010 in order to identify the ways in which the Commission has attempted to portray gas supplies to and within the EU as security concerns. Secondly, it examines the policy initiatives legitimised by these Commission interventions in order to examine both the extent and nature of policy change within the EU. It is argued that although gas supplies have been securitised this has been a gradual process based primarily (but not exclusively) on perceptions of structural weaknesses within the EU energy system itself rather than dramatic portrayals of existential threats to survival. Furthermore, although the perceived insecurity of gas supplies has generated a lot of policy activity, this has with a few exceptions not resulted in extraordinary and dramatic policy changes aimed at eliminating threats to energy security. Instead there has been the gradual development of fairly 'normal' policy measures aimed at developing and regulating an internal market for gas. Nonetheless, this institutionalisation of a liberal approach to energy security is still an important policy development which reveals some of the limits of securitising policy issues in the EU and energy issues in general.