Beneath the Baltic Sea: How the European Commission securitised hybrid threats on Critical Undersea Infrastructure to expand its role in EU security policy

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates the extent to which the European Commission has emerged as a meaningful actor in the European security landscape by examining its response to Russian hybrid threats in the Baltic Sea Region in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical landscape marked by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Has the role of the Commission fundamentally changed? Does the Commission continue to operate with its traditional Treaty-based mandates, or has it successfully leveraged the securitisation of sub-threshold provocations to expand its institutional authority? Developing a framework that integrates Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis with the Copenhagen School Securitisation theory, this study examines the Commission speeches, Joint Communications, press releases and Action Plans issued between September 2022 and May 2026. The thesis finds that the Commission has conducted its sustained securitisation campaign, constructing the Baltic Sea hybrid threats as existential threats through three principal discursive mechanisms: serialisation, quantification and attribution. The analysis demonstrates that this framing has been accepted by EU Member States and the European public, facilitating institutional expansion through the contextualisation of existing legal instruments and the creation of new operational capacities. However, despite this discursive success, the study identifies persistent readiness gap; while the Commission has effectively labelled Russian interference as hybrid attacks to justify the use of hybrid toolboxes, time after time, incidents in the Baltic Sea Region reveal that significant divide, between the Commission’ rhetorical capacity and its operational readiness to respond.