The security dimension of European Union climate policies and the European Green Deal

Combining the identity-focused interpretative understanding of social constructivism with the interest-based threat construction perspective of the Copenhagen School, this thesis examines the European Commission as a case study to show that securitization is used not only to create a threat perception, but also as a part of a broader strategy to construct and legitimize actors' identity. The study posits that the European Commission has securitized climate change in order to operationalize European Union's (EU) organizational identity and international role in climate policy as "normative power". Asking the questions "how" and "why", the study considers the period from the announcement of the European Green Deal on 11 December 2019 to the adoption of the European Climate Law on 30 June 2021 as a securitization period. By using qualitative content analysis, the study systematically examines securitization efforts in 764 documents, retrieved from the European Commission's official website. The study indicates that the European Commission has strategically adapted its interests and behaviors to ensure the efficacy of the EU's normative power identity in the realm of climate policies, through the European Green Deal and the "decarbonization" norm. Within this framework, the study reveals that the European Commission has re-shaped the Union's interests by transforming its role in the international system from "norm taker" to "norm maker" in line with the EU's normative power identity, thus ensuring that climate policies are developed from within the Union. The study argues that this transformation process has also led to a securitization tendency in the European Commission's behavior. Keywords: European Commission, climate change, securitization, social constructivism