EU defence industrial policy: from market-making to market-correcting

How did EU industrial policy emerge and become institutionalized in the field of defence through the actions of the Commission, which had no political prerogative or legitimacy in the field only a quarter of a century earlier? What was the Commission's strategy for ensuring its institutional initiatives, such as the defence package and the European Defence Fund (EDF), were adopted in negotiations that seemed to be lost in advance in favour of the EU Member States? Using an approach at the crossroads of political economy and the sociology of public action, the Commission's "political work" (Smith, 2019) is highlighted on the issue of constituting a defence industrial policy that is not limited to the initiatives and national preferences of the Member States. The processes of "legitimization", "problematization" and "instrumentation" that constitute the political work of an institutional actor such as the Commission are reconstructed.