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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Ben FarrandORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
This article argues that the European Union’s collective securitisation of semiconductors reveals an overlooked constraint in securitisation theory: the structural mismatch between the ‘urgency’ logic of securitisation, and the multi-year timescales required to develop material capacity in infrastructure-intensive technological domains. While the EU successfully constructed access to semiconductors as an existential threat and key strategic vulnerability to realising its ambitions of digital sovereignty, Europe lacks the fabrication infrastructure, workforce, and raw material access necessary to translate this discursive success into operational security. While the EU Chips Act serves as an example of a successful securitisation move in terms of policy, it does not necessarily translate into effective action. In this article, we develop the concept of material security constraints, with an emphasis on their temporal dimension, to explore how capital intensity, technical complexity, and supply chain dependencies systematically obstruct rapid implementation despite successful discursive securitisation moves. This produces a significant performance-capacity gap, whereby securitisation succeeds politically and institutionally but fails materially. The EU semiconductor case thus challenges core assumptions in (collective) securitisation scholarship and reveals the limits of digital sovereignty strategies in domains where regulatory and discursive power cannot compensate for entrenched material dependencies.
Author(s): Manakos K, Carrapico H, Farrand B
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of European Public Policy
Year: 2026
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 01/08/2026
Acceptance date: 24/07/2026
Date deposited: 01/08/2026
ISSN (print): 1350-1763
ISSN (electronic): 1466-4429
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2026.2710717
DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2026.2710717
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