Why no supranational capacity building in core state powers?

Since Maastricht, the European Union has expanded its policy scope to areas of core state power: defence, law and order, money and fiscal policy, energy and public services. Remarkably, this expansion did not involve the creation of major supranational capacities. The key resources of sovereign government remain in exclusively national ownership: the power to tax and issue debt, coercive force, administrative infrastructure. The lack of supranational capacity is not for lack of trying to build some. Capacity building has been a constant theme of EU integration in recent decades especially during times of crisis. Calls for the European army, border police, fiscal power or procurement capacity in strategic sectors abound. Various attempts have been made to heed them. Yet the result has usually been EU capacities that are temporary (e.g. the RRF), limited to emergency use (e.g. the SRF), off-budget (e.g. the EPF), extra-treaty (e.g. the ESM), supranational in name only (e.g. EU battle groups) and dependent on member state consent (e.g. Frontex). Why? The answer, I argue, lies in a peculiar dilemma of capacity building in core state powers: when it is functionally needed, it is politically unfeasible – and when it is politically feasible, there is little functional need for it. The paper explains the dilemma drawing on functional and (new) intergovernmental theories of integration. It explains why the dilemma is more pronounced in the integration of core state powers than in market integration. And the paper explains the residual role the dilemma leaves for EU capacity-building as a backup and insurance mechanism for national capacities in core state powers – a role that requires neither supranational ownership nor supranational control of core state powers but supranationalism light at best.