Mümin Ahmedoğlu

After 2022, Czechia drew unusual attention in European defense-industrial politics. Exports rose sharply. The multilateral Czech Ammunition Initiative delivered a cumulative 4.4 million large-caliber rounds to Ukraine. CSG N.V. was listed on Euronext Amsterdam in what was, by capital raised and market capitalization, the largest defense IPO on record. Public discourse increasingly casts the country as a contributor to European defense-technological sovereignty. The structural record is narrower than the discourse suggests. Czech defense production remains concentrated in ammunition and energetics, land platforms, and legacy overhaul. Czech participation in the European Defense Fund and PESCO is broad in count but thin in leadership. The country’s defense-industrial niches (CBRN defense, passive radar, large-caliber ammunition, small arms, MRO) derive their value from sustained capacity, not from new technological frontiers. I take this gap as my analytical object. Reading the Czech case through socio-technical imaginaries and the imaginary turn, and against the smart-small-power literature, I argue that Czech defense policy operates as a strategy of selective sovereignty. The components are familiar: calibrated participation in EU and NATO instruments, security of supply, embedded industrial roles, and the maintenance of established niches. What the dominant imaginary does is not industrial transformation. It actually renders legacy capacity legible as an alliance contribution and makes the continuity strategy politically intelligible. The Czech Ammunition Initiative is the paradigmatic case.

Below a value threshold, a European defence buyer may award a contract under national rules instead of the European Union’s procedures. This paper asks whether buyers use that freedom by setting a contract’s estimated value just below the threshold. It uses the national registers of Spain, Italy and Portugal, which record contracts on both sides of the thresholds, and an analysis plan registered after disclosed diagnostics and before the estimates. The same defence buyers face two thresholds: the Defence Directive’s, for military contracts, and the classical directive’s, for ordinary purchases. Estimates bunch below both. At the Defence Directive’s threshold the relative excess is 0.76 [0.33, 1.66] (95 % interval in brackets). Most of the excess sits on round estimates, a smaller excess remains without them, and the bunching moves with the threshold when the threshold is revised. The difference between the responses at the two thresholds is not detected, and not contradicted (0.20 [−0.25, 1.13]), and no difference is detected between defence and civilian buyers at the threshold they share (−0.15 [−0.31, 0.05]). The Defence Readiness Omnibus of 2026 raises the Defence Directive’s threshold for supplies and services to EUR 2,000,000. At the three registers’ defence buyers, 1,776 procedures launched in 2013–2026 fall in the band that the move takes out of the Union’s procedures, while the bunching it will create below the new threshold is predicted to be thin. Buyers act on the thresholds; who wins the contracts that the move frees is a question for the move itself.

How do EU institutions talk about defense, and what does crisis do to that talk? This article measures securitizing discourse—the moves, not their acceptance—across the Union’s three principal voices: 6.05 million sentences of European Commission speeches and European Parliament plenary debates (2000–2024) and the European Council’s summit conclusions, decomposed by a validated transformer pipeline into defense salience and three registers: threat justification, sovereignty framing, and joint-capability promotion. Three findings emerge. (1) Collective securitization is institutionally differentiated: the Commission’s discourse is capability-heavy (its share roughly 1.7 times the Parliament’s; d=2.0) and couples threat with capability language, while the Parliament’s is threat- and salience-heavy (d=-4.8) and opposes the two—the same shocks are translated into different registers by different institutional positions. (2) Securitization is punctuated with register-specific timing: 2014 broke the threat and sovereignty registers, 2022 broke salience itself (+91% in supranational speech; odds ratios 1.7–6.2 across institutions). (3) Crisis composition follows politicizing substitution: after 2022, threat and sovereignty framing gain while capability framing falls in all three institutions—compositional log-ratio models confirm the shift, and an explicit interaction test finds no significant difference between the intergovernmental and supranational voices. Politicization, these results suggest, operates inside supranational discourse itself; what changes at the extreme is the referent of sovereignty, which becomes markedly more European. The article contributes an institutional anatomy to collective securitization theory and a discursive observable to the politicization debate.

When a large, unexpected demand shock hits a discretionary procurement system, do public buyers compete more or less? I provide causal evidence for defense procurement, using the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a single, common shock to European rearmament. On the near-universe of EU tender records (EU-27, the UK, and Norway, 2014–2026), I estimate a defense-versus-civilian difference-in-differences with country-by-year fixed effects. Competition fell, and defense procurement shifted about ten percentage points toward the negotiated procedure without prior publication—legal sole-source awards that bypass open tendering—routed to the incumbent prime contractors that European defense-industrial policy has cultivated. Decomposing the legal justifications buyers must state, the shift is driven by “technical-monopoly” rather than urgency grounds. Replicating and extending a published coverage benchmark, I rule out that procurement migrated off-record into Article 346 exemptions; the effect survives Honest-DiD and leave-one-out checks. When rearmament meets buyer discretion, spending is absorbed by incumbents through legal exemptions rather than competition.

The Czech Aero L-39NG and Turkish Hürjet represent two contrasting approaches to the development of military training aircraft, reflecting different national attitudes toward defense-industrial policy, procurement models, and global market positioning. The study examines the economic, historical, and geopolitical factors underlying the two programs, situating them within the context of Johan Galtung’s structural theories of integration and imperialism as well as contemporary defense economics literature. Utilizing a comparative case study method, the research evaluates determinative factors such as government involvement, procurement autonomy, alliance integration, market competitiveness, and industrial scaling. The findings underscore that Czechia’s approach is one of niche specialization within NATO’s supply chain, leveraging legacy capabilities for export production, whereas Turkey’s holistic defense industrialization and strategic autonomy model relies on state-sponsored investment to challenge advanced Western suppliers. This examination makes important contributions to the literature on defense policy by demonstrating how mid-sized and smaller states can successfully manage the global arms market’s dynamics, striking a balance between integration and autonomy while developing viable aerospace industries. The research further offers policy suggestions to improve national defense R&D, promote cooperation within alliances, and minimize supply chain dependencies. Finally, the L-39NG and Hürjet cases embody the new roles of emerging defense producers amid a growing multipolar military-industrial structure.