Description
This article examines the European Union's collective securitisation of semiconductors, revealing a fundamental “performance-capacity gap” between discursive success and operational capability. While the EU successfully constructed semiconductors as existential threats – mobilising substantial resources through the European Chips Act and embedding security imperatives within institutional frameworks – it lacks the material capacity to operationalise the security it promises. Europe possesses virtually no advanced fabrication capacity, faces severe workforce shortages, and remains heavily dependent on external actors for critical raw materials – vulnerabilities that cannot be rapidly addressed despite political will. We introduce the concept of material security constraints to explain how infrastructure requirements, technical complexity, supply chain dependencies, and extended temporal horizons systematically limit collective securitisation outcomes in capital-intensive domains. European investments represent a fraction of major competitor commitments, while infrastructure development requires multi-decade timescales that conflict fundamentally with securitisation's urgency logic. This creates a paradox: the very urgency enabling political mobilisation undermines the patient commitment necessary for building semiconductor ecosystems. By distinguishing between securitisation as performative process and operational outcome, this case challenges core assumptions in collective securitisation scholarship. The findings have profound implications for understanding limits of the EU's digital sovereignty agenda and for theorising collective securitisation in infrastructure-dependent technological domains where regulatory and discursive power prove insufficient.
