The European Defence Fund (EDF) is the EU’s flagship instrument for fostering defence-industrial cooperation and strengthening Europe’s technological and industrial base. Yet it remains unclear whether EDF awards broaden participation across the Union or reinforce pre-existing advantages concentrated in Western Europe. The proposed paper evaluates whether EDF funding has reduced or reinforced the West-East gap in participation and awards. The study leverages the European Commission’s Financial Transparency System to build a country-year panel of EDF commitments by beneficiary location, complemented with project-level participation indicators derived from publicly available EDF project information. I distinguish between (1) participation breadth (number of awards and unique beneficiary entities per country-year) and (2) award intensity (total commitments and commitments scaled by population and GDP). Empirically, the paper combines distributional metrics (e.g., concentration and repeat-winner measures) with panel models to assess convergence/divergence between Western and Eastern member states and to test for structural shifts across EDF implementation phases. By providing a systematic, primary-source assessment of EDF allocation patterns, the paper contributes to debates on EU defence integration and the distributional politics of European defence industrial policy, with implications for cohesion and strategic autonomy.

The ramp up of European defence industrial production raises a critical question for the future shape and competitiveness of the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB): will it continue to be dominated and limited by core European Union (EU) producers or is there an ongoing redistribution of defence production? We argue a significant redistribution is underway, although not caused by recent geopolitical shocks, but by the long-term agency of the semi-periphery itself. Counter to the predictions of the Dependent Market Economy (DME) model, our analysis reveals that states in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) have pursued a distinct, longer-term industrial strategy - a model we term the Militarised DME (M-DME). The bloc’s recent geoeconomic turn has not created this upgrading path but has validated and dramatically accelerated it. Using time-series cluster analysis of EU arms export data, we evidence this sustained trend through a rise in high-value-added (HVA) exports, which is driven not by foreign direct investment but by indigenous actors. Ultimately, our findings reveal a contested re-division of labour that predates the current security crisis. They demonstrate the persistent agency of the semi-periphery in contributing to European strategic autonomy and reshaping the political economy of Europe's defence production.

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) is widely seen as a turning point in EU economic governance, introducing a form of contractual governance in which national Recovery and Resilience Plans, Council Implementing Decisions, and Operational Arrangements function as quasi-contracts between the European Commission and the Member States. While existing research has carefully analysed the design and approval of these instruments, we still know little about how the Commission’s leadership evolved during implementation and whether its attempts to strategically reorient the Facility translated into material policy change. This paper provides the first systematic analysis of whether, and to what extent, the Commission’s call following its June 2025 Communication On the Road to 2026—which urged Member States to prioritise strategic objectives such as defence-industrial capacity—resulted in actual reallocation of RRF resources toward defence and security-related areas. Using a hand-coded dataset of all amendment requests submitted during the implementation phase, combined with original data on payment requests and approvals, we trace defence-related commitments from plan amendments through the disbursement pipeline. We develop three indicators: (1) an alignment indicator capturing the inclusion of defence-oriented measures in amended plans; (2) a defence share ratio measuring the proportion of defence-related changes relative to total amendments; and (3) a defence payment realisation measure assessing whether defence-related amendments translated into approved payments. This design allows us to distinguish between symbolic inclusion, selective implementation, and effective financial reallocation. Our findings reveal two core dynamics. First, during the amendment and payment cycles, the Commission’s role shifted from strict contractual oversight toward a more entrepreneurial form of leadership, characterised by strategic signalling and flexible interpretation of RRF provisions. Second, defence reorientation was highly uneven across Member States and across implementation stages. While some governments introduced early and detailed defence commitments, these were often later diluted, reframed in umbrella terms, or removed altogether as payment constraints and approval risks became clearer. Other Member States incorporated defence only after explicit Commission signalling, frequently through vague or recycled formulations, while many did not engage in defence reorientation at all. Overall, the paper conceptualises the late-stage RRF not as a fixed contractual regime but as a negotiated implementation framework, and demonstrates that the Commission’s attempt to open a defence-industrial window within the RRF translated into selective and uneven material reallocation rather than uniform policy transformation.