The return of the ‘positive state’? Capacity-building for the protection of critical national infrastructures across Europe

Critical national infrastructures (CNIs) have come to be viewed as vital security issues across Europe. Yet, European states’ approaches to the protection of CNIs have been far from uniform. When do states engage in state capacity-building to protect CNIs against increasing security challenges? To answer this question, we draw on theories of (European) security policymaking, which highlight different types of security challenges, as well as historical institutionalist approaches, which expect state capacity-building to be contingent on ideational-institutional legacies. A mapping of more than 30 European states’ capacity-building efforts in the telecommunication and energy sectors lends strong support to the former, whereas we find no conclusive evidence for the latter. This underlines the explanatory power of types of security challenges but sheds doubts on expectations that ideational-institutional legacies are a powerful predictor of cross-country patterns of security policymaking reform. Moreover, to show how the type of security challenge matters, we trace, in an in-depth case study of French reforms in energy governance, the political economy mechanism whereby concentrated threats lead to state capacity-building to protect CNIs. Our findings contribute to research on the geopoliticization of CNIs and the instruments of European security policymaking.