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In June 2017, the European Commission launched a proposal for a European Defence Fund (EDF) aimed at financing transnational defence research and development through the European Union (EU) budget. This initiative has been described as a ‘game changer’ for European defence cooperation. I argue that the EDF can be analysed through the lens of neofunctionalist theory and challenges the hypotheses of new intergovernmentalism on the evolution of EU governance. The EDF is also marked by some innovative features, largely because it concerns a policy area – defence – in which supranational dynamics were traditionally limited. First, the Commission displayed an increasingly political cultivated spillover by its promotion of the EDF. Second, the EDF illustrates a new type of offensive functional spillover from the economy to defence. Third, the implementation of the EDF has launched a bureaucratic spillover that could lead to further initiatives.
Pierre Haroche (Fri,) studied this question.