Who Securitizes European Defense? Institutional Differentiation in EU Security Discourse, 2000–2024

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.