Towards Common Security: Intelligence Sharing in the European Union

Abstract

European security cooperation has significantly intensified over the past decade, a trend accelerated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, yet most research on intelligence sharing, a key resource for identifying and countering security threats, predates these developments. This thesis examines how intelligence sharing mechanisms are justified and organised across levels of EU governance, by focusing on their alignment with EU security objectives, the legal, ethical, and strategic constraints shaping them as well as the role played by capability asymmetries between Member States. Using inductive qualitative content analysis, the study codes a purposively sampled corpus of 34 public EU and national institutional documents and speech transcripts from 2016 to 2025 and examines mechanisms, formalisation, frequency, and constraints. Alignment between intelligence sharing and EU security cooperation is strongest where practices can be standardised, especially in the fields of border control and law enforcement, while strategic intelligence remains largely under national discretion. Legal, ethical and strategic constraints determine which exchanges are considered legitimate. Capability asymmetries can shape specific bilateral relationships but are not a major factor overall. Intelligence sharing therefore...