This article presents the first pan-European longitudinal analysis of how news media frames the role of defence industries as a reflection of the (re)conceptualisation of their role in European rearmament. We built a corpus of 15,194 press articles from 15 European states covering 2004 to 2024. Prevailing framings and temporal changes were analysed through human interpretation and Natural Language Processing using large-language-model embeddings, unsupervised clustering and classification, which provides a transferable framework for analysing large corpora. Contrary to expectations drawn from existing scholarship that security and state power would predominate, we find that economic framings are the most prevalent, with defence industries presented as providers of jobs, technology and export revenue. Security framings are secondary and are more internationalised than national, and their lack of prominence is in contrast to the security language used since 2022 by some European leaders. Critical framings are marginal and largely confined to arms exports. Rather than being securitized as instruments of state power, or contested as ethically problematic, European defence industries are predominantly framed as routine technocratic and commercial actors. The article suggests a reconsideration of the empirical basis of research on defence industries and cautions against being over reliant on elite discourse.
(2026) From national arsenals to European defence: changes in media framings of European defence industries, 2004–2024, *European Security * 35 (3): 463–484.
