ABSTRACT
Among the multiple ways in which the European Union seeks to constitute itself as a quasi-sovereign political body endowed with the legitimacy necessary to execute monetary policy, enact law and deploy a unified foreign policy, is through a reference to a discourse of value: the EU is construed as a community of values whose necessity, cohesion and self-evidence is implicit. A wide range of the principles and practices of the EU make reference, directly or sub-jacently, to a set of fundamental values whose origin and homogeneity is seldom put into question. One quite natural consequence of this reference to values is a certain kind of securitization of values. If the European Union faces a security challenge, it is related, in one way or another, to its security as a community of values. Yet what does it mean for a community of values to be insecurity, to be the object of security. This chapter argues that while values themselves, and the communities that hold them as there foundation, are indestructible, it is their forms of institutionalization that come under threat. By the very nature of the relation between institutions and values, this insecurity is structurally unavoidable.
