Militant Liberalism in a Hybrid Age: Ontological Security, Rule of Law, and the Quiet Federalization of the European Union

This working paper examines the European Union's response to hybrid threats — including disinformation, cyber-attacks, foreign investment screening, border instrumentalization, and lawfare — as an act of ontological security management. Drawing on Mitzen's ontological security theory, Loewenstein–Müller militant democracy scholarship, and EU legal cartography (Lonardo, Martinico), the paper argues that the EU's counter-hybrid governance simultaneously generates a quiet federalization of EU competences through Articles 114, 215, 352, 42(7) TFEU and Article 29 TEU, and produces systemic rule-of-law tensions with proportionality, judicial oversight, and democratic accountability. The paper analyses five hybrid-threat instruments across three registers — ontological identity narration, legal competence shift, and rule-of-law tension — and concludes that the EU faces a structural militant liberalism paradox: the more robustly it secures its ontological self, the more it risks transforming the liberal constitutional order it claims to protect. Published as a MISSHA Working Paper, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, June 2026. AI-Assisted Drafting Disclosure: This paper was drafted with AI writing assistance (structural editing and language refinement). All arguments, interpretations, evidence selection, and scholarly judgements are entirely the author's own.