From Endowments to Conversion: A Coherence-Based Framework for European Economic Security (Working Paper v6 with Reproducibility Bundle)

This article addresses a central puzzle of contemporary European political economy: why do substantial market size, regulatory reach, scientific capability, and institutional depth still fail to translate automatically into strategic geoeconomic capacity? The article argues that the European Union’s vulnerability cannot be reduced to endowments or to isolated sectoral deficits. It depends instead on a conversion problem: the degree to which capabilities are aligned, transmitted, financed, implemented, and observed across a polycentric institutional architecture. The paper develops a coherence-based framework for European economic security built around five linked constructs: a federal incoherence ratio (Ffed), a seven-domain coherence index with an imbalance penalty, a multilayer transmission-loss term, a bounded phase-alignment operator, and an observability correction derived from the law of emergence and mitigation. The empirical application is intentionally bounded and transparent. It uses an EU-level annual architecture for 2020–2025, a six-dossier timing registry, a country-comparative implementation stress case, and a public-only reproducibility bundle. Version 6 makes three decisive revisions relative to the earlier manuscript. First, it no longer treats the model-implied vulnerability score as an external outcome; the empirical section is explicitly framed as comparative architecture testing rather than exhaustive causal closure. Second, it adds robustness checks for alternative normalization, component ablation, leave-one-year-out stability, and data-transparency coding at cell level. Third, it recasts the manuscript as a theory/method article in mainstream political-economy prose. The result is a more defensible and more ambitious account of how Europe’s strategic vulnerability emerges from conversion losses, federal dissipation, cross-domain misalignment, and uneven observability.