European Defence Decision Making

This book comparatively examines the preferences of four key arms-producing states towards European joint armaments programmes. The European defence market is characterised by a mixture of inter-state competition and European cooperation, and this work assesses why countries sometimes decide to cooperate with their partners, while in other instances they refrain from doing so. In order to shed light on this empirical puzzle, the book focuses on state-defence industry relations in the four major European arms producers: France, Germany, Italy and the UK. The main argument is that the public or private governance of industrial suppliers and market size are the two decisive variables that explain the simultaneous presence of cooperation and competition in European defence procurement. Specifically, it argues that in public governance ecosystems, arms industries are able to "capture" the state's decision-making processes to their own advantage. In private governance ecosystems, the state is relatively autonomous from defence industry's influence and able to pursue larger macro-economic and military benefits. Moreover, the strategy pursued by governments and defence firms is decisively shaped by market size because of its importance in determining the relative costs and benefits of collaborative arrangements. This book will be of much interest to students of EU policy, defence studies, European politics and International Relations.

This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of the European Defence Agency (EDA), the leading EU armaments policy institution. Despite its critical role in European strategic and military affairs as the key hub of European policy-making in the field of armaments, the Agency has hitherto received very little attention by the academic and research community around Europe. To fill this gap in the literature, the book covers a multitude of inter-related themes and topics. Not only does it provide a detailed analysis and assessment of the Agency’s record as the first institution dealing solely with EU armaments policy, but it also links these findings to international relations and European integration theory. Thematically, the contributions go beyond the mere description of achievements, gaps and risks, elaborating on novel themes such as space, offsets, pooling and sharing, and transatlantic armaments relations. The book combines an interdisciplinary approach to the study of European defence with theoretical and ontological pluralism, and seeks to unveil the strategic, industrial, institutional and ideational sources of armaments collaboration and capability development under the aegis of the EDA. The multi-faceted orientation of the book will be of much interest to students of European security, EU institutions, defence studies, arms control and international relations in general.

​This book explores the multilayer nexus among inter-related international and regional security parameters that critically define the EU’s rapidly changing security environment. In terms of intensity, complexity and urgency these changes constitute challenges that threaten the very core of European security – both internal and external. In a fluid and transitional international environment of diversified needs and polymorphic threats the space dimension acquires a novel unified meaning. The book closely examines the EU’s current strategic, organisational and defence capabilities regarding global, regional and domestic challenges such as terrorism, systemic instability, global order and a number of crucial hindrances to transatlantic cooperation. The chapters offer not only valuable theoretical insights, but also unique perspectives on operational and organisational elements of EU applied policies based on the testimonies of field experts. The combination of theory-based approaches and the demonstration of the EU’s operational capabilities and weaknesses as externalized through its global strategy choices provide an overall evaluation of adopted policies and their effects. This is crucial in a global transition period that will define the EU’s role and its potential to produce desired outcomes through synergies with its strategic allies.

An engaging assessment of the theoretical debates on the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The contributions to this volume bring together sophisticated theoretical frameworks and extensive empirical research. Pluralistic in its approach, the volume emphasizes the role of conceptual diversity for better explaining the EU's CSDP.

This book explains the creation of the European Union's Security and Defence Policy - to this day the most ambitious project of peacetime military integration. Whether hailed as a vital step in the integration of Europe or berated as a wasteful threat to U.S. power, European citizens are increasingly interested in the common defence policy. Today, "European Defence" is more popular than the European Union itself, even in Great Britain. Mérand addresses the fundamental challenge posed by military integration to the way we think about the state in the 21st Century. Looking back over the past 50 years, he shows how statesmen, diplomats and soldiers have converged towards Brussels as a "natural" solution to their concerns but also as something worth fighting over. The actors most closely associated to the formation of nation-states are now shaping a transgovernmental security and defence arena. As a result, defence policy is being denationalized. Exploring the complex relations between the state, the military, and citizenship in today's Europe, Mérand argues that European Defence is a symptom, but not a cause, of the transformation of the state. This book is an original contribution to the theory of European integration. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Mérand develops a political sociology of international relations which seeks to bridge institutionalism and constructivism. His careful study of practices, social representations and power structures sheds new light on security and defence cooperation, but also on European cooperation more generally.

This book examines how the European Union can pursue a grand strategy and become a distinct global actor in a world of emerging great powers. At the grand strategic level, its sheer economic size makes the EU a global power. However, the EU needs to take into account that many international actors continue to measure power mostly by assessing military capability. To preserve its status as an economic power, therefore, the EU has to become a power across the board, which requires a grand strategy, and the means and the will to proactively pursue one. The authors of this book aim to demonstrate that the EU can develop a purposive yet distinctive grand strategy that preserves the value-based nature of EU external action while also safeguarding its vital economic interests. The book analyses the existing military capability of the European Union and its bottom-up nature, which results in a national-based focus in the member-states, impeding deployment capability. A systematic realignment of national defence planning at the strategic level will enable each member-states to focus its defence effort on the right capabilities, make maximal use of pooling and specialization, and contribute to multinational projects in order to address Europe’s strategic capability shortfalls. A stronger Europe will therefore result, it is argued, a real global actor, which can then become an equal strategic partner to the United States, leading to a revitalized Transatlantic partnership in turn. This book will be of interest to students of military studies, European Union policy, strategic studies and International Relations generally.

The aim of this study is to examine the extent to which the end of the Cold War led to Europeanisation in the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The analysis takes into consideration previous studies on Europeanisation and its impact on the transformation of national security and defence, and attempts to account for the development of Europeanisation and related mechanisms. These mechanisms, which have been described as framing mechanisms and negative integration, incorporate all the major relevant factors identified here (i.e. a common Strategic Culture, new security identity, domestic political decision-making, industrial base and defence-spending decline) that contributed to the realisation of the CSDP. The relevance of these factors for CSDP Europeanisation is examined through an historical and empirical analysis, and the relationship between the CSDP and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is also explored. This approach facilitates analysis of the debate concerning the emergence of the CSDP and throws light on the political shift that led European Union (EU) leaders to support the CSDP. Another aspect of this study is the empirical examination of the dynamics and limitations of the European defence sector. The changes which took place in this sector facilitated the emergence of the CSDP and are therefore analysed in the light of globalisation issues, economies of scale, economic crises, military autonomy, new security strategy and Research and Development (R&D) impact. This book will be of interest to students of European security, EU politics, defence studies and International Relations.