TY - JOUR
T1 - Combined differentiation in European defense
T2 - Tailoring Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) to strategic and political complexity
AU - Martill, Benjamin
AU - Gebhard, Carmen
N1 - Funding Information:
Over the course of 2017 the HR/VP, Federica Mogherini, and the European External Action Service (EEAS) would support member states to reach consensus over the design and governance of PESCO (Blockmans, , p. 1809). PESCO was also accompanied by a host of other initiatives aimed at improving the coordination of defense activities among EU member states. Following the publication in 2017 of the first EUGS implementation report and the Commission’s own “reflection paper” on defense (European Commission, ), a stream of new initiatives was introduced at EU-level (Martill & Sus, ; Sweeney & Winn, ; Tocci, ). These included, alongside PESCO, the Coordinated Annual Review of Defense (CARD) through which the military capabilities of member states would be subject to a coordinated review process, the European Defense Fund (EDF), through which €1.5bn seed funding from the EU budget would eventually be made available annually for defense research, the European Defense Industrial Development Program (EDIDP), which would allocate EU-funding biannually to support the development of defense equipment and technologies with an aim to boost competitiveness and innovation capacity, and new defense-related governance structures within the European External Action Service (the Military Planning and Conduct Capability, MPCC) and the European Commission (DG Defense Industry and Space) (see e.g., Béraud-Sudreau & Pannier, ; Martill & Sus, ; Sweeney & Winn, ; Tocci, ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/12/18
Y1 - 2022/12/18
N2 - Sustaining meaningful defense cooperation in Europe is made difficult by defense-industrial fragmentation, a multiplicity of institutional frameworks, divergent strategic cultures and domestic opposition to integration. The European Union’s recent foray into defense integration incorporates multiple forms of differentiation to overcome these barriers, with Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) characterized by selective membership, external participation, and project-based clustering. Such “combined differentiation” offers an instructive example of how EU practices and principles can contribute to meaningful defense collaboration, even though Brussels is often thought a weak actor externally. It also illustrates how distinct forms of differentiation can be embodied within a single structure to accommodate complexity in strategic preferences. Using the example of PESCO, this article shows how “combined differentiation” has emerged as a response to the nature of the European defense landscape and how debates between member states about how to respond to specific challenges have brought about further differentiation over time.
AB - Sustaining meaningful defense cooperation in Europe is made difficult by defense-industrial fragmentation, a multiplicity of institutional frameworks, divergent strategic cultures and domestic opposition to integration. The European Union’s recent foray into defense integration incorporates multiple forms of differentiation to overcome these barriers, with Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) characterized by selective membership, external participation, and project-based clustering. Such “combined differentiation” offers an instructive example of how EU practices and principles can contribute to meaningful defense collaboration, even though Brussels is often thought a weak actor externally. It also illustrates how distinct forms of differentiation can be embodied within a single structure to accommodate complexity in strategic preferences. Using the example of PESCO, this article shows how “combined differentiation” has emerged as a response to the nature of the European defense landscape and how debates between member states about how to respond to specific challenges have brought about further differentiation over time.
KW - combined differentiation
KW - PESCO
KW - European defense
KW - CSDP
KW - differentiated cooperation
U2 - 10.1080/13523260.2022.2155360
DO - 10.1080/13523260.2022.2155360
M3 - Article
SN - 1352-3260
SP - 1
EP - 28
JO - Contemporary Security Policy
JF - Contemporary Security Policy
ER -