The institutionalisation of the European defence equipment market

This thesis examines the emergence of EU-level rules in defence industrial matters within the context of European integration and inter-state cooperation more generally. This is a remarkable development, as the defence industrial policy area has been viewed as a core of nation state sovereignty and appeared impervious to injections of “more Europe.” At the centre of this nascent policy regime is the increasingly institutionalised European Defence Equipment Market (EDEM). The first and most significant elements of EDEM to date have been the 2009 Defence Procurement Directive issued by the European Commission and the voluntary Code of Conduct on Defence Procurement launched by the European Defence Agency (EDA) in 2006. These sets of rules have materialised despite EU member states’ resistance to meaningful constraints of national autonomy in defence procurement, and a distaste for the involvement of the European Commission in particular. An analytical puzzle thus emerges: why have member states acquiesced to binding regulation in the shape of the Directive, having already enacted a soft cooperation mechanism represented by the Code? The thesis answers this question by pursuing three lines of inquiry, which correspond to three hypotheses and specify clear pathways whereby external adaptation pressures, such as the Euro-Atlantic defence budgetary trends, may result in states’ acceptance of particular constraints. Firstly, the project examines the lobbying activity of the EU’s major transnational defence firms in pursuit of a larger, more integrated “home” defence equipment market. In addition, this thesis evaluates the success of the European Commission as a determined “policy entrepreneur” in securing member states’ acquiescence to unprecedentedly binding defence procurement rules. Finally, the development of an EU security and defence policy as a source of “vital policy rationale” for an EU defence equipment market is also investigated. The tension between the supranational and intergovernmental modes of organising the defence industrial field constitutes a central theme of this thesis, while the “policy cycle” framework is used to order the causal significance of each hypothesis