Description
Despite the EU’s efforts to promote cooperation in defence issues, collaborative procurement still represents a tiny fraction of overall procurement efforts in Europe. Moreover, European states sometimes cooperate in military affairs, but beyond the EU framework. In fact, as noted by a recent strand of literature, EU states resort to different types of procurement strategies simultaneously. This raises a puzzle: what motivations explain such a behaviour? Mainstream IR theories offer handy answers by resorting to well-known concepts, like alliance politics, varieties of capitalism, and strategic culture. However, we argue that all these accounts have limits, as they neglect the impact of military technology on procurement choices. Our argument, in a nutshell, is that the features of military technology underlying a given weapon system ultimately determine the type of procurement policy – i.e. collaborative or not, with ad-hoc partners, or in a multilateral framework.
