Description
Despite the recent focus on the factors explaining early withdrawals from military coalitions, no particular attention has been paid to the reasons underlying strong coalition loyalty. Similarly, while the literature on alliance burden-sharing points to potential factors highlighting why some coalition partners exhibit strong loyalty as coalition contributors in the first place, it overlooks why some of these partners eventually renegade while others remain till the end. The objective of this paper is therefore to address the phenomenon of strong military coalition loyalty. More specifically, it will be shown that the crucial factor behind loyalty is partners’ high degree of security dependence on coalition leaders. To check the impact of dependence and other competing variables on coalition loyalty I analyse the behaviour of big contributors in the Iraq War Coalition and subsequently trace dependency’s effects by conducting in depth analyses of the Polish, Australian, Georgian and South Korean missions.
