Description
French and British policy-makers have framed their defence partnership as exceptional and as a driver for Europe’ defence. The cornerstone of their partnership, the Treaties of Lancaster House, were designed to build progressive and controlled interdependence that would serve as a blueprint, in effect, for the convergence of European defence policy while preserving national sovereignty within the EU. Yet the two allies responded to the conflict in Ukraine in markedly different ways in 2014, and what followed was a decade of competition and political turbulence that left much of the Treaties’ promise unrealised. The Coalition of the Willing has since brought Franco-British leadership back to the fore, but that leadership now has to find its footing in a geopolitical landscape that is both new and deeply uncertain.
Competition arising from global shifts, including among allies, lies at the heart of this project, which examines how states seek to become the most influential actors within alliance systems. Previous research showed that competition and leadership play out in aggressive export strategies around defence industry and capability, in competing visions of what European defence architecture should look like and where the EU fits within it, and in the ability to shape thinking in Washington regarding the salience of the transatlantic alliance. This thesis argues that the long-standing forms of competition between European states, and between France and Britain in particular, have taken on a new dimension, because the geostrategic questions raised by the war in Ukraine cut to the heart of European country’s identity, interests and strategic culture. These include European/EU strategic autonomy, interstate defence integration, the growth of Europe’s defence industries, the EU’s role within the broader defence architecture, Germany’s growing weight on defence issues, interdependencies both within and beyond Europe, transatlantic solidarity, and the inclusion of third countries in the EU’s defence-industrial frameworks.
Methodologically, this thesis adopts an interpretivist, historical and multi-layered process-tracing approach grounded in constructivist foreign policy analysis. It draws on data from semi-structured interviews with foreign policy, industrial and military elites conducted in Brussels, Paris and London. Results show that deep-seated historical mistrust and competition, rooted primarily in disagreements over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a longer history of enmity, had a far-reaching effect on British and French cooperation on Ukraine. French policymakers did not trust Anglo-Saxon (Five Eyes) intelligence on Ukraine, while British policymakers had little appetite for involving a competitor nation given the Britain’s own engagement on the Ukrainian file well before 2014. These tensions undermined attempts at European coordination after 2022 despite EU efforts. Similarly, it emerges that the drive for European leadership through the Coalition of the Willing is as much about the pragmatic pooling of resources as it is about protecting each country’s influence and leadership on the continent. Finally, the research shows that, despite mutual fascination, French and British policymakers still hold a fairly crude understanding of what the other seeks to achieve for Europe’ defence. These findings suggest that what matters, for both research and policymaking, is understanding how competition between two allies shapes the way they promote a broader regional defence architecture, how that architecture evolves as a result, and how such competition still permeates cooperation when regional leadership becomes urgently needed.