Defence cooperation does not exist in a vacuum, and several structural and situational factors are needed to establish a multinational defence cooperation (MDC) successfully. This book uses three cases to demonstrate the dynamics behind the creation of three defence collaborations in Europe: 1) the Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO) in 2009; 2) the British– French Lancaster House Treaties in 2010; and 3) the Central European Defence Cooperation (CEDC) in 2011.

The first half of this chapter introduces the case studies and explains how they were selected, while the second half explains how the theoretical framework of the subregional approach was developed. In this regard, three rival explanations were tested using the method of pattern-matching, which means that the author generated predicted patterns regarding the studied phenomena and compared them to empirically based patterns. The three rival explanations regarding the creation of the studied MDCs were: 1) the lack of progress on pan-European/ transatlantic defence cooperation; 2) the impact of the financial crisis of 2008; and 3) different emerging perceptions by European states of shared threats. This research framework provided the opportunity to close certain explanations out, and helped to develop the empirically based patterns concerning every case that could convincingly explain the individual case studies. These empirically based patterns helped to develop the theoretical framework of the subregional approach. This theoretical framework is the structural and situational factors, and their unique interactions, which were introduced in Chapter 1. The details of them will be discussed in the following chapters.

The case studies: Lancaster House Treaties, NORDEFCO, CEDC

The book studies three subregional MDCs. The Lancaster House Treaties that were established between the UK and France comprise a bilateral MDC, while NORDEFCO and the CEDC are minilateral MDCs. These cases were selected because the academic literature focuses mostly on EU and NATO initiatives; the aim is for these bilateral and minilateral cases to provide a relevant contribution to our understanding of defence cooperation in Europe. Second, the cases represent different regions in Europe (the east, north and west); thus they make it possible to make generalizations about military cooperation in Europe.

More than sixty years ago Karl Deutsch argued in his seminal work that a ‘security community’ emerges when states agree to resolve their conflicts peacefully, not applying military force against each other but using mostly institutional procedures to overcome their differences (Deutsch, 1957). He pointed out that such states not only exist next to each other, but they also develop trust, shared values, shared identities and a sense of community. Building on Deutsch’s idea, Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett have highlighted the fact that it is a reasonable assumption in a security community ‘that states do not undertake – indeed, do not consider – security actions that can be interpreted by others within the community as militarily threatening’ (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 34– 5). Adler and Barnett also distinguish between loosely and tightly coupled pluralistic security communities. The most significant difference is that while a loosely coupled security community is only a transnational region where states practise self-restraint based on shared values and identities to ensure ‘dependable expectations of peaceful change’, a tightly coupled security community has become a mutual ‘aid society’ through common institutions and collective security arrangements (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 30– 7). Europe has a tightly coupled security community, which is based on the military, economic and political integration that has happened mostly through NATO and the EU. This is the most relevant precondition that allows the proliferation of multinational defence cooperations (MDCs) in Europe, and the first structural factor discussed in this book.

Before the emergence of the European security community, the danger of war had always loomed over Europe. In the twentieth century, two world wars broke out on the continent, and the Cold War created more than four decades of political, ideological and military divide between Eastern and Western European countries. In previous centuries European states often waged smaller, larger and even Europe-wide wars against each other.

However, now in the twenty-first century it is unimaginable that a war would break out between European countries that are members of the EU and/ or NATO. Accordingly, these states do not perceive any military threats from inside the security community, as they have reasonable assumptions that they will solve their conflicts in a peaceful way mostly through institutionalized processes in the EU and NATO.

Subregional defence collaborations provide the backbone of military cooperation in Europe and have become an integral part of the life of Europe’s armed forces. Subregional defence collaborations are the smaller bilateral and minilateral military projects that can function independently or as part of larger regional frameworks in Europe like the European Union (EU) and NATO. The relevance of subregional defence collaborations might be surprising at the first sight, as European regional level (NATO and EU) defence collaborations get much more media and academic attention than defence cooperation on the subregional level. For instance, when the French President, Emmanuel Macron called for a ‘true, European army’ at the centenary of the World War I Armistice in November 2018, or more recently when he emphasized that the EU needs to develop ‘strategic autonomy’, the news covered these topics extensively. However, when subregional level (bilateral, minilateral) defence collaborations are established, they receive less attention despite the fact that, currently, a web of hundreds of subregional military collaborations exist in Europe, many of them having been evolving for years or even decades.

If we look at some of the military initiatives of the last several years, we can see that many of them are smaller collaborations that are not necessarily part of European regional, NATO/ EU level cooperation. For instance, with the leadership of France, nine European countries – including the UK and Germany – created the European Intervention Initiative (EI2) in June 2018. In 2017 Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) that now includes nine European countries. Furthermore, the armed forces of six Central European states started to cooperate against mass irregular migration in 2016. Bilaterally, while thousands of British and French troops exercise together regularly, in 2019 Germany and France signed agreements to collaborate on the development of several future defence systems. The UK Carrier Strike Group 2021, led by the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier sailed to the Indo-Pacific region with the support of Dutch and US ships in 2021. In the same year, Greece and France agreed on a major package of bilateral military cooperation. Even many of NATO’s and the EU’s military projects are based on smaller subregional (bilateral, minilateral) groupings.

Multinational defence cooperations (MDCs) are rarely created from scratch; rather, they are based on previous collaborations lasting years or even decades. These existing collaborations generate personal networks and institutional relationships between the participating defence policy communities (DPCs), and these accumulate over time, and can help to launch new collaborations. The reason for this is that it is easier to cooperate with someone we know and have established relationships with than with an entirely new partner. Thus, already existing institutions, solutions and cooperative frameworks have an advantage over new ones (Uttley et al, 2019).

Path-dependence is a concept originally used in economics, but currently it is widely used in different academic fields. As William Sewell points out, this approach ‘assumes that events are normally “path dependent”, that is, what has happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of sequence of events occurring at a later point in time’ (Sewell, 1996: 262– 3). This concept is very broad, and scholars understand it in different ways. For some, path-dependence might mean simply that history matters. However, others focus on more specific issues such as the importance of initial conditions, while others again study the effect of historical lock-in or the mechanisms of self-reproducing and reactive sequences and their role in determining final outcomes (Mahoney and Schensul, 2006). The large variety of approaches to the concept of path-dependence has been criticized and also labelled as ‘concept stretching’ (Pierson, 2000: 252). Not surprisingly many scholars have attempted to provide more conceptual clarity for this term from different perspectives (Greener, 2005; Page, 2006).

Marc R. DeVore applied the concept of path-dependence in relation to defence cooperation (DeVore, 2012). In his research he investigated 16 different European and transatlantic armaments organizations that have been created since the end of World War II. DeVore shows that in the first half of the Cold War functional transatlantic organizations developed fastest and deepest thanks to the US’s political, technical and financial support for transatlantic armament cooperation. However, from the mid-1960s politically driven European organizations began to flourish because of the drying up of American subsidies and because some conflicts emerged between the US and European nations.

The previous chapters introduced how the individual structural and situational factors worked and how they contributed to establishing the three studied subregional multinational defence cooperations (MDCs): the Lancaster House Treaties, the NORDEFCO and CEDC. However, they do not explain how these factors interacted with each other and what the dynamics were between them. Accordingly, the current chapter brings the structural and situational factors together by applying the theoretical model that was briefly introduced in Chapter 1. For this purpose, this chapter first summarizes the conceptual elements of the studied structural and situational factors and expands on the model which the book offers to understand how and why new subregional MDCs are created in Europe. Second, based on this discussion and the insights of the previous chapters, this chapter explains how each studied subregional MDC was established. The purpose of this section is to pull all threads together with the help of the aforementioned theoretical model to provide a comprehensive picture about how these defence collaborations were created and how defence cooperation can be achieved in Europe.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, this book argues that, for understanding the processes behind creating subregional MDCs, we have to know the factors that affect and drive the participating defence policy communities (DPCs) to establish defence collaborations. Therefore, the unit of analysis is the individual DPCs of subregional defence cooperation. This book defines DPC of a current European country as the groups and persons who have the expertise, will and opportunity to influence the defence policy of the state. DPCs usually consist of military personnel and civil servants of the Ministry of Defence – including the Defence Staff – experts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Finance and the Prime Minister’s Office or its equivalent, major defence industrial actors, scholars of defence academies and think tanks and influential members of the parliament. In regard to theLancaster House Treaties, the British and French DPCs, and in the case of the NORDEFCO the Norwegian and Swedish DPCs, while concerning the CEDC the Hungarian and Austrian DPCs, will be discussed in this chapter in detail.

Multinational Defence Cooperation (MDC) is part of the everyday life of European armed forces. It has become such a natural and self-evident phenomenon for European military personnel and policymakers that they do not even think about its causes any more although it shapes almost every aspect of defence. MDCs have a massive effect on the defence policies, force structures, capability development plans and defence industrial considerations of individual European states. This is reflected in the strategic documents of European countries and the fact that they do not go to war without the support of other European states. Furthermore, most of the sophisticated weapon systems developed by European countries have been multinational projects for decades, and they cost billions or tens of billions of Euros. Every year tens of thousands of European troops participate in multinational military exercises, dozens of multinational units have been created for the last thirty years and Europeans also procure and maintain military capabilities together.

However, this level of cooperation did not happen overnight; rather, it has been the result of a decades-long evolution of collaborations. This chapter defines what an MDC is in the context of the book and also defines what the concepts of region and subregion are, pointing out the relevance of the subregional dimension of MDCs. The second half of the chapter outlines the broader history of defence collaborations in Europe between 1990 and 2010, as the studied three case studies were established in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Multinational defence cooperation in Europe and the subregional dimension

The UK Ministry of Defence defines ‘Multinational Defence Cooperation (MDC) as any arrangement where two or more nations work together to enhance military capability. This can include exchanges and liaison, training and exercising, common doctrine, collaborative equipment procurement, or multinational formations’ (UK Ministry of Defence, 2001: 2). The book uses this definition as a basis to inform its research, but it will amend it slightly as it acknowledges that this definition might seem too broad for analytical purposes. For instance, one might question the usefulness of a definition that covers everything from the exchange of liaison officers between two countries to collaborative equipment procurement including several countries.

Defence matters do not exist in a vacuum: they are always influenced by the actual political environment, the current political milieu. This is the case with defence collaborations in Europe as well. Without a supportive political milieu, those defence policy communities (DPCs) that want to cooperate with each other would be working in a void with no outside support, which would make their efforts to launch a multinational defence cooperation (MDC) very difficult or even impossible. A supportive political milieu helps to galvanize wider support for the MDC and can help to mobilize proponents from outside the enthusiastic members of the cooperating DPCs too. This may provide ‘firepower’ for the advocates of a new MDC to convince and change the attitudes of those who are sceptical or even hostile to the idea inside and outside the DPC. Thus a supportive political milieu for the creation of a new subregional MDC is a situational factor that is often necessary for a new defence collaboration to be initiated.

In general, the attitudes of actors regarding political issues ‘are powerfully conditioned by the social and political milieu in which they take place’ (Weatherford, 1982). For instance examining how political attitudes changed during the 1980 presidential campaign in the US, Michael MacKuen and Courtney Brown found that ‘the impact of an individual’s milieu on attitude change is greater than the effect of a respondent’s sex, age, or education […] the respondent’s race, information level, income, and ideology’ (MacKuen and Brown, 1987: 477). They also demonstrate that, although the political milieu of the macroenvironment is relevant in this regard, the content of the discussion in the microenvironment of the studied individuals has an even bigger impact on their political attitude. This affects communities differently, creating an unstable and dynamic nature for the contemporary political context (MacKuen and Brown, 1987: 485).

Building on the insights of MacKuen and Brown, this book understands the political milieu on two levels: the microenvironment and the macroenvironment. The microenvironment is where the discussions and the policy formulation happen inside a DPC (Roberts, 2020) and between relevant DPCs. However, this conversation is influenced by the events and processes of the macroenvironment.

After the Cold War, the defence budgets of European armed forces were under pressure. First, governments in Europe decided to spend on defence significantly less, as a large-scale conventional war on the continent became improbable. Understandably, they started to channel these extra funds into their economies and welfare systems (Davoodi, 1999). Second, as the international environment changed, the tasks of the armed forces had to change with them. Thus, European armed forces started to focus on power projection abroad both in terms of a war-fighting role and peace support operations (Edmunds, 2006). However, this needed massive restructuring and new investments, as European militaries had to transform themselves into smaller but flexible and highly skilled organizations compared to the mass conscript armies they had previously maintained. This double pressure – decreased funding and the need for transformation – resulted in significant force reductions in Europe, as militaries tried to free up funds for investment in new capabilities and structures.

The conceptual bases of the abovementioned thinking were laid down by Michael Alexander and Timothy Garden in their paper ‘The arithmetic of defence policy’, published in International Affairs in 2001 (Alexander and Garden, 2001). They pointed out that not only decreased defence budgets but also their shrinking purchasing power had resulted in the sharp decline of military capabilities in Europe. The reason for this is that defence inflation is significantly higher than ‘normal’ inflation, because although maintenance costs in the field of defence rise at the same ratio as inflation, personnel costs and equipment costs rise much higher than inflation (Alexander and Garden, 2001: 515– 17). Consequently, the higher rate of defence inflation would normally cause a decline in the purchasing power of defence budgets even if they remained unchanged in real terms and did not decline, as has been the case in Europe for the last few decades. This has led to continuous decreases in force levels and military capabilities to compensate for diminishing defence budgets and the effects of defence inflation. According to Alexander and Garden, this ‘arithmetic’ suggested that by 2020 the UK’s front-line forces might be only half of the 2001 level. Their prediction was fairly accurate, as the number of active military personnel in the UK in 2019 was 66 per cent of the 2000 level (NATO, 2012; NATO, 2020). Alexander and Garden (2001: 520) identified two options to reverse this trend.

The core idea of this book emerged about a decade ago when I was working at the Hungarian Ministry of Defence (MoD). I worked extensively with the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and was also involved in policy development regarding smaller multinational defence collaborations. At that time my impression was that the academic scholarship did not reflect my experiences and the everyday practices of European MoDs. While the academic debate primarily focused on the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the relevance of NATO was much bigger in defence, but most importantly, bi- and minilateral collaborations seemed to be even more relevant. I call them subregional collaborations in this book, while in this framework NATO and the EU are the regional, European-level multinational cooperative frameworks.

European militaries have established a plethora of subregional multinational defence collaborations, and although NATO- and EU-level processes have an impact on them, these smaller collaborations also influence Europeanlevel dynamics. My observation was that these smaller defence collaborations below the NATO and EU level provided the substance, the backbone, of military cooperation in Europe. Often the participating members of these subregional defence collaborations channelled their already existing practical cooperation into NATO and EU frameworks or rebranded them according to the newest vocabulary of these two organizations. The participating states of these subregional collaborations also coordinated their policies and intended to shape the debate in NATO and the EU. However, the dynamics behind starting a new defence cooperation in Europe was more complex than that, and I wanted to understand them in detail. Thus I started a PhD programme at King’s College London, and this book is a heavily revised and upgraded version of my PhD thesis.

As the reader will see throughout the book, my experience as a former defence official influenced my approach. Thus it will perhaps not be surprising that I propose that Defence Policy Communities (DPCs) should be the unit of analysis of multinational defence cooperation instead of governments or international organizations. The rationale behind this is that members of DPCs have the will and the opportunity to shape these collaborations. Of course, the DPC of every country is slightly different, but there are commonalities, and the staff of the MoDs and defence staffs, politicians and other government officials are usually the most influential members of them.

This book intended to understand why and how new defence collaborations in Europe are created and argued that the driving force for this is the subregional dimension. However, these subregional dynamics are less visible for the public and are studied less by scholars compared to NATO and EU-level dynamics. Thus, the subregional level regarding military cooperation – the processes going on below the large European organizations of EU and NATO – is often neglected even though most of the practical work is happening there. On the subregional level, European armed forces organize multinational exercises, cooperate on weapons development and procurement, establish multinational formations, train together, pool and share their capabilities and so on. Furthermore, the negotiations about these projects also take place on the subregional level. Thus, not surprisingly, the extensive cooperation of European militaries on the subregional level provides the foundation of European-level (NATO/ EU) defence collaborations. These subregional processes shape European-level dynamics but European-level processes also have an impact on subregional defence matters.

To understand the complexities of this issue, the book offered three major innovations. First, the book proposed a theoretical framework of the subregional approach and applied it to three cases: the Lancaster House Treaties, the Nordic Defence Cooperation and the Central European Defence Cooperation. The theoretical framework of the subregional approach suggests that both ‘structural’ and ‘situational’ factors are needed to create a new defence cooperation, and these factors interact with each other in a particular way. Second, the book argued that, instead of focusing on states, governments or international organizations, the best way to grasp the essence of defence cooperation is using defence policy communities (DPCs) as the unit of analysis. Finally, throughout the book, it was demonstrated that a multidisciplinary approach was needed for studying defence collaborations in order to be able to analyse the different aspects of this phenomenon.

The proposed theoretical framework of the subregional approach suggests that both long-term processes and rapidly changing events play a role when a multinational defence cooperation (MDC) is established. Thus, the book distinguishes between ‘structural’ and ‘situational’ factors. The ‘structural’ factors are those elements that have been evolving for a long time and change slowly.

Although structures are highly important because they provide the context for what is possible and what is not, without actual people nothing is done. Thus, in business or diplomatic negotiations, personal relationships between key stakeholders are often crucial. This chapter demonstrates that when new subregional multinational defence cooperations (MDC) have been established, key stakeholders from at least two defence policy communities (DPCs) worked closely together and took leadership to initiate new cooperation. The most important precondition for this was that these stakeholders had to like each other. This insight corresponds with the practical experiences of diplomats, who observe that when people in critical positions from different countries like each other and establish a good working relationship, significant progress can be made in a very short period of time on issues that had been stalled for years (Witness Seminar, 2019). They also notice that progress can still be made without interpersonal chemistry between leaders, and especially when frameworks or institutions are already in place, gradual improvements can be made too. These institutions can even serve to maintain healthy relations between countries at the technical level when the relationship between the leaders deteriorates significantly. However, good chemistry between leaders almost always boosts cooperation. This chapter thus describes a situational factor that can be described as ‘Strong leadership by a group of enthusiastic highlevel officials and good interpersonal chemistry between them’. It points out that structural factors are not enough to launch new MDCs and explains how interpersonal chemistry among the key leaders plays a crucial role in establishing new defence collaborations. This chapter applies the insights of social psychology, focusing on the research regarding interpersonal attraction.

Interpersonal attraction has an extensive literature in psychology that studies why certain people like and are attracted to each other and why others not (Huston, 1974; Hogg and Turner, 1985; Klohnen and Luo, 2003; Montoya et al, 2008; Finkel et al, 2015). People can find others attractive for different reasons, and attraction can lead, for instance, to friendships, romanticrelationships or good business partnerships. The underlying dynamics of attraction in each of these social settings are very similar, and empirical research shows that the most relevant variables for developing interpersonal attraction are propinquity, similarity and physical attraction.