Why Western Europe Needs the United States and NATO

Explaining Government Preferences for Institutional Change in EU Foreign and Security Policy

“…The second causal factor to be considered in this article is also connected to a consequentialist approach to international politics, but this approach stresses differences in resources rather than differences in interests+ 14 Realist scholars in international relations are less interested in the specific content and variation of policy preferences than in the means states have to obtain what they want+ While realism comes in many variants, all of them hold that the distribution of power capabilities among states is a crucial determinant of their behavior+ 15 A corollary is that differences in the behavior of states can be explained mainly by looking at their relative position in the state system+ Some realist authors, as I have pointed out in the previous section, make assumptions about state goals that are incompatible with the demonstrated willingness of various European governments to deepen their foreign and security policy integration+ Other variants of realism, however, do not rule out the possibility of voluntary integration, but seek to explain it by referring to the distribution of power among states+ In particular, Joseph Grieco has suggested a "neorealist" interpretation of the EU's Economic and Monetary Union, according to which the institutional arrangement agreed upon at Maastricht reflects the interest of France and Italy in gaining "voice opportunities" vis-à-vis Germany for determining monetary policy in Europe+ Grieco's thesis is that, "especially for weaker but still salient states, institutionalization might constitute an effective second-best solution to the problem of working with, but not being dominated by, a stronger partner in the context of mutually beneficial joint action~the first-best solution would be to become more powerful and thus be on more equal terms with the stronger partner, or perhaps even not to require cooperation!+" 16 Realist theory leads to the expectation that the international distribution of power affects each government's interest in a common foreign and security policy in a different way+ More specifically, governments whose power resources allow them to conduct an independent and effective foreign policy should see no need to relinquish their autonomy and have their hands tied by supranational institutions+ Weaker countries, on the contrary, should be interested in an integrated foreign 14+ Hasenclever et al+ 1997+ 15+ See Waltz 1979andLegro andMoravcsik 1998+ 16+ Grieco 1996, 289+ A similar argument with regard to European defense cooperation is presented by Art 1996+ and security policy for at least two reasons+ First, these countries can expect their influence on world affairs to increase when the EU acts as a unit+ The autonomy they would lose would be offset by the collective power of the supranational polity of which they are a part+ Second, a tight institutional structure would be a way to constrain the stronger member-states, whose independent foreign policy might become a threat to the interests of the smaller countries in the future+ By this logic, supranational integration enhances the security of smaller states by augmenting their external influence and by constraining potential sources of tension+ The hypothesis deriving from realism's emphasis on relative power resources is thus the following: H2: Governments with higher power capabilities will be less supportive of supranational integration in foreign and security matters than governments with lower capabilities+ Both explanatory factors considered so far-policy preferences and ...…”

Conditions of intergovernmental armaments cooperation in Western Europe, 1996–2006

“…The emergence of European security and defence cooperation has provided a particularly fertile ground. Scholars espousing this perspective interpret the drive towards cooperation in defence within Europe as a manifestation of balancing on the part of the larger states against the United States (Art, 2004(Art, , 2006Layne, 2003Layne, , 2006.…”

“…Countries that are relatively close to each other in terms of power capabilities are more likely to balance, whereas countries whose differential is relatively large are more likely to bandwagon with the most powerful state to whose strength they feel attracted (Walt, 1985: 7). Mearsheimer (1990), Art (1996), and Jervis (2005) suggest that small European states will seek to retain the security umbrella of the United States that has brought stability and peace to them. The weak states prefer to bandwagon with the United States rather than to team up with large European ones because not only have the Americans proven their benign intent over the course of the Cold War, but also the contribution of capabilities they could make to the balancing states does not off-set the gap that would still persist.…”

“…20 At a frequency cut-off of six cases and a consistency threshold of 80%, two distinct pathways to the outcome have been found under the intermediate solution, and two under the parsimonious solution. 21 In none is evidence found for the existence of balancing or bandwagoning behaviour as argued by Art (2006), Layne (2006), or Jervis (2005. I will assess the intermediate solution first.…”

“…Under the power-differential model, position affects the propensity to cooperate or not (e.g. Art, 1996;Jervis, 2005;Walt, 2005). The security-dependence model extends the argument by 3 More precisely, omitted-variable bias is the positive or negative distortion in the estimated effect of an explanatory variable on the explained variable that arises when a correlated, excluded variable actually has an effect.…”