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

Defence cooperation between Western European countries has increased considerably since the end of the Cold War. An analytical distinction can be made between political and economic cooperation, the latter having been neglected by political scientists. This study advances the debate on economic cooperation by identifying sources of variation in the European Union (EU)-15 countries' membership rate in cooperative armaments fora aimed at restructuring the demand side of European defence from 1996 to 2006. By combining six models from three different schools of thought, the risk of confirmation bias through intra-paradigmatic reasoning is reduced. At the same time, fuzzy-set analysis opens up the space for data-driven combination effects. Two distinct combinations form sufficient paths leading to high rates of membership. Most importantly, intentions to create collective defence technological and industrial benefits combine with trust in partners' ability and integrity to form an essential combination of conditions for governments to pursue cooperation on armament

Reluctant powers : a concept-building approach and an application to the case of Germany

Reluctance is an extremely widespread phenomenon in international politics. For example, several rising powers have displayed an inconsistent, flip-flopping approach towards their regions and have not conformed to the expectations and wishes of their potential regional followers. While the notion of reluctance is frequently employed to describe this type of incoherent and unresponsive foreign policy, the concept of reluctance has not been systematically defined and discussed in the fields of International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis. This paper develops a conceptualization of reluctance by identifying the concept’s semantic field and discussing how reluctance relates to similar but distinct notions in the field of IR (concept reconstruction) and, on that basis, by outlining the constitutive dimensions of reluctance and their operationalization (concept building). To illustrate how this conceptualization of reluctance can provide new insights in empirical analyses, the concept is applied to the case of Germany’s approach to crisis management in Europe and the European neighborhood