Sharing the Burden of Collective Security in the European Union. Research Note

This article compares European Union (EU) burden-sharing in security governance distinguishing between assurance, prevention, protection, and compellence policies. We employ joint-product models and examine the variation in the level of publicness, the asymmetry of the distribution of costs and benefits, and aggregation technologies in each policy domain. Joint-product models predict equal burden sharing for protection and assurance because of their respective weakest-link and summation aggregation technologies with symmetric costs. Prevention is also characterized by the technology of summation, but asymmetry of costs implies uneven burden-sharing. Uneven burden-sharing is predicted for compellence because it has the largest asymmetry of costs and a best-shot aggregation technology. Evaluating burden-sharing relative to a country?s ability to contribute, Kendall tau-tests examine the rank-correlation between security burden and the capacity of EU member states. These tests show that the smaller EU members disproportionately shoulder the costs of assurance and protection; wealthier EU members carry a somewhat disproportionate burden in the provision of prevention, and larger EU members in the provision of compellence. When analyzing contributions relative to expected benefits, asymmetric marginal costs can largely explain uneven burden-sharing. The main conclusion is that the aggregated burden of collective security governance in the EU is shared quite evenly

China and the European Union

European Union–China relations have despite different histories and values, economic and political development, geographic distance and interests, not only strengthened over time in institutional terms, but also moved beyond the core area of economic interactions to involve political, security and cultural cooperation. On the whole the relationship is based on partnership and neither sees the other as a potential enemy. Both support a strong United Nations, the existing international trade system, the non-proliferation regime, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change among others. These joint perspectives are particularly valuable given the retreat of President Trump from a number of hitherto US honored international agreements and commitments, such as on multilateralism, arms treaties and international governance. On the down side initial expectations that growing economic interactions between the EU and China would narrow the gap on human rights and democracy issues between the two parties have not materialized and the EU can no longer pretend to shape the China in its own image. There are also a number of unresolved problems affecting the partnership. Among these are disputes over trade imbalances, investment access regulations in China and human rights issues, on the one hand, and the persistent arms embargo sanctions and unfulfilled market access status for China, on the other. Overcoming these is not being helped by existing misperceptions that Europeans and Chinese have about each other. Furthermore, as China continues to gain economically, partly through the Belt and Road Initiative, seeks to broaden its international relations policy with Chinese characteristics, and moves to an aggressive maritime policy in the East and South China Sea, the EU will find the partnership more testing at both the bilateral and multilateral level

ANVIL Deliverable 5.1: Report on EU added-value for policy stakeholders

This report constitutes Deliverable 5.1 of the FP7 Security Programme Coordination and Support Action ‘Analysis of Civil Security Systems in Europe’ (ANVIL, Grant Agreement no. 284678). Deliverable 5.1 is a report onwork package 5, which is dedicatedto providingpolicy stakeholders with an EU added-valuecontribution in civil security. The definition of EU added-valuefor ANVIL follows a dual rationale. In administrative terms, the concept means the added-valueof the project itself for civil security policy-making communities in Europe. Simply put, it asks how beneficial the results of this EU-funded project are for the end-users in their everyday practice of drafting civil security and civil protection recommendations. A second definition of EU added-valuedraws on the nature of our study and its content, and explores whether additional EU actions related to crisis management can have a positive impact on the delivery of civil protection at national level. In WP5 we have taken both definitions into consideration. WP5’s final evaluation workshop oscillatesbetween both definitions

New horizons in EU–Japan security cooperation

Alongside the EU–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) between the EU and Japan entered into force in 2019. Whereas the EPA enshrines the existing interconnectedness between the Japanese and European economies, the SPA remains more aspirational. With an emphasis on shared norms and values and recognising an increasingly hostile external environment, the EU and Japan are seeking to deepen and broaden their security cooperation. For the period 1990–2017, EU–Japan security cooperation is mapped for a broad range of security domains. During this period, cooperation has increased notably in domains such as economic security, cyber-security and civil protection. In other areas, such as military, regional, energy and human security as well as terrorism, the scope of cooperation lags behind. Looking forward, the SPA not only reflects a renewed interest and level of ambition in the EU and Japan but also provides them with a platform to extend security cooperation to address their global and regional challenges

Security Cooperation in EU-China Relations: Towards Convergence?

Over the past decade, the EU and China have expanded their relations beyond a focus on economic and trade issues into the sphere of security. This is particularly evident when security is seen to encompass a variety of policy domains—from traditional, military security to non-traditional human security. However, this development has not followed an even or linear path: the record of EU-China security cooperation has been varied across different policy domains, with distinct temporal trajectories. This article addresses the question of why security cooperation between the two sides has advanced in certain policy domains while having faltered in others. Based on an expert survey of European and Chinese scholars, we explore both interest-driven and experience-driven explanations. Our analysis identifies a number of key events in the development of EU-China relations that have been critical in terms of initiating and enhancing cooperation in specific domains. Overall, we find that past experience with actual cooperation, rather than declared intentions, best explains the pattern of cooperation over time

Security: Collective good or commodity?

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 Sage.The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in Europe and North America has been central to the development of security as a collective good. Not only has it institutionalized the state as the prime national and international security provider, it has helped to reduce the threat from other actors by either prohibiting or limiting their use of violence. The recent growth of the private security industry appears to undermine this view. Not only are private security firms proliferating at the national level; private military companies are also taking over an increasing range of military functions in both national defence and international interventions. This article seeks to provide an examination of the theoretical and practical implications of the shift from states to markets in the provision of security. Specifically, it discusses how the conceptualization of security as a commodity rather than a collective good affects the meaning and implementation of security in Western democracies.ESR

Convergence towards a European strategic culture? A constructivist framework for explaining changing norms.

The article contributes to the debate about the emergence of a European strategic culture to underpin a European Security and Defence Policy. Noting both conceptual and empirical weaknesses in the literature, the article disaggregates the concept of strategic culture and focuses on four types of norms concerning the means and ends for the use of force. The study argues that national strategic cultures are less resistant to change than commonly thought and that they have been subject to three types of learning pressures since 1989: changing threat perceptions, institutional socialization, and mediatized crisis learning. The combined effect of these mechanisms would be a process of convergence with regard to strategic norms prevalent in current EU countries. If the outlined hypotheses can be substantiated by further research the implications for ESDP are positive, especially if the EU acts cautiously in those cases which involve norms that are not yet sufficiently shared across countries

Proceedings of the 29th EG-ICE International Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering

This publication is the Proceedings of the 29th EG-ICE International Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering from July 6-8, 2022. The EG-ICE International Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering brings together international experts working on the interface between advanced computing and modern engineering challenges. Many engineering tasks require open-world resolution of challenges such as supporting multi-actor collaboration, coping with approximate models, providing effective engineer-computer interaction, search in multi-dimensional solution spaces, accommodating uncertainty, including specialist domain knowledge, performing sensor-data interpretation and dealing with incomplete knowledge. While results from computer science provide much initial support for resolution, adaptation is unavoidable and most importantly, feedback from addressing engineering challenges drives fundamental computer-science research. Competence and knowledge transfer goes both ways. &nbsp