Abstract
This paper explores different trajectories of European co-operation for naval procurement, which has become topical with the, much touted, merger of French and Italian shipyards to create a ‘naval airbus’ since 2017. What is interesting here is the absence of a Franco-German nexus at the centre of industrial defence collaboration, even if what has been agreed as of 2019 is a much more limited joint venture. Indeed, European shipyards and naval systems integrators, as well as the naval procurement planning process more generally, remain, with a few interesting exceptions, stubbornly national. Consolidation of yards and related firms has only been patchy at the European level. Instead, European naval procurement is dominated by de facto national monopolies offering at the global and European level, rival ships, sensors and weapon fits. Also, examined are collaborative naval projects brokered by OCCAR, the EDA and now PESCO. What do their naval projects reveal and in particular why does the naval sector appear to offer less successful examples of collaborative procurement compared to land or air sectors? In particular, what theoretical perspectives can shed light on this situation: is the relative weakness of European naval procurement due to the absence of a shared culture among European naval-industry elites, intense national institutional path dependencies, or conflict over shares of the global export trade in naval armaments? The argument of the paper stresses the importance of global contracts, competition and markets all of which serve to challenge the logic of any strictly European naval defence co-operation emerging in preference for a more traditional dependence on semi-captive national markets combined also with increasingly non-European global partnerships.
Panel: Arms Procurement and Transfers