Unexpected compliance? The implementation of the Defence and Security Procurement Directive

ABSTRACT

When the member states of the European Union (EU) accepted the Defence and Security Procurement Directive, the expectation was that they would be able to retain a substantial amount of autonomy. During the implementation process, however, the members accepted the European Commission as a legitimate authority on how the Directive should be implemented. In this light, member states changed one specific policy issue, not addressed in the Directive: their offset policy. Addressing the role of the Commission in the Common Security and Defence Policy, this paper analyses three separate cases and finds that a cost benefit analysis cannot explain why these member states complied with non-legally binding Guidance Notes issued by the Commission. The paper also explores the role of national civil servants seeking rule consistency and finds they acknowledged the authority of the Commission in prescribing new rules.

KEYWORDS:

• Defence and Security Procurement Directive
• European Commission
• Guidance Notes
• implementation
• compliance
• cost benefit analysis
• bureaucracy

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Helene Sjursen for her comments on several drafts of this article and constant encouragement. Many thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and thank you to the Norwegian Ministry of Defence for financing this research. A previous version of this article was presented at an ANTERO workshop in Dublin, 31 May – 2 June 2017. This article is part of the EuroDiv project at ARENA, a research project financed by the Research Council of Norway’s initiative ‘Europe in Transition’ (EUROPA).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Offsets are the return investment of a country that sells defence material to a foreign government. Consequently, the return investment stimulates the economy of the buying country (Trybus 2014; Weiss and Blauberger 2016).

2. This enforcement is reflected in current cases against Denmark and the Netherlands (European Commission 2018).