The practice of burden sharing in European crisis management operations

ABSTRACT

If a European organisation decides to deploy a military force in Mali or a police mission in Afghanistan, member states probably believe that collective security is a public good that benefits them all. But who will lead the mission? Who will staff it? Who will pay for it? Who will risk casualties? While rational-choice theorists expect little burden sharing, constructivists expect a great deal more insofar as normative pressures are brought to bear on governments. The problem is that it is hard to find countries that systematically eschew their responsibilities or, contrariwise, systematically contribute their fair share out of a sense of moral obligation. In this article, we analyse burden sharing as an anchoring practice, shedding light on the social logic of burden sharing rather than abstract interests or norms. Established after the end of the Second World War, the field of European security has given birth to a “community of security practice” around the more or less routine task of determining national contributions to crisis management operations. Based on interviews with practitioners from the UK, France, Germany, Norway and Ireland, we analyse the impact of intersubjectivity, power and strategic culture on the practice of burden sharing.

KEYWORDS:

• Burden sharing
• Europe
• security
• social practices
• crisis management

Acknowledgements

We thank Federica Bicchi, Niklas Bremberg, colleagues who provided comments during the Stockholm and London workshops, and the two anonymous European Security reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Frédéric Mérand is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Montréal Centre for International Studies (CÉRIUM).

Antoine Rayroux is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Concordia University.

Notes

1. The Athena mechanism is funded in proportion of member states’ GDP, making Germany the bigger contributor to the fund.

2. In the case of Ireland, though, the Eurozone economic crisis had painful consequences in terms of public spending, which also led to a slowdown in multinational peacekeeping deployments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (co-investigator, Martial Foucault).