A new alliance in Europe: the September 2021 defence agreement between Greece and France as a case of embedded alliance formation

ABSTRACT

In September 2021, Greece and France announced the conclusion of a landmark defence agreement, which included not only the sale of modern French frigates to the Hellenic Navy but also the signing of a new “strategic partnership for defence and security cooperation”. The cornerstone of this strategic partnership – which formalises Paris’ and Athens’ geopolitical rapprochement, accelerated after the tensions with Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean in 2020 – lies in a mutual defence clause that commits France and Greece to defend each other in case of an armed attack against their respective territory. The new bilateral alliance thus forged between Athens and Paris, coming on top of similar NATO and EU security guarantees, is of political as well as scholarly interest. Politically, the question is how such an arrangement, which ostensibly aims to protect Greece from fellow NATO member Turkey, squares with the broader European security architecture. From a scholarly perspective, the Franco-Greek defence agreement is remarkable in that, unlike almost all bilateral or minilateral defence cooperation arrangements that have been concluded in recent years between NATO and EU countries, this one touches on the key question of collective defence, thus constituting an intriguing case of “embedded alliance formation”.

KEYWORDS:

• France
• Greece
• alliance
• NATO
• EU
• embedded alliance formation

Acknowledgements

For their useful comments on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank Tongfi Kim, Luis Simón, the participants to the 2022 workshop on “Military Alliances and the Challenges to the Use of Military Force”, co-organised by the European Initiative for Security Studies (EISS), the NATO Defence College (NDC) and the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) at the Brussels School of Governance (BSoG), as well as the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Think tanks have published a few analyses of this agreement, providing useful insights (Sokou 2021, Tertrais 2021, Ülgen and Özel 2021, Schmid and Domingues Dos Santos 2022).

2 Private communication with a French diplomat, 20 July 2022.

3 Author’s own calculations from: https://www.hellenicparliament.gr/UserFiles/c8827c35-4399-4fbb-8ea6-aebdc768f4f7/11865163.pdf.

4 The full text, in French, of the Franco-Greek strategic partnership is provided in the annex to: Décret n° 2022-180 du 14 février 2022 portant publication de l'accord entre le Gouvernement de la République française et le Gouvernement de la République hellénique pour l'établissement d'un partenariat stratégique de coopération en matière de défense et de sécurité, signé à Paris le 28 septembre 2021, Journal officiel de la République française, No.0039, 16 February 2022, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000045174537. For the Greek version, see: https://www.hellenicparliament.gr/Nomothetiko-Ergo/Anazitisi-Nomothetikou-Ergou?law_id=50f9990e-73f6-4015-b706-adb4013e7514.

5 Military alliances tend indeed to generate a “halo effect”, in that the sense of obligation developed by allies towards each other often goes beyond the formal terms of their alliances (Snyder 1997, pp. 8, 356–358).

6 In this respect, press reports in December 2022 that the Greek government may decide to extend Greek territorial waters to 12 nm again in 2023, this time around Crete (Daily Sabah 2022), seem at first sight to confirm rather than contradict this view. It seems indeed that such a possible extension would only concern the southern and western parts of the Cretan coastline, which lie outside the Aegean Sea – thus carefully avoiding crossing, once again, Turkish red lines. Such a view would have to be revised, however, if this extension were in fact to be carried far to the south-east of Crete, an area where the risk of a direct conflict with Turkey is greater (Perot 2021, p. 22).