Self-Binding via Benchmarking: Collective Action, Desirable Futures, and NATO’s Two Percent Goal

ABSTRACT

How do states use benchmarks to organise their collective action? Although states increasingly rely on benchmarks to steer their collective action towards futures they deem desirable, research in IR has not yet unpacked the ways in which benchmarks alleviate – but also sometimes worsen – collective action problems. I argue that benchmarking enables states to tackle three interrelated problems: the coordination problem by the setting of common goals, the burden-sharing problem by the setting of individual goals and the assurance problem by generating comparative dynamics that are conducive to the fulfilment of these goals. Benchmarking thus amounts to a form of “self-binding” to certain futures. I illustrate and explore this self-binding through a case study of the two percent spending goal that NATO publicly adopted in 2014. The case study provides insights into how states back their commitment to goals through benchmarking while circumscribing the resulting pressure game to avert detrimental effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Benchmarks
• collective action
• futures
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization
• self-binding

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited greatly from the discussions and feedback during two workshops organised by John Berten and Matthias Kranke in June 2019 and May 2020. I am also very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The article was written in the context of the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 “Practices of Comparing” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For the growing indicators literature in International Relations, see notably Broome and Quirk (2015), Merry (2016), Mügge (2016), Malito, Umbach, and Bhuta (2018), Kelley and Simmons (2019, 2020) and Beaumont and Towns (2021). Mayer (2014, 13–29) and Urlacher (2018) provide good overviews of the collective action literature.

2 For a useful discussion of constructivist theorising, see Kratochwil (2008).

3 For a more detailed discussion of the openness of the future and the anticipation of possible futures see the editors’ introduction to this special issue (Berten and Kranke 2022).

4 Following Guzzini (2012, 58–61), this research strategy can be described as a form of “interpretivist process tracing” of the evolution of a social mechanism: the benchmarking process through which NATO seeks to steer its collective action.

5 I bracket for this article the possibility that actors engage in two or more forms of self-binding that hamper each other. For instance, the EU’s fiscal rules constrain most of the European NATO members in their quest to fulfil the two percent goal (see Becker 2019).

6 Broome and Quirk (2015, 820) list “indicators” as a subtype of benchmarks alongside indexes, metrics, rankings and so on. Other authors – e.g. Merry (2016), Malito, Umbach, and Bhuta (2018) – in contrast use the notion of indicators as umbrella term for the various comparative evaluation techniques. Their definition of indicators, though, is similar to Broome and Quirk’s definition of benchmarks. Merry (2016, 12) for instance conceptualises indicators as “the systemic, comparative organization and presentation of information that allows for comparison among units or over time”, notably with regard to the performance of these units. I therefore treat “indicators” and “benchmarks” as interchangeable terms.

7 I thus concentrate on the ideas/perceptions side, rather than the identity/norms side, of the constructivist research agenda that Zyla (2018) proposes for NATO’s burden-sharing.

8 The reports from 1963 to the present can be consulted on NATO’s website. See NATO (2021).

9 For an analysis of various critical junctures in NATO’s history, see Johnston (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the DFG [Grant Number SFB 1288 “Praktiken des Vergleichens”].

Notes on contributors

Thomas Müller

Thomas Müller is a postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University. His main research interests are great power politics, the interplay of hierarchies and the politics of quantification in world politics. In the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 “Practices of Comparing” at Bielefeld University, he currently co-leads a project that studies how knowledge about the distribution of power is produced and used in world politics. His most recent articles have been published in the Review of International Studies, Global Society and the European Journal of International Security.