Search

As the UK leaves the European Union and as the multilateral order is increasingly under stress, bilateral security links are more important than ever. Among such relationships, the UK-France partnership has become particularly critical in the past decades. Alice Pannier's Rivals in Arms reveals the history of the growing special partnership between Europe's two leading military powers in the twenty-first century. Using an innovative analytical framework rooted in theories of cooperation and negotiation, this book exposes the challenges the two countries have faced to develop, equip, and employ their military capabilities together. Through a decade-long study, Pannier highlights how France and the UK have endeavoured to make their partnership more effective and resistant to domestic and international shifts, including Brexit. Building on more than one hundred interviews with key stakeholders and unmatched access to primary sources, Rivals in Arms takes the reader behind the scenes, investigating the complicated but crucial defence relationship between France and the UK - a relationship that is critical to the future of Euro-Atlantic security.

This book describes the evolution of French defence policy since the end of the Cold War. For the past thirty years there have been significant changes to French defence policy as a result of several contextual evolutions. Changes include shifts in the global balance of power, new understandings of the notion of international security, economic downturns, and developments in European integration. Yet despite these changes, the purpose of France’s grand strategy and its main principles have remained remarkably stable over time. This book identifies the incentives, representations and objectives of French defence policy The authors examine the general mechanisms that influence policy change and military transformation in democracies, the importance of status-seeking in international relations, the processes of strategy-making by a middle power, and the dilemmas and challenges of security cooperation. By doing so the book raises a number of questions related to the ways states adjust (or not) their security policies in a transformed international system. This book makes French-language sources available to non-French-speaking readers and contributes to a better understanding of a country that is at the forefront of Europe’s external action. This book will be of great interest to students of defence studies, French politics, military studies, security studies, and IR in general.

This thesis seeks to improve our understanding of the mechanisms of bilateral cooperation, with an analysis of the implementation of the Franco-British Treaty of cooperation in defence and security, signed in 2010. The thesis studies three cases of bilateral cooperation: the military intervention in Libya in 2011, the development of the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force and cooperation on armaments in the missile sector. The thesis fills an empirical gap on contemporary Franco-British defence relations, a topic of critical academic and political importance on which no recent monograph exists. Examining interactions among the variety of collective actors involved, it offers a fine-grained account of the workings and processes of this newly institutionalised cooperation, across sectors of conventional defence. In the absence of a satisfactory existing theory, the mechanisms specific to bilateral cooperation are analysed using an original model. The model is centred on four concepts that represent the challenges of bilateral cooperation: incongruity (incompatibility of interests), astructuration (lack of structure, formal and informal), symmetrism (search for similarity and equality) and entanglement (intertwining with other bilateral, multilateral and transnational relations). Through a detailed analysis of the case studies, the thesis demonstrates that these challenges are in fact inherent to the process of bilateral cooperation and it explains how they shape the outcome of the bilateral enterprises. The thesis also shows that each experience of cooperation initiates transformative dynamics, which progressively alter the conduct of cooperation in each specific sector and the bilateral defence relationship more broadly. These transformative dynamics are ambivalent, as both cooperative and competitive practices become constituents of Franco-British defence cooperation.

À l’Est de l’Europe, au Sud de la Méditerranée, sur le territoire même des Européens, les menaces s’accumulent. Face à cette situation, que peut dire une politique européenne de sécurité et de défense en panne ? À quelles conditions les coopérations de défense pourraient-elles redémarrer ? Et si l’on parle de cohésion face aux échéances politiques, que penser de l’hypothèse d’une sortie de l’Union européenne du Royaume-Uni ? Catastrophe ? Nouveau départ ? Un numéro qui s’interroge sur tous les environnements de l’Europe et sur notre capacité à prendre les décisions nécessaires – ou à ignorer la réalité du monde.