Pools of European structural integration: framing nations and the re-centring of defence pooling after 2022

If austerity after 2008 aroused the European interest in pooling and sharing, the Crimean crisis of 2014 turned it into a programme: NATO Centres of Excellence, the Permanent Structured Cooperation, the European Defence Fund, OCCAR programmes, the EU Battlegroups and NATO’s forward presence are several hundred small collective actions through which European allies pool national resources under a framing nation. This article reads them through Galtung’s structural theory of integration, in which integration is the formation of a new actor by territorial, organisational or associational principles, and operationalises the theory with a typology that codes every pool by one of five functions and aggregates the functions by the capability pooled, the form of the pool and its content. On 496 pools and 3,177 participations of the 27 EU member states and the United Kingdom, it asks who frames and who joins each group of pools, and whether the centre of the system is the same whichever theory defines it: structural position, capacity, the size of the defence institution, or status. Five findings follow. The centres coincide at the top, with the United Kingdom as the rank-disequilibrated exception; framing follows the size of the defence institution rather than money or status, and joiners are drawn by size, not by soft power; along the supply chain from industry through the rear echelon to military operations the interaction structure turns from feudal to one without a stable centre, and from non-contiguous to territorial; the post-communist allies form an association of equals in the rear echelon while industry remains a club of the large; and from the launch of PESCO the common capabilities re-centred on the large Western institutions, the post-communist share of new participations in the operational pools falling from 40 per cent before 2014 to 23 per cent after 2022, while the national capabilities under allied command and the new coalitions for Ukraine moved leadership towards the flank. Galtung’s three principles, sixty years on, describe the European NATO well.