Eclecticism and the future of the burden-sharing research programme: Why Trump is wrong

Abstract

Since the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Europeans and the Americans have disagreed about who should share how much of the collective security burden. The input side of alliance burden sharing – that is, how many troops a member state contributes to the alliance – has been the privileged variable, both at the political as well as the academic levels. Other output variables (e.g. numbers of troops deployed to a particular mission) are highly contested. This article offers an analytically eclecticist framework for studying Atlantic burden sharing that allows combining variables on the input and output sides of the alliance burden sharing debate with those that consider it a social practice.

Keywords

Collective action post-positivism institutionalism international organizations burden sharing

Introduction

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has experienced burden-sharing debates since its creation in 1949.¹ When considering how to fairly contribute to the alliance² and how to share its collective burden, historically both the Europeans and the Americans have disagreed significantly about who should share how much of the collective alliance burden.³ The latter have argued that it was time for the Europeans to increase their share because America had already paid enough during WWII; the former believed that they needed time to recover financially from the war. Partly to mitigate these disagreements, in the early 1950s NATO instituted the Annual Force Review, which was a simple defence formula by which the contributions of troops for each member state were decided, adjusted, and sometimes even traded. Thus, if one member provided more forces, other allies were required to contribute fewer (Thies, 2003: 77-122). With that process in place, the US concentrated on strengthening the Europeans’ contributions to NATO, to decrease American efforts, and to avoid duplicating the efforts of other allies.

The input side of alliance burden sharing (ABS) – that is, how many troops a member state contributes to the alliance – has been at the center of ABS debates until this day, both at the political as well as the academic levels. For example, at the Brussels NATO Summit in July 2018, President Trump challenged the 24 European countries that had not yet reached the 2% gross domestic product (GDP) benchmark of defence spending agreed upon at the Wales Summit in 2014, threatening them in a letter that they would lose US protection if their defence expenses did not increase. On Twitter, he stated:

[M]any countries in NATO, which we are expected to defend, are not only short of their current commitment of 2% (which is low), but are also delinquent for many years in payments that have not been made. Will they reimburse the U.S.? (Twitter, 2018)

At the actual summit meeting, Trump specifically accused Berlin of being ‘a captive of Russia’ and that ‘[i]t certainly doesn’t seem to make sense that they paid billions of dollars to Russia and we have to defend them against Russia’ (CNN, 2018). On the second day of the summit, Trump renewed his threats with an ultimatum, demanding an increase in defence spending by January 2019, ‘or the United States would go it alone’ (CNN, 2018).

This threat by the USA to leave the alliance did not go unnoticed in the alliance. Trump’s statements not only caused surprise and commotion – the USA had considered NATO an important pillar of its foreign policy since 1949 – they also shook the somewhat fragile unity that NATO wanted to show toward a re-strengthened Russia in the aftermath of the crisis in Crimea. All this considered, Trump was neither the first president nor the first US politician to voice dissatisfaction with the seemingly insufficient contributions of some European NATO members. He is only the latest to continue to use the input side as the key index for measuring ABS.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed back swiftly by pointing to other types of contributions to ABS – namely those that consider the output side. She noted that

Germany also does a lot for NATO. We are the second largest donor of troops, we put most of our military abilities into the service of NATO and we are strongly committed in Afghanistan, where we also defend the interests of the United States of America. (The Guardian, 2018)

Merkel was joined by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who supported the chancellor’s point of view. He added that ‘[y]ou can try and be a beancounter and look at exactly how-much-this and how-much-money-that. The fundamental question is: Is what you’re doing actually making a difference?’ (CBC, 2018a).

For Trudeau, NATO is about shared values and beliefs:

We are training together, learning together and developing a level of interoperability that goes beyond military tactics and abilities. It goes to how we understand each other, how we learn from each other and how we grow together. That as a demonstration of our shared values and convictions as an alliance is as strong as any other indication we can show with the amount of tanks or the amount of firepower. (CBC, 2018b)

He further reminded his colleagues that

[w]hen it comes to NATO, Canada has always pulled its weight. Our engagement in NATO has only expanded over the years, and with good reason: it reflects Canadian values, and is essential in preserving the rules-based international order. We will continue to step up and work together with our Allies to build a safer, more peaceful world for our citizens and people around the world. (Prime Minister’s Office, 2018)

Other leaders supported Merkel and Trudeau, even those who had already met the 2% benchmark, such as former Latvian prime minister Maris Kucinskis. For him, NATO’s capacity as an alliance was more important than the 2% benchmark (Prime Minister’s Office, 2018).

The goal of presenting these three short examples is to show the divergence of opinion among the leaders of the NATO member states on the questions of ABS and how to measure ABS contributions. Trump firmly believes that calculating the level of GDP devoted to defence spending is the best variable to consider, while Merkel, Trudeau, and Kucinskis prefer to focus on the number of troops deployed in missions that have benefited the security of both Europe and the USA (Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, etc.). Thus, the concept of ABS should be widened beyond focusing on inputs; it should also include outputs and focus on the quality of these outputs.

The debate about input versus output transcends the political world, reaching deep into academic debates. While we examine the literature’s ontological and epistemological assumptions in greater detail in the next section, it suffices here to note that a large majority of studies present strong rationality assumptions and positivist⁴ epistemologies when analyzing ABS behaviour. The majority of the literature approaches the topic in a deductive manner, narrowly testing the hypotheses of ABS with single, static methods. ABS is also mostly ontologically static, assuming that ABS actors (e.g. member states, politicians, members of NATO’s International Staff) are rational, cost-benefit-calculating entities that do not have much political agency of their own (Zyla, 2015).

In short, to a large extent the literature considers ABS to be a static outcome rather than a social process that is informed by, for example, intersubjective meanings, social forces, norms, beliefs, or values, which are not only derived from material burden-sharing interests but can themselves inform ABS behaviour (Keck and Sikking, 1998).⁵ This is a challenge to the extent that we cannot find the answers to more complex questions, such as why a particular ABS pattern exists (e.g. free-riding), and why a trend emerged at a specific moment in time, by employing these analytically static lenses.⁶

This paper seeks to start a dialogue about how an analytical, eclecticist framework can address this gap by combining variables on the input and output sides of the ABS debate with those that consider it a social practice. The latter would require stepping toward a post-positivist⁷ epistemology and away from materialistic ontology.

What is being presented here as analytical eclecticism is not to be interpreted as an alternative model of research (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010). It should rather be viewed as an intellectual viewpoint that combines various theoretical frameworks. Specifically, eclecticism selectively combines complementary theoretical frameworks in the field of international relations (IR) and can thus be described as a ‘middle-range causal account incorporating complex interactions among multiple mechanisms and logics drawn from more than one paradigm’ (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010: 19; see also Cornut, 2015). Lake (2013) calls this a meta-theory and notes that the goal of analytical eclecticism is to find the best assumptions for capturing the nature of humans. Specifically, the added value of analytical eclecticism is that it considers more than just one or two variables; it aims to holistically combine a number of both quantitative and qualitative variables in its explanation. Offering this inclusive approach clearly is an advantage of analytical eclecticism compared to conventional theories. Lake (2013: 573) reminds us that ‘[i]t is precisely this “mixing and matching” of assumptions, issue areas, units, and interests that makes this sort of theorizing “eclectic.”’

Three distinct characteristics of analytical eclecticism are particularly important for ABS studies (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010: 412). First, while it is common in IR to be paradigm-driven, analytical eclecticism focuses more on complex and real-world problems and situations (Sil and Katzenstein, 2011: 482–483). This tendency, inspired by American pragmatism, allows for the ‘formulation and exploration of novel and more complex sets of problems’ (Friedrichs, 2009: 647). In this sense, the progress of analytical eclecticism is ‘measured’ in terms of how successful these theoretical paradigms are in solving real-world problems.

Second, analytical eclecticism is effective when it addresses and analyzes large and complex problems. It is less appropriate when considering a specific research question or filling narrow gaps in the ‘traditional’ IR literature (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010: 412). It promises to produce a variety and number of empirical solutions to large problems (Lake, 2013). As a result, for the ABS research programme analytical eclecticism promises to reveal a wider and deeper array of links to explain states’ burden-sharing behaviours than traditional IR theories can.

Third, analytic eclecticism is not interested in generating parsimonious explanations (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010: 412). It has the capacity to tackle complex, multi-dimensional, and policy-relevant problems and to combine different ontological viewpoints. Therefore, a broad eclecticist approach, which would include a multitude of variables, avoids the oversimplification of explanations or an excessive reliance on single frameworks (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010: 414). In this sense, paradigmatic and policy-relevant thinking complements the traditional and parsimonious theorizing of ‘classical’ IR theories.

As questions of ABS are known to be inherently complex and placed at the intersection of theory, policy, and practice, we charge that an eclecticist approach would help us to acknowledge the confluence of factors that can account for a particular ABS decision or behaviour.⁸ Analytical eclecticism goes beyond studying the material and structural factors that are mostly typical of realist and liberal IR theories and includes ideas and social contexts as variables in its analysis.

The advantages of taking an analytically eclecticist approach would be manifold. First, it would add an analysis of social variables to the currently primarily material and structure-focused analysis. At the moment, the ABS literature does not reveal the social motivations and power structures that influence ABS behaviours. Giving actors more agency would allow us to understand their intersubjective social structures and their value-rational motivations for sharing ABS rather than solely considering their cost-benefit calculations. Indeed, broadening the equation to include societal norms, values, beliefs, and power structures (Foucault and Mérand, 2012) could better disclose states’ motivations and the intersubjectivity of ABS. More attention could also be paid to the interpretations, perceptions, and definitions that politicians give to the concepts of ‘burden’, ‘fairness’, and ‘justice’, and how they may or may not influence ABS decisions.

Second, an eclecticist approach would allow for a combination of two logics to explain ABS behaviour, one being a logic of appropriateness (March and Olsen, 2004) and the other being the logic of consequentiality, which is based on strict cost-benefit calculations.

Third, because it is possible to combine both material and social variables in an analytical eclecticist framework, we would be exposed to new variables for studying ABS behaviours.

Fourth, we have shown that different currents, or actors, see ABS differently. For example, positivists view ABS as an outcome, while post-positivists treat it as a process or practice (Schatzki et al., 2001). Thus, an analytically eclecticist approach would allow us to concurrently study two dependent variables (what burden sharing actually is). In other words, the two epistemologies use the same term, burden sharing, to analyze different things.

Without trying to interpret which definition or interpretation of burden sharing is better, analytical eclecticism can integrate the two variables and, thus, overcome some rather narrow analyses in this field. Consequently, engaging in a paradigmatic struggle of competing theoretical frameworks is not very helpful for pushing the ABS research program forward. An analytically eclecticist framework⁹ could overcome this theoretical narrowness that might exist when focusing on mono-paradigmatic approaches (e.g. idealism, realism, liberalism). It would also allow for a multi-level study of factors that each NATO member state considers influential, such as parliaments, non-governmental organizations, and the media.

In sum, an analytical eclecticist approach has the potential to improve our understanding of various aspects of ABS, especially (a) how states view and construct NATO’s collective burdens in their domestic polities; (b) what meaning each state assigns to these collective burdens; (c) what value and instrumentally rational motivations influence states’ ABS behaviour, and which normative predispositions they have toward NATO’s public goods; and (d) how member states can negotiate and trade ABS values in NATO’s political marketplace of ideas¹⁰ and meanings, both at the institutional level (e.g. the North Atlantic Council) and at the level of the member states (e.g. formal or informal ministerial meetings). The inclusion of these ideational variables widens the perspectives for the ABS research programme.

To be clear, we are not juxtaposing positivist versus post-positivist epistemologies; nor are we suggesting that one is superior to the other, that the latter provides deeper explanations, or that we should entirely disregard positivist ABS scholarship. This is an impossible call to make because there is no agreed-upon standard by which we can judge which epistemologies are better or worse; nor should positivist literature be entirely disregarded, or an explanation considered superior or inferior.

In the next section, we first discuss the conventional scholarly thinking on ABS, without claiming comprehensiveness, then consider power- and interest-based theories. What follows in the next section is a discussion on idea- and identity-based theories, which were mostly advanced by the constructivist scholarship in IR. This is followed by a presentation of analytical eclecticism and its possible methodological implications. The last section provides some methodological suggestions for what an analytically eclecticist ABS research programme might look like.

Conventional scholarly thinking on ABS

As a reminder, this is not a comprehensive literature review of ABS – that is already well documented elsewhere (e.g. Zyla, 2015). Instead, we review the main and most influential features of that literature as the basis for exploring how an eclecticist approach could improve the research programme on ABS. Three subcategories are worth mentioning: (a) power-based theories, which are associated with (neo-)realist theories in the field of IR; (b) interest-based theories, which are aligned with (neo-)liberal theories of international cooperation; and (c) idea- and identity-based, constructivist theories that consider ideas, arguments, and social identities.

Power-based theories

Realism

Ontologically speaking, power-based theories explain burden-sharing behaviours by considering state- and system-level variables. The power levels of states vary, which explains why states shoulder collective burdens – for example, to counter powers or threats (e.g. Walt, 1987) – and the more powerful states will offer protection to the less powerful states. This disparity in material power capabilities (especially for neo-realists) among states lays the foundation for revisionists to question the effectiveness and purpose of burden-sharing models. Power is seen as a way to achieve national security and as one of the motivations for entering into a burden-sharing regime that promises to yield exactly that level of security. In this logic of power, strong military members will offer protection to weaker states that free-ride and enjoy the benefit of the alliance without paying very much for it. Those allies that value the alliance the least or have better alternatives are more inclined to lobby others for stronger alliance commitments or offer some side payments.

Public choice model

Following a similar ontology, rational institutionalism (Shepsle, 2008) is one of the branches of rationalist theory most often employed in studying ABS. An alliance is an institution, and it either provides a pure public good (e.g. collective defence) (Olson and Zeckhauser, 1966) or collectively consumes a good or a service (Buchanan, 2008) (e.g. peace, order, stability). Deductive analyses have shown that if the public good is pure, it must be non-rival and non-exclusive. Non-exclusiveness suggests that all allies should have access to the good and its benefits without impeding the access of others to the same good and benefits. The benefits of a public good are non-excludable. This means that preventing one ally from consuming the good is not feasible and that unless extra payments or coercive behaviours are used, larger alliances tend to produce fewer public goods.

Based on this, scholars have established three hypotheses. First, the most powerful states, in terms of level of GDP spent on defence, carry a larger proportion of NATO’s transatlantic burden (Sandler and Hartley, 1999). Second, free-riders – those states that profit from the benefits of the public good without participating in paying for them – hinder the overall well-being of an alliance. Third, both private and public goods can be produced by alliances (Sandler and Hartley, 1999: 34ff) – specifically, when benefits are paid privately to alliance members. Based on this hypothesis, IR scholars have concluded that allies who value the public good the most carry the majority of the burden (Thies, 2003).

Interest-based theories

States are not unitary actors, but highly decentralized and fragmented entities composed of various societal groups and actors. The latter are expected to hold individual preferences for ABS, while these preferences differ analytically from strategies. Thus, states represent actors with varying opinions and preferences. What these actors are hoping to obtain in terms of outcomes (e.g. security, wealth, peace) will impact their cost-benefit calculations – for example, is it in states’ interest to contribute? That is to say, states represent societal preferences through institutions that are themselves constantly engaged in processing the demands and interests of societal groups. According to Moravcsik, ‘[. . .] the state is not an actor but a representative institution, constantly subject to capture and recapture, construction and reconstruction, by coalitions of social actors’ (2003: 163). Therefore, institutions are considered the transmission belts in the exchange of and competition for ABS ideas. After considering all the actors’ preferences, institutions present the final products of that process – namely, state preferences. This viewpoint shows which of the actors or groups influences most of the state preferences for ABS.

Furthermore, there exists a hierarchy in each actor’s preferences and strategies, which may be influenced by – or influence – others’ preferences. These bargaining processes transcend national boundaries and thus entail costs and benefits for states as well as non-state actors. In this bargaining context, three outcomes are possible: negotiating for zero-sum-game preferences, overlapping preferences, or mixed preferences.

In conclusion, in interest-based theories, the relationship between the state and (international) society is an essential variable for explaining ABS behaviour.

Alliance value

In a similar interest-based perspective, Massie and Zyla (2018) argue that states invest in an alliance in proportion to the benefits that they believe they will receive from it. Thus, states that expect large benefits have a tendency to value the alliance to a higher degree and to increase their burden-sharing contributions.¹¹ Equally, a state that values the alliance less is expected to shoulder less ABS (Massie and Zyla, 2018). All in all, states consider external threats and their possible influence in an alliance when determining their ABS contributions to a collective (alliance) cause.

Alliance entrapment and dependence and/or abandonment

ABS behaviour may also be influenced by fears of alliance entrapment or abandonment. Alliance entrapment occurs when a member state does not confront an external threat along with its allies or even chooses to join an aggressor against the alliance (Snyder, 1984). This represents a constant concern for members of being abandoned. On the one hand, the less autonomy a state has vis-a-vis its allies, the more likely it is to fear being entrapped in their quarrels. It is thus reasonable to hypothesize that, on the one hand, states with a high level of dependence on the USA may fear losing America’s protection and, on the other hand, fear being entangled in a US-led conflict in which they have little interest (e.g. Bennett et al., 1994: 44–45). This dependence on the USA also prescribes to which level allies will support US-led NATO missions.

Limitations of power- and interest-based theories of ABS

Zyla (2015: 35–45) presents an extensive discussion of the limitations of the power- and interest-based theories of ABS, which were magnified with the end of the Cold War. Thus, a simple summary of them should suffice here. The power- and interest-based theories of ABS are theoretically and methodologically limited for a number of reasons.

The Cold War gave new meaning to ‘collective defence’ as a public good and thus challenged the rationalist assumptions of power- and interest-based theories.

Rationalist models have a limited scope for understanding state behaviours because they focus on material rather than social variables in their analysis.

Rationalists’ assumptions of jointness and pureness are too strict to explain real-life scenarios.

There is no equal and balanced production of public goods among NATO members, with the result that alliances may also produce multiple public goods that can be exchanged or traded among allies.

Actors’ preferences for ABS may change over time and are, therefore, not necessarily static.

Members’ contributions are controlled by the resources available to them in a specific context (e.g. nuclear powers have very particular capabilities that are not available to all allies).

To conclude, ontological and epistemological assumptions of rationalist ABS theories are limited in their understanding of states’ social structures and motivations for ABS. That is, they clearly lack an understanding of states’ intersubjective social structures, their meanings, and their value-rational motivations for (or against) sharing collective burdens, and they consider them to be independent variables that explain ABS behaviour.

Constructivist idea- and identity-based theories

Following our review of the power- and interest-based theories of ABS, this section explores post-positivist theories and their explanatory value in an eclecticist approach to the study of ABS. The value-added by idea- and identity-based theories is that although they have been used in IR before, they are fairly new to the study of ABS. They are also new to an eclecticist framework of ABS since such a framework does not yet exist. To be sure, due to space limitations the goal is not to test new theoretical propositions. Rather, we simply aim to show how these idea- and identity-based theories, using an eclecticist approach, could potentially advance our analysis of ABS and what an inductive ABS research program might look like. In this sense, we are simply pushing the ABS research program, rather than offering new empirical analyses. As noted above, we also do not take sides in the debates about whether these idea- and identity-based theories are indeed theories or whether they should rather be considered meta-theoretical standpoints that ameliorate ontological assumptions put forward by the power- or interest-based theories discussed above; nor do we offer any particular solutions for this debate.

More specifically, constructivist approaches stress ideas and identity as independent, explanatory variables rather than treating them as exogenously given, as rationalist theories do. Rationalist scholarship, constructivists charge, treats the processes that produce the self-understanding of states (e.g. their identities), as well as the ideas and objectives of what they perceive to be in their (national) interest, as a black box – that is, as an unknown process. Constructivists challenge this ontological claim by pointing out that these processes are causally affected by decision-makers’ beliefs and values. This representation can be altered by the fact that the knowledge held by ABS actors influences their perception of reality and informs their behaviour and decisions. Constructivists also hypothesize that ABS actors’ beliefs and values can change, and this dynamic evolution can alter the actors’ perceived ABS options and choices. In sum, to conceptualize ABS as an outcome, it is essential to recognize the causal link between the world view and perceptions that states’ foreign policy actors have of security issues and threats, and the ABS policies of that state. Here, an eclecticist research program would build on positivist scholarship to better explain and understand ABS.

Moreover, these beliefs can be considered to be at least partially independent from material interests (e.g. the distribution of power and wealth); indeed, as Weldes (1999) reminds us, they constitute state identities. Building identities through beliefs and values can lead to the social construction of power dynamics, which is a key currency in rationalist scholarship. In other words, an ABS ‘reality’ is socially constructed and, thus, contestable. Here, future burden-sharing studies could build on, for example, the work of Kitchen (2010), which adds that political discourses foster the creation of expected and socially defined behaviours for NATO members.

Learning

Learning happens when a change of beliefs leads to a change of behaviour (e.g. Weldes, 1999). In ABS, this may happen when states obtain new information about the social world – about either other allies or a social event – or learn from past experiences, and this new information ultimately alters their vision and understanding of ABS. Consequently, there can be a change in their political goals or even in their ABS policies. Up to this point, it is not clear whether allies have ever engaged in burden-sharing learning processes. Hence, this is a promising area for research because it can deepen our understanding of allies’ burden-sharing behaviours (also longitudinally) and integrate it with rationalist models in an eclecticist research programme.

Perceptions

There is currently a gap in the literature about the way that NATO member states and their political actors perceive physical security, threats, distributive justice, and collective-action responses. In other words, we know next to nothing about how state officials (bureaucrats, politicians, etc.), while engaging in negotiations on ABS (e.g. in the North Atlantic Council (NAC), perceive those values, or how ABS has become part of their international identity (Wendt, 1992). Perceptions in general, as well as perceived policy options, are important variables that can influence ABS behaviour. They are thus more than exogenously given, as rationalists would charge. The point is that perceptions are not at all well studied in the rationalist ABS literature because rationalist scholarship, as we have shown above, assumes that social interactions between states and their officials are governed by objective, general laws that are independent of human subjectivity and that can objectively explain (social) behaviours. Here, an eclecticist ABS research program could build on the alliance-value literature, which is defined as the ‘anticipation of future benefit from the alliance’ (Davidson, 2011: 15). Thus far, however, alliance values have been mainly used in rationalist ABS studies showing state support or refusal for participating in NATO military interventions when a highly valued ally requests it (e.g. the US).

Norms

The literature presents a solid picture of the importance of norms in foreign policy. Norms can be defined as ‘intersubjective beliefs about the social and natural world that define actors, their situations, and the possibilities of action’ (Farrell and Terriff, 2002: 7). They carry a prescriptive character, describing social facts and identities (Katzestein, 1996) and presenting how the world ought to be and how we ought to behave in it (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Norms can help form state identities and establish power relations (Hurrell, 2002). They also help actors situate themselves in relation to other social actors, interpret their interests and actions, and foster group identification. Because of this character, they can be studied as justifications for social actions; be seen as the source of social power; and create new actors, interests, or categories of action. In relation to ABS, very little is known about whether (and possibly how) norms have causally affected states’ ABS behaviour. This is a gap that an eclecticist research program could help fill.

Socialization

Policy officials (bureaucrats, politicians, etc.) are part of a larger international social community. Their mutual social interactions unquestionably influence states’ ABS rationality (and not the other way around). In this social context, states not only respect the logic of cost-benefit calculations to inform their policies and practices, they also refer to the logic of appropriateness to determine how they should act in specific situations. As March and Olsen remind us, ‘[p]olitical actors associate specific actions with specific situations by rules of appropriateness. What is appropriate for a particular person in a particular situation is defined by political and social institutions and transmitted through socialization’ (1989: 23).

In other words, intersubjectively shared meanings are important variables to consider, and they need to be studied in the NATO ABS context because they have a regulative and constitutive character (Dessler, 1989). Material causes do not make states act in a certain way; they make it possible for them to act the way they want and do. Applied to the issue of ABS, this argument means that burden-sharing interests are not exclusively material but also socially constructed and thus constitutive of interests – that is, they are ‘produced, reproduced and transformed through the discursive practices of actors’ (e.g. Weldes, 1998: 218). Studying these socialization processes would ultimately allow us to better explain and understand ABS behaviours.

Communication

Communication in collective-action situations, written or otherwise, is an important basis for understanding the processes of rule interpretation and application (Habermas, 1996). For example, one of NATO’s collective decisions at the Wales Summit was to establish the 2% GDP benchmark for annual defence spending. As noted, this collective rule has recently become the subject of much friction, and it is unclear why some members fall below the 2% benchmark. An eclecticist research program could look deeper into the intangible variables that influence the interpretation of collective rules and, once again, could dispel the belief that ABS conforms only to material realities.

For example, constructivist theorists have argued that rules must be viewed as being legitimate and fair before states will comply with them (Franck, 1990). A similar analysis or even application of ABS is currently absent, and there is no information as to how member states perceive the 2% GDP benchmark as a collective rule. It is sensible to believe that, with those answers, we could better understand why some allies do not comply with that rule. Further avenues to explore include the language used when communicating such rules in alliances. As Kratochwil (1993), for example, reminds us, clearer language could increase states’ respect for rules, although we cannot guarantee that this clarity alone would eliminate deviations from the 2% GDP benchmark. Finally, the literature tracing the role of the reputation of states in this process of communication might be useful for explaining these deviations.

Some methodological considerations for an eclecticist research program

This overview of the most appropriate post-positivist theories in an eclecticist ABS research program was, once again, not meant to present a complete list of existing theories. In the same vein, this section presents a short, non-exhaustive list of suitable methodologies to operationalize the ontological and epistemological assumptions discussed.

Case studies

The advantages of studying particular cases include being able to focus on comparative, heuristic, and less frequently studied cases (e.g. states from central, eastern, and southern Europe) and to detect new phenomena. A case study is defined as ‘the detailed examination of an aspect of a historical episode to develop or test historical explanations that may be generalizable to other events’ (George and Bennett, 2005: 5). The goal of researching case studies, especially inductive case studies, is to discover new patterns, meanings, and causal mechanisms for conceptualizing complex ABS behaviours and decisions (Bennett and George, 2005: 75); this is an area where rationalist methods fall short (George and Bennett, 2005: 19).

In this sense (and contrary to statistical ABS studies, especially), cases do not omit all contextual factors; indeed, inductive case studies are particularly well known for fostering new hypotheses and addressing causal complexity, areas where statistical methods and formal models are weak (George and Bennett, 2005). Furthermore, an eclecticist research program could be applied to various historical contexts (e.g. NATO’s operations in the former Yugoslavia, Darfur, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya) to decipher both material and non-material influences on ABS decisions.

However, in order to increase the internal validation of eclecticist ABS studies and the overall generalizability of its findings, it is important to go beyond the alliance context and consider, for instance, a sample of UN peace-keeping operations.

Expert interviews

Interviewing ABS experts (e.g. high-ranking bureaucrats, ministers, deputy ministers, directors general, NATO International Staff) could enrich an eclecticist research program with detailed qualitative data. Indeed, semi-structured or even unstructured interviews would allow researchers to (a) explore the value that policymakers and/or the respective ministries assign to NATO’s public goods as well as their motivation for (or against) ABS; (b) shed light on the actors’ understanding of burden-sharing issues, contexts, and related events; (c) provide deeper explanations for states’ ABS decisions; and (d) dig deeper into some main actors’ cognition, language, and beliefs systems.

Discourse analysis

A discourse is a social practice through which we make sense of the world. It can be used to construct the social (ABS) world while being simultaneously moulded by social contexts. Thus, discourse analysis is a system of signification that dissects the world and its social realities and relations. Because discourse has the power to frame subjects and objects as being relevant or not, it insinuates that there can be a break between how ABS sharing is understood, explained, and applied.

In using discourse analysis, Kitchen (2010), for example, displays how the discourses of political elites can perpetuate or change social norms, depending on whether these elites choose to follow the status quo or not. The ABS literature, however, has not yet integrated these approaches. Nevertheless, studying ABS discourses can be useful in (a) revealing the context that decision-makers are embedded in, (b) identifying the audiences who validate ABS actors, (c) deciphering the relationship between speakers and audiences, and (d) defining the ABS actors’ perceptions (Hansen and Waever, 2002).

Why is this important? In reality, it is quite rare that NATO’s top politicians hold all the valid and complete information about ABS. They are influenced by the representations projected by the media, the literature, and their professional advisers. The elites, in turn, influence an audience by portraying what matters with regard to ABS. In ‘speaking back’ their representation of an ABS issue, politicians are influencing what counts as proper representations in ABS debates. One may assume that it is extremely unlikely and politically naive for them to articulate an ABS policy without showing concern for the representations found in the wider public sphere as they attempt to present their ABS policies as legitimate to the electorate.

Applying a discourse analysis to ABS studies would help researchers better understand the official ABS discourses, and offers a research path toward (a) analyzing what happens when oppositional forces and opinions confront or reinforce each other’s burden-sharing representations in public or in the media (cf. Neumann, 2002); (b) exploring what kind of network of larger foreign policy discourses the discursive practice of ABS belongs to (i.e. how the discourses are distributed and regulated across texts); and (c) demonstrating the links between the social and cultural structures that form the environments in which discursive practices evolve.

Conclusion

The disagreements about ABS that were publicly exposed at the 2018 Brussels Summit between President Trump and some of his closest allies were serious, yet not alarming. An alliance is an organization that can (and indeed should) engage in discussions, negotiations, and disagreements. In the case of NATO, issues of ABS have been contentious in the past, so they cannot be considered a novelty. Moreover, one of the advantages of an alliance is that it is a place where democracies meet regularly to discuss important policy issues. It can thus be considered a forum in which allies can voice their differences and express their concerns or dissatisfactions. The strength of an alliance is that collective solutions stem from these debates and do not threaten the existence of the alliance (Neumann, 2002).

This article advanced the idea that an eclecticist theoretical framework would enrich the ABS literature without denigrating the power- or interest-based theories that currently form the basis of the literature. It also demonstrated how an analytically eclecticist framework would add value to the ABS research programme. Such a framework would ultimately allow us to move past the theoretical contest of which theory is ‘better’ and produce a theoretical and methodological diversity of explanations for ABS behaviours.

More specifically, the article discussed what contributions idea- and identity-based theories would make to an eclecticist analysis of ABS. To recapitulate, such theories include social structures and representations as well as motivations that influence ABS behaviours. They go far beyond the limited cost-benefit calculations that have been previously identified as the mechanism for decision-making in ABS and argue that norms, values, beliefs, and power structures should be integrated into IR theories (Foucault and Mérand, 2012). By forgoing the notion that ABS is a static outcome, we thus opened the door to better understanding how this process is shaped. It becomes realistic to begin to understand how ABS is interpreted and framed by each NATO member state in domestic polities as well as how values may be shared and negotiated in the political sphere (e.g. NAC). Furthermore, such an inductive approach would create a space for new patterns of and causal explanations for ABS motivations to emerge. The final section of this article offered some methodological tools that could help operationalize these theories.

The aim of this paper, it is important to remember, was to begin a conversation on how analytic eclecticism could help fill a post-positivist gap in the ABS literature in an analytically eclecticist framework. The intention was not to elucidate all the possible theoretical and methodological features of this new approach. Indeed, if we generally agree that the ABS research programme should adopt an eclecticist approach, we have just started the conversation. Future studies are needed to operationalize and eventually test this approach empirically. This is best done in a collaborative effort.

One might also envision enlarging the theoretical base and inviting foreign policy analysis (FPA) theorists to analyze the eclecticist burden-sharing research programme.¹² While commonly considered part of the larger IR theory family (Alden and Aran, 2017: 3), what lies at the heart of FPA is investigating the decision-making, the individual decision-makers, and the processes and conditions that affect those decisions and foreign policy outcomes more generally (Alden and Aran, 2017). In other words, FPA investigates the foreign policy process as opposed to the foreign policy outcomes that IR theorists tend to concentrate on. For example, bureaucratic politics draws much more on organizational and sociological theories that attempt to understand how institutional motivations and organizational procedures can impact foreign policy decisions. It seems that some interesting cross-fertilization is possible between the eclecticist ABS research programme proposed here and FPA, and it is worthwhile not only exploring but also nurturing.

Having said this, an eclecticist approach presents three main limitations. First, when studying intersubjective meanings and relying heavily on semi-structured or open-ended interviews to gain access to people’s belief systems, there is a risk of not being able to reach the relevant actors. They are often highly ranked individuals in governments or organizations, and they tend to keep information about the alliance classified. Thus, it could be hard to obtain interviews with them or, if it is possible, to obtain valuable and complete information on their ABS perceptions.

Second, because of the nature of the alliance and the large number of member states, and thus the sheer number of individuals involved, it would be impossible to account for all their socially constructed meanings and understandings of security, alliance values, and power. Thus, there is no way to know the finite number of meanings that could exist about ABS, and, therefore, we would not know when to stop looking for them. The third limitation is the fact that the information collected could prove to be incomplete.

This being said, these limitations should not deter us from pursuing this collaborative eclecticist research program on ABS. It is a promising avenue – theoretically, methodologically, and empirically.

Supplemental Material

French_Spanish_abstract_863132 – Supplemental material for Eclecticism and the future of the burden-sharing research programme: Why Trump is wrong

Supplemental material, French_Spanish_abstract_863132 for Eclecticism and the future of the burden-sharing research programme: Why Trump is wrong by Benjamin Zyla in International Political Science Review

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Patrick James, Charles Doran, Frédéric Mérand, the three anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, and Daphné Robichaud for her research assistance.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (grant number 435-2017-1428).

ORCID iD

Benjamin Zyla

Notes

Author biography

Benjamin Zyla is an associate professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, and currently Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz in Germany. He works on questions of global security governance, international organizations, and international peace operations.

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