This research investigates expert interventions in domestic public debate as a means to enhance publicity
on possibilities to assist military alliances in the face of direct threats. Military alliances, such as NATO and
the EU’s CFSP, serve as a joint response mechanism in cases where alliance partners are under threat. As
such, they are systems of multi‐layered governance which elaborate strategic approaches and capabilities
at the intersection of the national and international level. In the event of a threat and the subsequent
development of a policy response, the publicity of deliberation within alliances often comes under pressure
as decision‐makers act under the imperative of confidentiality. Experts, understood as independent actors
with in‐depth knowledge in foreign and security policy, may play a crucial role in these instances by
providing assessment on capability and feasibility, triggering debate and contextualizing policy‐options for a
domestic audience. In their role, they create the publicity that is an essential precondition for public
opinion and, ultimately, democratic legitimacy in policy formation.
The publicity role of experts will be analyzed through two cases of collective defense: the terrorist attacks
in New York/Washington (2001) and Paris (2015), when the U.S. and France invoked solidarity clauses, Art.
5 NATO Treaty and Art. 42(7) EU Treaty respectively, requesting security assistance of allied states. The
research analyses the debate on policy options in two of such allied countries, the UK and Germany. For
that purpose, we map expert interventions in major news outlets and examine argumentations with regard
to the form of publicity that they generate: On the one hand, experts might construct their interventions by
weighing trade‐offs between various objective ‘goods’ ‐ a publicity with characteristic of a ‘market
discourse’. Alternatively, experts may balance between competing subjective ‘strategic representations’,
thus following the idea of a ‘polis discourse’ (Stone, 1988). In light of this distinction, our analysis focuses
on how expert interventions reflect and critically consider the arguments and interests of stakeholders at
all levels of the decision‐making process, and where their publicity can be located between the extremes of
market discourse and polis discourse.
The contribution of this research is to shed light on the role that expert interventions play in generating
national‐level publicity of multilateral decision‐making processes, thus enhancing legitimacy. While the role
of experts in closed‐door policy formation and the media’s role in generating publicity has been widely
researched, insights in the role of expert interventions in domestic debates on issues of multi‐layered
governance has lagged behind. The research design further allows us to consider differences in the role of
experts interventions in the public sphere both between countries and over time.