Rearming Europe: Domestic Governance Ecosystems and the Demand for European Defence Integration

In a very short period of time, amid tensions with both the EU’s most direct military threat and its strongest ally, calls to re-armament have started echoing across the political spectrum. While this objective is embraced across member states, there is far less agreement concerning who the EU should arm, and how. More specifically, the EU member states diverge in their support for outright EU-level defence cooperation versus mere intergovernmental coordination of complementary national procurement. In this paper, we investigate the domestic institutional origins of political demand for European defence integration. We argue that variation in governance ecosystems—whether public or private—explains preferences for cooperation (centralized EU-level resources) or competition (intergovernmental control). In public governance systems, where strong formal and informal ties between the defence sector and the state prevail, firms can overcome collective action problems and mobilize political demand for EU-level cooperation to secure industrial advantages. In contrast, private governance systems, where such ties are weaker and state discretion is more pronounced, are more likely to generate demand for coordination, as firms pressure governments to retain national control. We operationalize governance ecosystems by parsing the career histories of 350000 defence sector employees to create bipartite networks of public-private career shifts within France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland. We then conduct a discourse network analysis of defence policy debates, analysing patterns of narrative congruence across political, bureaucratic, and industrial actors in these five member states. By further subdividing our networks into sectors, we are able to assess whether governance ecosystems shape political demand more powerfully than standard IPE expectations that assume a shared sectoral preference among firms in the defence industry. This paper contributes to understanding how domestic governance structures condition preference formation and contestation in EU defence policy.