Convergence around what? : Europeanisation, domestic change and the transposition of the EU Directive 2009/43 into national arms exports control legislation

Abstract

Although armaments touch on essential elements of sovereignty, a Europeanisation of this field has been occurring since the late 1980s. This process led to the approval of EU Directives in 1990 regulating respectively arms procurements and arms intra-Community transfers. This “Defence Package” has attracted scholarly attention because it contains the first supranational acts in this core state power and represents a departure from the standard understanding of CSDP as an intergovernmental policy area. However, academics have only focused on the decision-making process which led to the approval of these Directives. This thesis addresses this gap by investigating domestic policy and institutional changes, as consequences of this Europeanisation process. Using Europeanisation literature as an analytical lens, and focusing on a top-down understanding of this process, the thesis operationalises EU Directive 2009/43/EC, creating an internal arms market as the independent variable, and the national transposition regulations in three case studies (UK, Italy and Hungary) as the dependent variables. In order to assess the direction and intensity of change, the thesis analyses the two main ideas for regulating arms exports: the “pro-industry” model and the “restrictive model”. Each model is identified along eight dimensions. The thesis investigates the direction and intensity of domestic change in each case study and compares them in order to verify whether there is convergence and if so, around which model. Providing new insight into the domestic changes to arms transfer legislation, the study finds that, even in the traditional intergovernmental field of arms transfers and production, the direction of the Europeanisation process is unbalanced in each dimension and overall favours a pro-industry model as opposed to an ethically and politically regulated one.