Beyond the 2% fetishism: studying the practice of collective action in transatlantic affairs

Abstract

NATO burden sharing is currently hotly contested. While it has been measured at the political, economic, and military levels and being looked at from the input and output side, the most commonly used variable to measure NATO BS is considering the percentage of GDP that a country spends on defense, which NATO agreed upon in 2014 should be 2%. The aim of this article is twofold. First, we review the most commonly used system- and state-level variables to explain burden sharing behavior and to carve out their explanatory limitations due to their strong rationality assumptions, positivist epistemologies, deductive, hypothesis testing research designs, and methodological individualism. The gap in the burden sharing literature currently is that it is unable to explain why a particular burden sharing behavior exists (i.e., free-riding) and why it occurred (or not) at a particular point in time. Our second aim is to make suggestions on how to fill these gaps by offering a selective number of post-positivist theories to study NATO burden sharing. We argue that we need to unravel the BS logics and social mechanisms that underpin BS decisions and behaviors, and hypothesize that states may, for example, not exclusively be informed in their burden sharing behavior by a logic of consequentiality but one of appropriateness. However, in order to gain access to this logic and social mechanisms, we need to employ post-positivist theories (and thus methodologies).