Eclecticism and the future of the burden-sharing research programme: Why Trump is wrong
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512119863132 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512119863132
International Political Science Review
2020, Vol. 41(4) 507 –521
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512119863132
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Eclecticism and the future of
the burden-sharing research
programme: Why Trump is wrong
Benjamin Zyla
University of Ottawa, Canada
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 dur-
ing 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.
Corresponding author:
Benjamin Zyla, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa, 120 University, Ottawa
K1N 6N5, ON, Canada; Institute for Advanced Study, University of Konstanz, Germany
Email: bzyla@benjaminzyla.com
863132IPS0010.1177/0192512119863132International Political Science ReviewZyla
research-article2019
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