Understanding Greece’s policy in the European Defence Agency: between national interest and domestic politics

Abstract

This paper tracks Greece’s engagement with the European Defence Agency (EDA). Greece has been an EU member state involved in setting up EDA. Indeed, its pro-integration stance on defence matters, at large, and EDA, in particular, can be traced back to its set of external security threats, and its belief that EU institutions and mechanisms can provide a protection layer against these threats. The chairing of important European defence preparatory groups (POLARM) and the Presidency of the Council provided normative agenda-setting procedures to uphold this objective. Significantly, Greece’s positions altered as EDA assumed operational status. Purely external security considerations were coupled with domestic, economic and political considerations, such as the protection of its defence industrial base, and disproving widely-held assumptions about political corruption in relation to defence procurement.