Transaction Costs and Security Institutions Unravelling the ESDP [Hardcover]

Examines international cooperation in European security from a transaction cost economics perspective. This book addresses the puzzle of how to approach?differing institutional preferences.?It argues that the reduction?and limitation of transaction costs was the primary determinant of security preferences.PART I:?PREFERENCES, SECURITY INSTITUTIONS AND TRANSACTION COSTS IN WORLD POLITICS? Introduction Theorising Preference Formation for Institution-Building in European Security Transaction Costs and Security Institutions PART II: UNRAVELLING THE EUROPEAN SECURITY AND DEFENCE POLICY (EDSP) The Demand for a Security Institution: German, British and French Perceptions of the Environment in the 1990s Germany - From Defending the Alliance's Territory To Crisis Management for the Union Great Britain - From Opposing the Union towards a Subordinated ESDP? France - From Gradual WEU Integration to Full-Scale ESDP Germany: An Incrementally Decreasing Willingness to Bind the Country Great Britain - From No EU Security Policy To a Purely Intergovernmental ESDP? France - A Consistently Intergovernmental Approach towards ESDP PART III: TRANSACTION COSTS AND SECURITY INSTITUTIONS: ESDP UNRAVELLED Alternative Explanations and Theoretical Scope of the Transaction Costs Framework Conclusion - Theory-Development in the European Security and Defence Policy

This is an immensely ambitious book. Rejecting as inadequate and unconvincing realist, liberal-intergovernmentalist and constructivist approaches to ESDP, Weiss embraces political economy to argue that European states embarked on cooperation as a conscious exercise in reducing current and future transaction costs in the provision of collective security. Exhaustively researched and densely informed with social science theory, the book will be fiercely debated by scholars of both international relations and European integration.

- Jolyon Howorth, Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale, USA and Jean Molw