Multinational defence cooperations (MDCs) are rarely created from scratch; rather, they are based on previous collaborations lasting years or even decades. These existing collaborations generate personal networks and institutional relationships between the participating defence policy communities (DPCs), and these accumulate over time, and can help to launch new collaborations. The reason for this is that it is easier to cooperate with someone we know and have established relationships with than with an entirely new partner. Thus, already existing institutions, solutions and cooperative frameworks have an advantage over new ones (Uttley et al, 2019).

Path-dependence is a concept originally used in economics, but currently it is widely used in different academic fields. As William Sewell points out, this approach ‘assumes that events are normally “path dependent”, that is, what has happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of sequence of events occurring at a later point in time’ (Sewell, 1996: 262– 3). This concept is very broad, and scholars understand it in different ways. For some, path-dependence might mean simply that history matters. However, others focus on more specific issues such as the importance of initial conditions, while others again study the effect of historical lock-in or the mechanisms of self-reproducing and reactive sequences and their role in determining final outcomes (Mahoney and Schensul, 2006). The large variety of approaches to the concept of path-dependence has been criticized and also labelled as ‘concept stretching’ (Pierson, 2000: 252). Not surprisingly many scholars have attempted to provide more conceptual clarity for this term from different perspectives (Greener, 2005; Page, 2006).

Marc R. DeVore applied the concept of path-dependence in relation to defence cooperation (DeVore, 2012). In his research he investigated 16 different European and transatlantic armaments organizations that have been created since the end of World War II. DeVore shows that in the first half of the Cold War functional transatlantic organizations developed fastest and deepest thanks to the US’s political, technical and financial support for transatlantic armament cooperation. However, from the mid-1960s politically driven European organizations began to flourish because of the drying up of American subsidies and because some conflicts emerged between the US and European nations.