The promise
Through a very liberal and unifying message, the Commission showed its hopes and ambition to make the Member States even more collaborative and united. A very liberal-institutionalist message: Buy together, build together, deter together.
Spending more, cooperating less?
Eighteen months later, numbers and statistics tell a very different story. Fragmentation, the Commission argues, is the principal impediment to successful procurement.
But cooperative problems require cooperative solutions. It is this gap between the EU’s rhetoric of cooperation and the reality of national interests that leads to questioning the real bond between Member States. National ‘individual’ security isn’t a problem that funding can temporarily fix, but rather a firm priority for states.
Behind the promises lie numbers that reveal a clear struggle with commitment from Member States. Although Member States’ defence expenditure rose by 19% in 2024 to €343 billion and is expected to reach €381 billion by 2025, participation in the collaborative procurement framework remains very low.
Where cooperation actually breaks: PESCO and the industrial base
The Permanent Structured Cooperation framework of the EU (PESCO), which allows participating Member States to work together on defence and military capabilities, also shows a failure of cooperation between states to build together and not just spend together. In February 2026, the EU Parliament assessment found that most of PESCO projects were stuck in the “design” or “execution” phase. This is a direct consequence of the lack of follow-through from national institutions, obstructing the liberal model the EU was built upon.
On the industrial level, this pattern repeats. Roughly three-quarters of EU defence procurement still goes to suppliers from outside the Union, mostly to the United States, creating a dependency that EDIS is still trying to soothe by pushing purchases towards the European Union. The large domestic defence industries in the EU, like Germany, France and Italy, each with their own political constituencies attached to them, have every motive to protect national contracts rather than give in to joint programmes. Smaller Member States, lacking a strong industrial base, often find it faster and cheaper to buy from other countries, rather than wait for the European alternative to mature. Neither choice is irrational; both depict the reality countries choose when the cost of cooperation outweighs the pull of national interests.
In 2007, the European Union had hoped its joint defence procurement would unify European weapon spending by targeting 35% collaboration among Member States. Fast forward to 2022, only 18% of defence investments were made collaboratively. In March 2024, the European Commission unveiled a programme to strengthen the European defence industry and produce more and faster: the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS). The plan set two targets: that 50% of Member States’ purchases and acquisitions would come from European industry by 2030, and that 40% of such purchases would be made jointly.
Not a bureaucratic failure, a rational choice
This gap could read as a simple institutional failure, due to the EU’s bureaucracy. On paper, joint procurement gives the illusion of a realistic plan to which Member States would stick without much questioning since Europe is the one winning. However, this thinking assumes the EU’s cooperative framework relies on genuine transfer of sovereignty. Andrew Moravcsik’s theory of intergovernmentalism suggests otherwise. He argues that EU integration is best understood as a series of rational choices made by national leaders, shaped first by domestic interest and organised constituencies, then negotiated at the EU level according to each state’s relative bargaining power. Institutions like PESCO and EDIP were built in the name of European solidarity, not to override national interests but rather to manage them. For their part, States only give up as much sovereignty as they need in order to make their promises to each other believable.
Seen from this perspective, the joint procurement numbers aren’t failing; that’s exactly how the system was designed to work. When the biggest European military economies are reluctant to cede ground to joint programmes, it isn’t a betrayal of the EU, but rather a preference for domestic and national priorities. Smaller Member States buying off-the-shelf from Washington are doing the same, prioritising national defence development from a different starting point. Defence procurement simply makes it harder for this dynamic to be hidden because sovereignty, industry, and strategic dependence collide here more directly than almost anywhere else in EU policy.
Europe did not build a cooperative defence union. It most likely rehearsed one.
