What do a coup, an arrested Member of Parliament, and a pink shovel have in common? The attempted coup in Turkey in 2016 prominently involved the Incirlik base; the Belgian Green Member of Parliament Zoé Genot was arrested at Kleine-Brogel during a security breach in 2018; and anti-nuclear activists at the Volkel airbase in 2023 invited participants to dig under the fence with pink shovels. These are three of the six airbases where the United States still stores nuclear weapons in Europe. Down from over 7,000 at the height of the Cold War to just above 100, these weapons are still stationed in five European countries.
For some of you, this information might be surprising. But for the North Atlantic Alliance, nuclear deterrence has been at the core of its business almost since its inception. However, politically, nuclear weapons have disappeared from the radar after the end of the Cold War. As Vipin Narang, a senior US government official and an MIT professor on leave, said in one of his final speeches while in government, after the end of the Cold War was a period of ‘nuclear intermission’. The first nuclear act took place in the Cold War. The second act has started recently.Footnote 1 During this nuclear intermission, many called on European countries to radically rethink their reliance on nuclear deterrence and perhaps step away from hosting them in Europe in the first place.
This second act started partially through what Time Magazine called the ‘collapse of global arms control’.Footnote 2 Since the mid-2010s, numerous arms control treaties between great powers, which structured and secured European security since the end of the Cold War, have collapsed, following the violations and/or withdrawal by Russia, as a sign of the deteriorating relations between Russia, the United States, and European countries. At the same time, a fresh movement has sprung up in Europe, aiming to once and for all do away with nuclear weapons, banning them because of their unacceptable humanitarian damage. Obviously, it would be hard to ban them in Russia and China, and therefore the movement has set its eyes on a somewhat less ambitious goal – to have them removed from Western Europe.
European policymakers found themselves between a rock and a hard place – between the global strategic conundrum calling for growing attention to nuclear deterrence and domestic audiences demanding just the opposite (doing less). This book is about how they navigated this balance.
For most European countries, nuclear deterrence is provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nuclear umbrella, which is meant to protect European countries against external adversaries.Footnote 3 As a part of this umbrella, the United States stations nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.Footnote 4 The countries hosting the weapons have a role in their deployment and delivery. This important physical connection gives the United States a direct material stake in European security. This practice is called ‘nuclear sharing’, a name rooted in the 1950s idea, which actually foresaw sharing US weapons with European allies, though in the course of 1960s, the scale of ‘sharing’ was tapered down.Footnote 5
As I explain in Chapter 1 of this book, nuclear sharing serves a number of political, strategic, and military goals. It is meant to deter adversaries, assure allies, and avoid division of the alliance. The policy intimately involves allies in the nuclear policy of the alliance, which proudly calls itself a ‘nuclear’ one.Footnote 6 However, it has been heavily contested by the public opinion, civil society, and political parties in Europe ever since its beginnings.
The main research question this book asks is why nuclear sharing continues despite being an unpopular and contested policy. Addressing it requires answering three related research questions: where does the domestic contestation come from? How do the allies view nuclear sharing? How do elites make sense of these contradicting preferences?
To answer these questions, I look into the domestic contestation of nuclear sharing in the European host nations since 2010.Footnote 7 I choose 2010 because it is the start of the new period in the history of NATO. In 2009, US President Barack Obama, in his speech at Prague Castle, offered a vision of a world without nuclear weapons, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year. One year later, the foreign ministers of Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway wrote to the secretary general with a request to re-evaluate stationing nuclear weapons in Europe.Footnote 8 Instead, NATO doubled down on its mission by underscoring that it is a ‘nuclear alliance’ in its Strategic Concept.Footnote 9 Since 2010, European countries had to deal with not only growing instability after deteriorating relations with Russia but also a renewed push for nuclear disarmament. Activities of civil society, under the umbrella of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), led to the adoption of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). While none of the NATO governments signed or ratified the treaty, it created enough attention to spur the alliance to denounce it on the day when it was open for ratification.Footnote 10
In this book, I offer a novel theory, building on combined insights from public administration, comparative politics, foreign policy analysis, and international relations, which reflects the complexity of democratic foreign policy-making in the twenty-first century.
I do not opine on whether US nuclear weapons should remain or be withdrawn and why. While I do have a view on this issue, a reader will hopefully not find it in this book. Rather, this is a book about a policy puzzle, and I want to offer an answer based on a rigorous approach using social science theory and method. Therefore, I hope that this book can elucidate the roots of contestation of nuclear weapons in Europe, the reaction which this contestation creates, and perhaps a more nuanced take on nuclear politics in Europe in the twenty-first century.
The Book’s Argument in Short
In Chapter 3, I develop the theoretical argument of this book in full, but presenting its capsule version now might be helpful to a reader to understand the book’s key contribution.
If the question is why nuclear weapons are hosted even if large swathes of the public dislike them and many parties oppose them, the answer is that nuclear sharing is a policy which ends up being controlled by policy elites, primarily bureaucrats (and technocrats) in various ministries. Despite attracting high levels of opposition, it is a low-salience policy, like most other foreign policy issues.
As the late political science titan Peter Mair argued, two sources of control exist for policy-making: responsiveness and responsibility.Footnote 11 Responsiveness is a sympathetic response ‘to the short-term demands of voters, public opinion, interest groups, and the media’.Footnote 12 Responsibility is the ‘necessity … to take into account (a) the long-term needs of their people and countries, which … underlie and go beyond the short-term demands of those same people; (and) (b) the claims of audiences other than the national electoral audience, including … the international commitments and organizations that are the root of their international credibility’.Footnote 13 Mair argued that one implication of responsibility as a form of control in democratic polities is that leaders’ hands are sometimes tied.Footnote 14
The academic proponents of nuclear disarmament often suggest that continuing deterrence policies in the face of the lack of public support is undemocratic (I outline this argument in greater depth in Chapter 3). However, using Mair’s logic, doing so is not necessarily undemocratic per se, and it also is relatively common to remove certain policies from democratic control. Citizens, for instance, have only a limited impact on central bank interest rates, and central banks are sometimes (especially in the Westminster system) completely insulated from democratic politics.Footnote 15 Withdrawing certain policies from democratic politics means leaving them to policy elites, including bureaucrats and technocrats, which is a core of democratic policy-making. Those who oppose it are usually interested in centralising power with the executive. In the United States, this is known as a ‘unitary executive’ theory.Footnote 16 Others, however, see such centrality as a core of growing authoritarianism.Footnote 17
For these policy elites, who often derive their views from their expertise and knowledge, following public opinion would be seen as antithetical to their mission. However, as the theories of technocratic responsiveness developed in the study of public administration underscore,Footnote 18 they cannot be completely ignorant of them, certainly not when the backlash against expertise is so high. Therefore, policy elites resort to symbolic adjustment steps – such as attending the TPNW Meetings of State Parties (MSPs) as observers.
My new theory borrows from comparative politics, the study of lobbying, public opinion, and international relations to explain how these individual pressures emerge and then uses theories of technocratic responsiveness to explain how elites react to these popular pressures.Footnote 19
Contribution to the Study of Nuclear Politics
The simplest reason for writing this book is that no other book systematically studies the domestic contestation of nuclear sharing and how policy elites engage with it in all five host nations.
A more elaborate answer obviously needs to acknowledge that scholars have already paid extensive attention to nuclear sharing and extended nuclear deterrence. However, they have either focused on strategic questions or based their methodology on single-country case studies.
The study of strategic questions has centred on strategic causes, specific effects of nuclear sharing, or extended deterrence in general. While I review this work in more detail in Chapter 2, it has focused on the origins and rationale of nuclear sharing for European security. Some of the most foundational work by historians studies the origins of this practice and how it was crafted early on by European leaders.Footnote 20 The traditional strategic literature has highlighted that nuclear weapons strengthen the link between Europe and the United States and thus contribute to Europe’s defence. For instance, in a recent edited collection, international relations scholars Stéfanie von Hlatky and Andreas Wenger led a team of scholars who explored the role of extended deterrence in the interactions between NATO and its adversaries.Footnote 21 Focusing on nuclear sharing, US international relations professors Matthew Fuhrmann and Tom Sechser argued that these deployments do not have additional deterrent power, compared to formal alliance commitments.Footnote 22 In another paper, they doubted whether these dissuade allies from pursuing nuclear weapons, an oft-stated argument in favour of nuclear sharing.Footnote 23 Similarly, historians have conducted case studies to study the effect of nuclear sharing on national non-proliferation policy.Footnote 24 In more recent years, scholars have studied strategic dynamics and how nuclear sharing might fit into a broader pattern of nuclear deterrence.Footnote 25
The scholarship on domestic politics and its link to nuclear sharing has thus focused strongly on single case studies. While this work is abundant and has a long tradition, scholars have focused on explaining the patterns of contestation within individual countries rather than across countries. Many of the contributions to this scholarship could be found in the 2014 special issue of European Security edited by Stéfanie von Hlatky. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, more attention has been paid to these factors, but this emerging work is again fundamentally based on country case studies.Footnote 26 With the growing attention to using surveys to study public opinion, some comparative work has started to emerge comparing findings from multiple countries, but it is very limited.Footnote 27
The scholarship on the domestic politics of nuclear sharing has offered a multitude of arguments for national foreign policies. Some scholars pinned the cause of domestic discord on the tension between principles and interests.Footnote 28 Others found its roots in diplomatic culture.Footnote 29 Some, especially diplomatic historians and political scientists focusing on Italy, have looked for reasons in the bilateral relationship with the United States.Footnote 30 Earlier studies focused on the socialisation of individuals and their coming of age.Footnote 31 Some case studies, such as early work from the 1980s on Germany, examined the role of bureaucracies in the host states.Footnote 32 Scholars have also provided illuminating historical case studies,Footnote 33 descriptions of party platforms,Footnote 34 and analyses of the role of civil society, especially in the national setting.Footnote 35 Some even explored links to the national strategic culture.Footnote 36
As much as this scholarship provides relevant insights into the political dynamics related to nuclear sharing in individual countries, its value has been more restricted when it comes to delivering more systematic insights into domestic political dynamics. The very limited comparative work in the nuclear field in Europe almost exclusively focuses on the countries actually possessing or pursuing nuclear weapons and tends to be more historical rather than contemporary.Footnote 37 If the attitudes were studied comparatively, they privileged the technocratic elites and their perspectives.Footnote 38
This book aims at overcoming these limitations in two ways. Firstly, it offers a systematic comparative study of the domestic politics in the five host countries. For all the elements which the book will touch on – public opinion, parties, civil society, or elites – all five countries were studied using the same methodology, with the same theory used to interpret the findings. This strengthens our knowledge base about the contestation of nuclear sharing and allows us to draw comparative conclusions. The focus on all five countries also corrects the limitations due to unequal attention that the individual host nations have received in the literature. Secondly, it offers a new, fresh, and compelling theory to explain both the bottom-up pressure and how elites engage with it. As I explain in the next section, and then throughout the book, this theory offers us a more modern understanding of democratic policy-making than has been commonly assumed among nuclear theorists and allows us to understand both grassroots contestation and how it affects policy.
Contribution to the Broader Field
While this book deals primarily with a question aimed at understanding the domestic challenges to nuclear sharing, it carries broader implications for diverse strands of scholarship.
Most directly, it speaks to scholars of nuclear weapons. While this work has paid some attention to domestic political considerations, doing so in depth and systematically has been uncommon in this field.Footnote 39 As this book underscores, using the tools of comparative politics and foreign policy analysis offers us new insights into how preferences around nuclear weapons come about and also how they interact with other views. For instance, the link between anti-capitalism and anti-nuclear views, which is clearly exploited by civil society in the Cities Appeal and which I discuss in Chapter 6, is something that would be otherwise difficult to discover. More importantly, however, as the perceived importance of nuclear sharing increases, it is imperative to understand what domestic political conditions this practice intersects with. Importantly, this book brings much more nuance and colour to understanding how European publics, parties, civil society, and also policy leaders engage with nuclear weapons and what reactions nuclear weapons stir in them.
More broadly, the book speaks to scholars of US alliances, who have often paid only limited attention to the domestic dimension. To be sure, numerous works have explored how NATO politics has intersected with domestic debates in Europe – for instance, related to the Euromissiles crisis or the military interventions in the Balkans.Footnote 40 However, numerous works on NATO overlook the importance of domestic politics, which further feeds into the perception that democracy and domestic politics somehow do not matter for the alliance.Footnote 41 By contrast, my work underscores that policy elites in NATO countries have to act often under very complex domestic political constraints. They balance the demands stemming from responsiveness and responsibility and therefore often end up producing outcomes which might be difficult to comprehend from the outside, such as attending the TPNW MSPs.
For the scholars of European security, my book offers a few lessons on how domestic politics influences an issue which they have often overlooked – nuclear weapons. The book underscores that, contrary to the many perceptions, nuclear weapons are front and centre in the debates about European security, and many domestic political dynamics, known from the study of European security, apply equally well to these debates. As my work demonstrates, many of the forces known all too well to the scholars of European security – including executive dominance and low issue salience – are replicated in the study of nuclear weapons. Parties – a well-known subject in the study of European security and foreign policy – matter for nuclear weapons too. Realising this connection has consequences for seeing both European security and nuclear weapons in a broader political and theoretical context.
For students of executive action, particularly from the fields of public administration and public policy, my book offers a lesson on how elites respond to various audiences. For public policy scholars, the insight that policy elites work under the twin pressures of responsiveness and responsibility is not revolutionary. However, only very limited scholarship still actually realises how elites make sense of various audiences. That they prefer the responsibility induced by international commitments is an important insight from this work. My book further elucidates this connection in the understudied area of foreign policy. By studying policy adjustments under responsiveness demands, I contribute to the scholarship on policy changes.
Last but certainly not least, my work offers insights for the scholars of civil society, public opinion, and political parties, as it provides empirical material for engagement of many of their theories in an issue area which has been traditionally overlooked by these scholars. By using their methods and theories, this book offers a novel test for them and a new field where these theories could be further refined and developed.
How the Book Was Researched
This book offers a methodology which combines three elements of study: domestic contestation, alliance audiences, and the consequences of their heterogeneous interaction. This requires splitting the exploration into individual chunks, each of which was researched independently, but with the goal of combining them in the end.
In the three chapters on contestation by domestic audiences, I rely on the state-of-the-art social science concepts, theories, and methods in each of the separate issue areas to explain the patterns of contestation. Therefore, in the chapter on public opinion (Chapter 3), I rely on the scholarship on public opinion and public attitudes in foreign policy. In the chapter on parties and parliaments (Chapter 4), I engage with the relevant work. In the chapter on civil society (Chapter 5), I engage with the theories and tools used in the study of civil society. In the chapter focused on the responses from the allied audience (Chapter 6), I use the tools from the study of foreign policy preferences. And then, to bring it all together, I rely on the tools from the study of elite decision-making. Throughout this research, I have purposefully tried to keep focus on all five countries in which the nuclear sharing mission is being executed – Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
The individual methodology for each chapter is explained in detail in the relevant chapter. In the three chapters on domestic audiences, I use a mix of pre-existing data and freshly collected data on public opinion, party positions, and civil society mobilising. In the chapter on allied perceptions, I study strategic documents, primarily from the immense corpus collected by the research team led by political scientist Jordan Becker at West Point.Footnote 42
The chapter on elites (Chapter 7) relies on, and the remainder of the book benefits from, interviews conducted specifically for this book and those for another project on civil society and nuclear risk. All the interviewees were selected from policy elites, experts, and senior members of parliament in the host countries. Both projects for which the interviews were intended were in line with the ethics approval received from the Ethics Board of the Department of Public Administration & Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. However, the two projects and their ethics approval differ slightly. The project on civil society and nuclear risk was primarily an oral history interviews, focused on prominent respondents, and therefore operated under the assumption that the interviewees would be identified by name. All of them agreed to this, so they are all also identified by name in this book. The interviews conducted specifically for this book were done separately under a different ethics approval that gave the respondents an opportunity to choose how they wish to be identified – some wanted to be identified by name and others by their professional identity, and yet others wished to remain completely anonymous. I have respected those wishes.
Taken together, this book offers a comparative study of five countries, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods in an integrated framework that allows me to study the research questions linked to this book in a systematic, coherent, and conceptually sound manner.
Structure of the Book
It is best to understand this book as a jigsaw, which comes in four big blocks. The first block is the history and theory, providing historical and conceptual basis. The second is the domestic demands related to nuclear sharing, looking at public opinion, parties, and civil society. The third is the contrasting demands regarding nuclear sharing made by allies. And the fourth emerges by studying how elites interact and make sense of these conflicting demands. In practice, this jigsaw structures the book into nine chapters, including the introduction.
Some readers might not be familiar with the details and history of nuclear sharing in Europe, so Chapter 1 provides an introduction that presents the historical origins, political and strategic rationale, major debates during the late Cold War (the so-called Euromissiles crisis), and debates in the post-Cold War period up until 2010, when the last major proposal to remove the weapons from Europe was withdrawn. It also introduces more recent debates about nuclear sharing, particularly with the focus on the challenges introduced by the humanitarian disarmament movement and the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the theoretical argument. Outlining the theory of technocratic responsiveness requires some preliminary steps, however. Firstly, the chapter outlines the critique of nuclear sharing as an undemocratic practice, which has been advanced by scholars both in the past and more recently. It then provides the concept of responsiveness and responsibility as two forms of control in democratic policy-making, along the lines of work introduced by Peter Mair. The chapter explains how nuclear sharing is an archetypal technocratic policy, which means that the critics who posit that it is undemocratic mistake its main feature for a bug. Lastly, the chapter outlines how the theory of technocratic responsiveness actually works: that is, how different societal stakeholders – such as voters, parties, and civil society – influence technocrats and also that these technocrats are responsive to not only a domestic audience but also a foreign one – their allies.
In Chapter 3, I look at the public opinion on nuclear weapons in Europe. This chapter has three portions. In the first, I provide an extensive overview of public opinion research in Europe on issues related to nuclear weapons. Next, I present results of a unique, unpublished survey of public opinion in all five host nations, mapping and explaining views on the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, their use, and possible disarmament. I explain these views with a reference to fundamental foreign policy attitudes, such as militarism or cooperativeness, but also technocratic attitudes and populism, which are more aligned with the theory of technocratic responsiveness. Finally, I outline which lessons the public seem to draw from the war in Ukraine for the future of nuclear sharing, based on the same unpublished data.
Chapter 4 introduces the reader to the positioning of European political parties on nuclear sharing in the five host nations. After outlining the theoretical and conceptual reasons why parties matter for studying foreign and security policy, I compare the views among European far-left, centre-left, centre-right, and far-right parties on the basis of their party manifestos from the Comparative Manifesto Project’s Manifesto Corpus. In the second half of the chapter, I investigate the parliamentary activity in four out of five countries (Turkey has none), looking at voting patterns on various parliamentary motions critical of nuclear sharing, using novel data on all parliamentary votes on nuclear weapons in these countries.
In Chapter 5, I look primarily at the influence of civil society. The chapter examines contemporary civil society activities in four of the five countries (except for Turkey, which seems to have no active civil society on the issue). The analysis is primarily based on the activities of ICAN and more specifically through the lenses of support for the ICAN’s flagship Cities Appeal, an initiative to gain support for the TPNW from city councils. I investigate how successful (or not) the Cities Appeal is in the host nations and what explains the patterns of varying success.
As the theory of technocratic responsiveness holds, technocrats care about external audiences too. In this book, that external audience is composed of the allies. Chapter 6 addresses the allies of the host nations – the alliance, the United States as the patron, and other European countries. Using the insights from the strategic documents, I examine how the allies talk about nuclear sharing and extended deterrence.
Chapter 7 looks at technocratic elites and how they respond to all these pressures. I base this chapter on interviews conducted with them and report how they think about the purpose of hosting nuclear weapons and the legitimacy of various audiences and explain their views on interaction with diverse stakeholders. This section also provides an overview of national strategic documents and government communications in the host nations to the public, parliament, and civil society on issues related to nuclear sharing. This chapter furthermore discusses how elites react and defend nuclear sharing abroad, in an increasingly hostile international environment.
The Conclusion summarises and answers the main question of the book. However, it also provides three other arguments. Firstly, it looks at the ongoing debates in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, from the enlargement of nuclear sharing to supplementing it with other types of nuclear equipment in Europe, and discusses the likely reception in the host nations. Secondly, it studies the growing international backlash against nuclear sharing and how it is likely to develop further. Finally, it offers suggestions for how technocrats could be even more responsive and how the public legitimacy of nuclear sharing could be enhanced.
