Introduction

Faced with an increasingly restive regional environment and incomplete alignment with existing allies, the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC, “Gulf states” below) have incentives to diversify their portfolio of defence and security relationships. Traditionally strong relationships with the US and the UK may come to be complemented by three groups of states beyond the Anglo Saxon core: traditional developing countries, the emerging BRIC countries, and the non-Anglo OECD countries, which, with a term from the Varieties of Capitalism literature, can be termed Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs). This essay explores the potential of this last group for GCC defence cooperation.

Comprising numerous developed economies in continental Europe and beyond, CMEs are characterized by higher degrees of coordination between societal actors, with firms having to engage in multiple networked stakeholder relationships in-country in order to succeed, instead of relying predominantly on market relationships, as liberal market economies (LMEs) such as the UK and the US do. CMEs may hence be faced with countervailing pressures regarding engagement in MENA defence markets and show widely differing outcomes.

For both prospective Gulf government partners and corporate players alike, it is hence imperative to be aware of the potentials and pitfalls of entering into cooperative relationships with CME partners. On the basis of a political economy framework integrating the concept of games in multiple arenas, this comparative case study investigates the differing abilities of CMEs to provide integrated frameworks for the arms trade and their overall military cooperation in the Gulf region.

This study highlights the cases of France and Germany in Western Europe and Japan and Korea in East Asia. It stresses the extent to which governments, bureaucracies and corporates in these countries have managed to coordinate their efforts with a view to achieving a dual payoff structure for economic objectives and perceived security needs by engaging Gulf buyers of military equipment. It also assesses different patterns of cooperation between national actors in these countries of origin, and compares their ability to achieve coordinated outcomes in a defence market that has seen rapid expansion, as shown in Figure 1.

Purely economic considerations do not explain the contrasts found. If defence were a market like any other, initial assumptions would include:

• 1. From a resource-based security perspective, East Asia is expected to dominate: while Japan and Korea as major buyers of Gulf energy products display a strong energy dependence on the region, this is not the case in Western Europe, where other sources of energy products predominate. Incentives to lock in suppliers by building relationships in areas other than the energy sector are hence stronger for East Asia.