Page 33 - Five Forces of Americanisation Richard Hooke 04072025 final post SDR1

The UK Defence Industry in the 21 Century
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The Five Forces of Americanisation

International Security Framework: 2025

This reflects a modern paradox identified by a report published in July, 2023 by the Centre for Security,
Diplomacy and Strategy at Brussels School of Governance. Drawing attention to a notable degree of
both segmentation and integration of Europe’s arms industry, it reflects a desire both to increase self-
reliance and to collaborate with partners.

(Whilst) “Europe’s arms industry is often characterised as fragmented, … mapping of the five
largest arms companies in each European Union member state, plus Norway and the United
Kingdom … suggest(s) that in many sectors and sub-regions the European arms industry is more
than a collection of isolated national industrial bases.
“Western European arms companies offer a wider array of complex products than their Central
and Northern counterparts, but Central European countries’ top five firms are most active in the
production of small arms and light weapons, ground platforms and hardware components.
Additionally, while the arms industry in Central Europe appears isolated from the rest of the
continent, purely national industrial bases no longer exist in Western or Northern Europe.
Overall, the underdeveloped industrial ties with Central Europe appear as an obstacle to further
the Europeanisation of the sector”.
(Brussels School of Government, July, 2023)
Together with the Balkan states awaiting entry to the EU via its “stabilisation and association” process
(Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia), those countries
viewed by the EU as Central Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia)
may together become regarded as critical to the EU’s ability to present both a genuinely cohesive
defence industrial base as well as a collective deterrent to Soviet expansion in Europe. Even now, in
May, 2025, the presence of both Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico and Serbia’s President
Aleksandar Vucic at Russia’s Moscow Victory Day parade must energise the EU to speed up their entry.
While the new international security framework combines both formal and evolutionary, “organic”
structures associated with the trade in arms and equipment, the USA is a common feature. A major
military force. The biggest spender on defence with the largest corporate presence in defence

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