Why Contribute? Burden-Sharing in CSDP Military Operations

Despite its short life span and modest goals of operations, the CSDP has already experienced serious difficulties in finding enough troops to man its military missions. This is not very puzzling, considering the large burdens military deployment generates. What is puzzling, however, is that some member states nevertheless carried a high share of the burden of several EU-led operations. Burden-sharing has remained largely underexamined in the burgeoning literature on the CSDP. Our study addresses this gap by examining differences in contributions to operations EUFOR Congo and EUFOR Chad/CAR. After an account of the planning process of both operations, an incentives-constraints model is derived from the literature on military burden-sharing in other contexts, and tested with fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Results reveal that several combinations of incentives and constraints caused states to carry a high share of a mission’s burden.