ABSTRACT
The Eurofighter consortium was formed in 1983 with the name “Future European Fighter Aircraft” and included five nations: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. In early 1985, France left the consortium to develop its own domestic project, the “Rafale”. Nevertheless, the four remaining countries agreed on the Eurofighter programme in December 1985. Therefore, the first section briefly describes the context in which the Eurofighter was conceived, through a historical analysis that marks the main stages of the development of the programme, as well as its main organizational and managerial features. Second, it analyses, individually, governments’ and firms’ preferences in the UK, France, Italy and Germany, highlighting the main decisions, turning points and domestic political debates that have characterized their participation or defection from the Eurofighter. In these sections, the aim is to investigate whether state–defence industry relations and the size of the defence-industrial market impacted on European countries’ decisions to collaborate or defect from this military programme. Finally, the chapter emphasizes if and how my theoretical framework is more adapted to explaining European defence-industrial cooperation, compared to Realist and Liberal approaches.
