SINATRA's main scientific breakthroughs relate to theoretical innovation and data gathering and treatment. Theoretical development has been the main focus of the project during its first stage. SINATRA zooms in on the interaction between external wedging and internal binding. While those are well-established concepts, the project goes beyond the question of how great powers try to divide a target – conceived as a unitary actor – from another great power or otherwise “bind” it to themselves. Instead, SINATRA zooms in on US and Chinese efforts to influence individual European countries, the impact such efforts have on European unity, and how powerful intra-European actors try to bind these targets together and preserve European unity in the face of external pressure.
By gathering a database of 700 national strategic documents, over 1000 WTO-related decisions, and leveraging existing data on UN general assembly voting, SINATRA has assembled the most extensive and comprehensive set of quantitative data to identify European alignment patterns in US-China competition. So far, research on this topic has been qualitative. No analysis had systematically arranged and compared a group of states or offered a consistent set of measurements for alignment. This limitation impedes replicability and generalizability, which this database aims to remedy.
Four ‘capstone’ articles contribute to setting out the theoretical foundations of the project. The first article (published, Review of International Studies) examines how great powers cope with states or actors who “hedge” or elude taking sides in great power competition. The second article (published, Journal of European Public Policy) examines the balance between cooperation and conflict in Franco-German relations. The third article (R&R, Contemporary Security Policy) looks at the various levels of analysis in wedge strategies (inter-state, sub-state, transnational). The fourth article (under review, European Journal of International Relations) examines how “secondary” states and actors draw on different types of binding strategies to balance autonomy and security. Several additional articles advance the project’s objectives.
