Untying the Knot? Assessing the compatibility of the American and European strategic culture under President Obama

Abstract

This article analyses the similarities and differences of the latest American and European security strategies under President Obama in order to make inferences about the degree of compatibility of their deep-seated and shared norms, beliefs and ideas regarding the means and ends of national security, and to better understand the normative continuity/discontinuity of those norms of the Obama vs. Bush administration. Building upon constructivist work on strategic cultures, the article concentrates on a qualitative analysis of elite security discourses and disaggregates them into their normative and ideational components. By studying strategic cultures empirically and comparatively, the study fills a known void in the literature on strategic cultures. It finds that American and European norms, beliefs and ideas about the means and ends of national security policy are compatible with regards to challenges and threats as well as preferred modes of international cooperation; they are incompatible with regards to commonly held beliefs about the international system and how to address threats, which is worry some politically. Moreover, the article finds that there is a continuity in the US security strategies from President Bush to Obama.

Keywords:

• constructivism
• ESDP
• European defence
• norms
• security
• strategic culture

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (2009–2011), and am thankful to Alexandra Gheciu, Srdjan Vucetic, Elke Winter and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. All errors, of course remain mine.

Notes

1. This article will not look at the practice aspect of strategic cultures – that is if states behave the way they suggested they would in their security strategies.

2. This cluster is adopted from Berenskoetter (2005) and Meyer (2005).

3. Martha Finnemore, for example, uses the US intervention in Somalia in 1993 to argue that this particular intervention would have been inconceivable without the norms of humanitarian interventions that allow for a coercive breach into the domestic affairs of sovereign states.

4. This is how Robert Kagan and his compatriots conceived strategic culture.

5. Exceptions are Johnson, Kartchner, and Larsen (2008) and Kirchner and Sperling (2007).

6. I thank the reviewers for asking me to include this important aspect into the study.

7. There has been some talk whether the ESS would be updated, possibly within the next two years. However, as long as the EU has not made any official announcements, this remains speculation and methodologically and empirically irrelevant for this study.

8. This assumes that identity implies difference (Neumann and Welsh 1991; Ruggie 1998).

9. However, the purpose of the article is not to discuss the norm evolutions and, consequently, this study will not analyse the processes of “norm emergence”, “norm cascade” and “norm internalization” as described by Finnemore and Sikkink (1998, 895–905).

10. This, of course, is only a brief scan of a much larger literature on norms; for further discussion, see Rawls (1955), Krasner (1984, 1988) and Ruggie (1983, 1993).

11. For a challenge of this view, see Hymans (2006), Montgomery (2005), Sagan (1996) and Solingen (2007).

12. The danger of tautological inference is explicitly noted in Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman (1981), Almond and Verba (1965), Berger (1996), Kupchan (1994) and Legro (1995).

13. European Council (2003), which will be abbreviated in the following as “ESS”.

14. These normative predispositions, as one analyst argued, qualified the EU as a “transformative” or “positive power” (Biscop 2005).

15. The NSS of 2006 talks about political alienation, grievances, sub-culture of conspiracy and an ideology of murder as the causes for terrorist activities (White House 2006).

16. The term state failure is an overarching concept defined by the State Failure Task Force. It refers to a collapse of authority within a particular state to impose authority and order in situations of civil war, revolutionary war, genocide, politicide and regime transitions (Goldstone 2000).

17. This list is consistent with the 1999, 2002 and the 2006 versions of the NSS; the latter also talks about political alienation, grievances, sub-culture of conspiracy and an ideology of murder as the causes for terrorist activities.

18. The strategy of pre-emption was first developed by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld (Woodward 2004).

19. Some authors have pointed out that regime change in the Middle East and the promotion of democracy there is not necessarily a bad policy (Ajami 2003). For a critical analysis of regime change see Gordon (2003).

20. There is no space to discuss this concept here in detail; see Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde (1998).

21. This is a point that is only shared with the UK national security strategy (Cabinet Office 2010, 14), which is also the only one recognizing that the relative weight of economic activity is shifting from developed economies in Europe to growing economies in Asia and Latin America.

22. For further analysis, see Vaisse (2007); on the EU neighbourhood policy, see, for example, Vennesson (2007).

23. The negotiations were held in a hotel on the Petersberg near Bonn/Germany, and the tasks were adopted from the Western European Union (WEU), which was dismantled (Jørgensen 1997).

24. This is also reflected in the national security strategies of Britain, France and Germany (BMVg 2006, 38).

25. 2385th European Council meeting, General Affairs, Brussels, 19–20 November 2001.

26. Interestingly, there are no geographical or functional limitations of international organization; they range from North America, to Europe, to Asia and the Middle East (NSS 2010, 39–43).

27. This is a hypothesis succinctly summarized by Kagan (2002, 2004), Leffler and Legro (2008), Lundestad (2008), Pond (2004) and Sloan (2005).

28. Indeed, the USA did not feel constrained by those allies and explicitly reserved the right to act unilaterally (Jervis 2003).

29. The literature also calls this “multilateralism à la carte” (Cameron 2002). For a disagreement that America has disregarded international institutions, see Zyla (2006, 2007).

30. Those consequences, however, were not further detailed.

31. For a similar argument see Dannreuther and Peterson (2006).

Additional information

Funding

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (2009–2011)