European Security Policy: Strategic Culture in Operation?

Abstract

With the Lisbon Treaty in place and the European Union increasingly involved in crisis management and stabilization in places near and far, this Special Issue examines whether European security behaviour is evidence of an actual strategic culture. Contrary to prevailing scholarship on the subject, this volume demonstrates that strategic culture, as an analytical tool and force on European strategic goals and conduct, is far from conclusive. Ostensibly, the development of a security culture was a major lever by which the European Union's principal planning document, the European Security Strategy of 2003, tried to guide the European Union's role in international security. This volume revisits the trajectory of the concept of strategic culture and examines its application in a variety of circumstances, especially operations in Africa and the Balkans, including joint operations with NATO and the United Nations. The contributors to this Special Issue find that strategic culture is a useful tool to understand EU's operations, not in the sense of a ‘cause’, but as a uniquely European normative framework of preferences and constraints. Classical notions of strategic culture must be adapted to highlight the specific evolution of Europe's strategic culture. Though at variance over the extent to which security and defense missions have promoted a shared strategic culture in Europe, the authors in this Special Issue reveal a growing sense that a strategic culture is critical for European ambition as a global actor. Should Europe fail to nurture a shared strategic culture, its ambitions and the normative framework that underpins it will unravel.

Notes

With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) became the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).

See stock-taking of the first five years see Nicole Gnesotto (ed.), EU Security and Defence Policy. The First Five Years (1999-2004) (Institute for Security Studies, European Union: Paris, 2004).

See http://consilium.europa.eu/media/1232545/map_en0711.pdf

It is necessary to raise two points here. First, from our point of view, operations, which can be considered practices of CSDP policies, reveal more about a strategic culture than the building up of sheer military and civilian capacities. They are in a way practices of sometimes stiff policy, which often is nothing more than rhetoric. This is especially true for the multi-level decision-making process of the EU, which is based on decisions by 27 member states. In this complex decision-making environment the agreement on building up capacities easily becomes an ‘empty promise’ that has little impact on real behaviour. Second, the European Union's outreach to other IOs also has a theoretical dimension, in the sense that it can answer the question of whether the European Union disposes over a unique and separate strategic culture and whether and – if at all – how it is interwoven with NATO and the United Nations. There is the hope that this outreach provides a contribution to the further development of SC approaches in general, and the EU's SC in particular.

Robert O. Keohane, ‘International Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 4 (1988), pp. 382.

It should be noted, though, that not all scholars agree with this clustering. For a different approach see Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 5–22.

See, for example, Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946).

Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p.11.

Quoted in Jeffrey S. Lantis and Darryl Howlett, ‘Strategic Culture’, in John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Eliot Cohen (eds), Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.85.

Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1977), p.8.

Colin S. Gray, ‘Comparative Strategic Culture’, Parameters, Vol. XIV, No. 4 (1984), p.28; see also Colin S. Gray, ‘National Style in Strategy: The American Example’, International Security, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1981), pp. 35–37.

A rebuttal of the first generation arrived promptly: Colin Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: the First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1999), pp. 49–69.

Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1995), pp. 32–64.

John S. Duffield, World Power Forsaken: Political Culture, International Institutions, and German Security Policy after Unification (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’ (note 12); Peter J. Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Ronald L. Jepperson and Ann Swidler, ‘What Properties of Culture do we Measure?’, Poetics, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1994), p. 360.

John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Towards a Neo-Realist Synthesis’, World Politics, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1983), pp. 261–285; John Gerard Ruggie, ‘What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge’, International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4 (1998), pp. 855–885.

Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p.15.