The cultural variable in foreign and defence policy

Cultural awareness – whether in the form of training or briefings – has become a part of military pre-deployment routines. The need to understand culture became an operational necessity during the war in Afghanistan. This lesson was not integrated into planning immediately, but later rotations of Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) formations did include established academics serving as advisors to commanders. In the United States, the military employed social scientists as part of their Human Terrain Teams in both Iraq and Afghanistan, recognizing that getting culture right is crucial for successful military operations (Kassel 2015). This approach proved controversial, especially as scientists voiced ethical concerns, but the spirit of the effort endured through Cultural Support Teams, where female service members were deployed in support of United States Army special operations combat forces. Through this initiative, the American mission was able to reach the local female population, an important demographic, which had previously been ignored in counterinsurgency operations (von Hlatky 2014).

Culture is also important when different countries and organizations work together. In the context of multinational operations, cultural interoperability is as important as technical interoperability (Rubinstein et al. 2008). Alliances and partnerships preserve the institutional memory of cultural interoperability by representing a forum for socialization, joint training and mutual influence. While these examples illustrate how culture impacts the security realm of international politics, how have scholars integrated the cultural variable in their analyses? Is it possible to study culture in a systematic way to address empirical puzzles about war and military cooperation?

The articles in this special issue take up this challenge and demonstrate the various ways culture factors into the implementation of major foreign and defence policy decisions. This introductory article will examine how culture has been theorized and operationalized in the field of international relations (IR), focusing more specifically on foreign policy analysis and security studies. Although culture transcends disciplinary boundaries, receiving substantial scholarly attention, we argue that there is greater potential for cultural analyses in IR to inform foreign and defence policies. While there is a sense that culture is important, scholars must take pains to empirically demonstrate how cultural variables influence the outcomes that are central to the security and defence community of practice: outcomes such as war, international cooperation, military intervention. How can we improve our analytical tools to better account for the role culture plays in crises, conflicts and war? Scholarly debates in the 1990s sought to answer this question.

Debates in the literature

Scholarly work on culture emerged from an important research tradition in political science and IR that has studied the impact of culture on political attitudes and values, societal norms, public opinion, and foreign and defence policy decision-making (see Almond and Verba 1963, Johnston 1995, Finnemore 1996, Katzenstein 1996, Duffield 1999). Definitions of culture transcend disciplinary boundaries, from anthropology and sociology to political science and history. Drawing on various definitions, we understand culture as the socially constructed way that individuals and organizations ascribe meaning to their daily practices, building a sense of common identity through interaction and socialization (Geertz 1973, p. 89, Lapid 1996, p. 7, Ross 2007, p. 41, Crossley 2015, p. 68).

The debate in IR theory has centered on how culture contributes to the definition and prioritization of states’ interests. For scholars such as Peter Katzenstein, interests emerge and are made intelligible through a process of social interaction (Katzenstein 1996). He suggests that culture can be understood as both a cultural–institutional context and collective identity, meaning that we can conceive of states as social actors, advancing their interests in various institutional settings and collectively identifying with certain values, norms and principles of international action (Katzenstein 1996). The big shift was to argue that both state interests and institutional practices are determined by culture, rather than existing a priori. In the 1990s, IR debates were increasingly influenced by constructivist scholars, who emphasized the importance of norms, culture and collective identity as crucial factors to understand international politics, especially patterns of interstate cooperation and conflict, challenging neorealist assumptions and analyses (Wendt 1994, Finnemore 1996). It is no surprise, then, that these debates also made their way into security studies.

In security studies, Alastair Iain Johnston called on the academic community to use the concept of culture in a more systematic way in his 1995 state-of-the-art International Security article (Johnston 1995). In this article, he covers different types of cultural explanations and argues that it is possible to derive testable hypotheses by zoning in on military culture and organizational culture as intervening variables (Johnston 1995, pp. 41–43). The work of Elizabeth Kier fits this model, as she demonstrates the cultural underpinnings of preferences in military doctrine (Kier 1995). This paved the way for other scholars to investigate the link between culture and the use of military power (Farrell and Terriff 2002). These analyses are helpful to understand how military organizations interpret their environment or actualize defence policy, as determined by civilian decision-makers. Furthermore, culture is an important factor to understand alliance dynamics and military cooperation, since wars are increasingly multinational in scope and in theaters where diverse military cultures must coexist (von Hlatky and Breede 2016).

Finally, the concept of strategic culture has been very influential in the foreign policy analysis (FPA) literature. FPA scholars have identified patterns in decision-making that they ascribe to a state’s strategic culture (Johnston 1995). In Canada, strategic culture has been especially popular (Massie 2009; Massie and Roussel 2013), even if scholars continue to question its utility as a concept (Bloomfield & Nossal 2007, p. 228, Haglund 2009). Canada’s evident attachment to peacekeeping is an illustration of this logic. Canadians are so deeply connected to the image of Canada as a peacekeeper that many of them thought the military was wearing blue berets in Afghanistan (Martyn 2016). This affection for peacekeeping no doubt led Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reintegrate it as part of his defence policy platform.

As a point of clarification, we should note that strategic culture is different from military culture, an important distinction for this special issue, given our focus on defence and military themes. A state’s strategic culture represents the beliefs held by civilian policymakers rather than the collective beliefs of a military organization (Kier 1995, Farrell 2005). As Legro notes, organizational military culture “may or may not relate to wider societal culture or to the beliefs held within a different military organization” (Legro 1996, p. 123). The individual contributions touch on aspects of both.

Main contributions

This special issue is divided into two broad themes: our first three authors deals with culture as a variable to increase understanding and improve coordination between allies and partners. Our claim is that studying cultural nuances will help improve the interoperability of multinational coalitions. Thomas Crowson’s piece, although evoking a purple dinosaur that will cause any parent’s eyes to roll, presents a clear disaggregation of culture into a series of indicators that can be used to inform and improve cultural awareness in soldiers prior to and during military engagements. More importantly, however, Crowson’s analysis argues that this awareness needs to be applied to coalition partners. In short, militaries need to take a systematic approach to understanding the cultural nuances of those they work with as much as they try to understand those whom they are operating against. Crowson’s framework is one such tool to address this need. Another tool is offered by Rob Williams, which draws on history to inform the selection criteria of interpreters. Using the Polish experience during the Second World War as his starting point, Williams presents four factors that can be used to inform how coalition partners select interpreters for use within and between multinational military staffs. Given that most military engagements today are multinational efforts, such attention is warranted and Williams offers a potential solution to the friction of language.

Taking a slightly different approach, but again with the same overall conclusion, Pierre Jolicoeur argues that socialization through defence education is the vector through which former rivals can become partners. Through an analysis of ongoing The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) efforts through the Defence Education Enhancement Program (DEEP), Jolicoeur provides some guidance on how to entrench gains made through NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. Indeed, where Williams provides tactical-level guidance for the selection of interpreters and Crowson offers operational-level recommendations for improved coalition cooperation, Jolicoeur’s piece provides longer term, strategic guidance to address cultural divides between nations. Taken together, this first section provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for all levels of conflict.

The second theme in this special issue supports the claim that certain assumptions that guide policy and military action are culturally determined. When confronted with reality, these assumptions are shattered by a culture clash of sorts, potentially leading to policy or operational failures. For example, Jan von der Felsen and H. Christian Breede present a reflection on how concepts quite literally get lost in translation in an alliance context. The authors conduct a discourse analysis of the concept of war in both the Canadian and German contexts. For his part, Allan English presents a truly troubling discussion on the clash of cultures that occurred between Canadian Armed Forces soldiers in Afghanistan and the Afghan National Security Forces with whom they were partnered. English presents an example of the deep ethical dilemmas that are possible when countries from disparate cultures partner toward a common security goal. Finally, Peter Kasurak’s article presents a similar discussion on the clash of cultures but adds that unclear mission objectives only serve to further exacerbate the cognitive dissonances faced by soldiers. Indeed, clear direction is a key requirement in such complex environments, and Kasurak’s article presents some examples from the last few decades where this was absent.

In sum, the authors in this special issue demonstrate the importance of culture by introducing original theoretical approaches and novel empirical puzzles. The contributors come from diverse professional backgrounds, which delivers value added in terms of confronting theoretical claims about culture with practical experience from the field. We hope that this special issue will revive sustained discussion on the topic of culture like that in the 1990s, and we are optimistic that cultural approaches can further our understanding of Canadian foreign and defence policy, so long as scholars are meticulous about how they operationalize them.

Conclusion

This article focused on how academic research has integrated culture as a variable in IR and security studies. The authors in this special issue make an unquestionable contribution to this rich debate in the literature. While acknowledging this, we also reflect on the fact that the greatest demand for cultural analysis has come from governments and militaries. In Afghanistan and Iraq, getting the cultural variable right was recognized as crucial for achieving successful operational outcomes. We anticipate that demand will only grow for accurate and thoughtful work on how culture impacts major foreign and defence policy decisions. The implication from a scholarly standpoint is more cross-pollination between security studies and area specialists. Similarly, the cultural variable is important to understand interstate cooperation and even interagency cooperation, as national cultures mix with organizational cultures to produce an incredibly dizzying coordination matrix.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the generous support provided by the Queen’s Centre for International and Defence Policy, as well as the diligent research assistance provided by Jeffrey Rice and David Walsh-Pickering.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Stéfanie von Hlatky is an Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University and Director of the Centre for International and Defence Policy. Email: [email protected]

H. Christian Breede is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMCC) and a serving officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Defence Engagement Program (Canadian Department of National Defence).