‘Let's Call the Whole Thing Off’? Security Culture as Strategic Culture

Abstract

Scholars interested in contemporary security and defence policy, in Europe as elsewhere, often seek refuge in conceptual havens, and the articles in this special issue are no exceptions. One of those sheltering spots has been dubbed security culture, while another fashionable resting place carries the label, ‘strategic culture’. This article argues that attempts to draw a distinction between the two categories are superfluous, not to say meaningless, and that insofar as what we should call our concept, it really is a case of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More important is the task of attempting to abstract policy significance from the complexity and definitional vagueness of the more ‘senior’ of the two concepts, namely strategic culture. This complexity and vagueness to the contrary notwithstanding, this article claims that strategic culture can be of some analytical use in highlighting the ways in which both context and character have played, and continue to play, a part in shaping states’ orientation toward security and defence policy.

Notes

Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance (New York: Continuum, 1980), p. xv.

See Jörg Nagler, ‘From Culture to Kultur: Changing American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1870–1914’, in David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (eds), Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 131–54 and Michaela Hönicke, ‘“Know Your Enemy”: American Wartime Images of Germany, 1942-1943’, in Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl (eds), Enemy Images in American History (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997), pp. 232–278.

Quoted in André Tardieu, France and America: Some Experiences in Cooperation (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 64. Perrin du Lac was a French colonial administrator who, for reasons both political and geopolitical, found himself stranded in the New World from 1789 until 1803, when he was finally able to return to France.

Ibid., pp. 50–51.

Parts of this and the following sections have been based on my article ‘What Good Is Strategic Culture? A Modest Defence of an Immodest Concept’, International Journal, Vol. 59 (Summer 2004), pp. 479–502.

For the results of that project, see Jeannie L. Johnson, Kerry M. Kartchner, and Jeffrey A. Larsen (eds), Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Culturally Based Insights into Comparative National Security Policymaking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Jeffrey S. Lantis, ‘Strategic Culture: From Clausewitz to Constructivism’, Paper prepared for the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Washington, DC, 31 October 2006, p. 13.

Colin S. Gray, ‘Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 26 (January–March 2007), pp. 1–20.

On the necessity for structural realists to conceive of power as ‘aggregate capability’, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 60.

For a vigorous rejection of the understanding of power as aggregate capability, see David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), especially chapter 4.

Some would object, and insist instead that unless we can come to agreed-upon working definitions, we can never assign a value to our terms, thus cannot hope to measure them ‘scientifically’. This insistence strikes me as being in its own way unscientific, if by the term science we simply mean the systematic organization and use of knowledge in a given area of inquiry. For a refreshingly catholic view of such a way to organize thinking about foreign policy, see James N. Rosenau, The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy, rev. and enl. edn. (London: Frances Pinter, 1980).

Jack Snyder is often credited with being the first writer explicitly to employ the rubric, in his The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Options (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1977).

For a cautionary reminder, see Giovanni Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 64 (December 1970), pp. 1033–1053. But for a tacit recognition that the problem may be immune to resolution, see David Collier and James E. Mahon, ‘“Conceptual Stretching” Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 87 (December 1999), pp,845–855.

T.D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), pp. 26–27.

Williams, cited by William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 35–61. For an extensive catalogue of culture's many, and at times contradictory, meanings, see A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 1.

For such a bounded application of strategic culture, see Yitzhak Klein, ‘A Theory of Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 10 (January–March 1991), pp. 3–23. Sometimes a modifier even more limiting than ‘strategic’ is chosen, as in the case of the debate over France's and other states' military culture. For that debate see Elizabeth Kier, ‘Culture and Military Doctrine: France between the Wars’, International Security, 19 (Spring 1995), pp. 65–93; Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Douglas Porch, ‘Military “Culture” and the Fall of France in 1940: A Review Essay’, International Security, 24 (Spring 2000), pp. 157–180; and Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. viii.

Ronald Jepperson and Ann Swidler, ‘What Properties of Culture Should we Measure?’ Poetics, 22 (1994), pp. 359–371.

Donald R. Kelley, ‘The Old Cultural History’, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 9 (August 1996), pp. 101–126.

In the first of his seven-volume magnum opus; see Giovanni Andres, Dell'origine, progressi e stato attuale d'ogni letteratura, 7 vols. (Parma: Stamperia reale, 1782-99).

Kelley, ‘Old Cultural History’ (note 20), p. 109. Tylor's book was entitled Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.

Ibid., pp. 114–116.

See David Brion Davis, ‘Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History’, American Historical Review, Vol. 73 (February 1968), pp. 696–707.

Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 14–15.

Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 6–9. For an early attempt to associate culture with ethno-nationalism, through the concept of national ‘genius’ (or, as it would subsequently be rendered, ‘national character’), see Edward Sapir, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 29 (January 1924), pp. 401–429.

(New York: Basic Books, 1973).

Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction’, in Beyond the Cultural Turn (note 15), pp. 1–32.

Quoted in Kelley, Cultural Pattern in American Politics (note 26), p. 12.

Sewell, ‘Concept(s) of Culture’ (note 15), p. 48.

Johnston, Cultural Realism (note 16), pp. 36–37. Also see his ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, International Security, Vol. 19 (Spring 1995), pp. 32–64.

Johnston, Cultural Realism, pp. 36–37.

Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

Examples, respectively, of first- and second-generationers, as Johnston interprets them, are Colin S. Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of International Studies, 25 (January 1999), pp. 49–69; and Bradley Klein, ‘Hegemony and Strategic Culture: American Power Projection and Alliance Defence Politics’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 14 (April 1988), pp. 133–148.

Johnston, Cultural Realism (note 16), pp. 1–2, 37–39.

Terrence J. McDonald (ed.), The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Also see Mark M. Blyth, ‘“Any More Bright Ideas?” The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy’, Comparative Politics, 29 (January 1997), pp. 229–50; and David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1994).

Kelley, ‘Old Cultural History’ (note 20), p. 117.

Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’ (note 34), p. 58 (emphasis in original). In this regard, Gray's understanding of strategic culture is similar to the way in which Fukuyama defines culture, as ‘inherited ethical habit’. See Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 34. Also see, for this distinction, Stuart Poore, ‘What is the Context? A Reply to the Gray-Johnston Debate on Strategic Culture’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29 (April 2003), pp. 279–284.

Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’ (note 34), p. 69.

Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 72–74, 206–15.

Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 4–6.

For one claim that historical explanation is possible, but requires taking the ‘inside view’ – that is, getting into the heads of sentient decisionmakers so as to comprehend how they understood reality – see Isaiah Berlin, ‘History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History’, History and Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1961), pp. 1–31.

Von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (note 43), pp. 134–135. Also see Richard Biernacki, ‘Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History’, in Beyond the Cultural Turn (note 15), pp. 62–92; Patrick L. Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

As is argued in Michael Nicholson, ‘What's the Use of International Relations?’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 26 (April 2000), pp. 183–198.

Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for a reminder that bipolarity might just be unstable and very dangerous.

Illustratively, a survey of IR practitioners in North American universities found only 15 per cent of Canadian professors self-identified as working within the ‘realist’ paradigm, as against a somewhat larger minority (25 per cent) in the US. See Michael Lipson, Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, ‘Divided Discipline? Comparing Views of US and Canadian IR Scholars’, International Journal, Vol. 62 (Spring 2007), pp. 327–343.

For one realist's assessment of constructivism, see Stephen M. Walt, ‘International Relations: One World, Many Theories’, Foreign Policy, No. 110 (Spring 1998), pp. 29–46.

Jeffrey Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory’, World Politics, 50 (January 1998), pp. 324–348; Sujata Chakrabarti Pasic, ‘Culturing International Relations Theory: A Call for Extension’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 85–104.

Ted Hopf, ‘The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory’, International Security, 23 (Summer 1998), pp. 171–200.

For the argument that ‘identity’ is simply too loose and self-contradictory a category to provide guidance for serious analysis, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society, Vol. 29 (February 2000), pp. 1–47.

In the words of two scholars, ‘both constructivism and rationalism are broadly positivistic in orientation’. David Dessler and John Owen, ‘Constructivism and the Problem of Explanation: A Review Article’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 3 (September 2005), pp. 597–610.

On the prominence of anthropologists among this pioneering generation of strategic culturalists, see E. Adamson Hoebel, ‘Anthropological Perspectives on National Character’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 370 (March 1967), pp. 1–7.

Michael C. Desch, ‘Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies’, International Security, Vol. 23 (Summer 1998), pp. 141–170.

For some examples of the criticisms unleashed in his direction, see the separate contributions of John S. Duffield, Theo Farrell, and Richard Price, under the heading ‘Isms and Schisms: Culturalism versus Realism in Security Studies’, International Security, Vol. 24 (Summer 1999), pp. 156–172.

See David Dessler, ‘Constructivism within a Positivist Social Science’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25 (January 1999), pp. 123–37.

Adrian Hyde-Price and Lisbeth Aggestam, ‘Conclusion: Exploring the New Agenda’, in Lisbeth Aggestam and Adrian Hyde-Price (eds), Security and Identity in Europe: Exploring the New Agenda (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), pp. 234–262.

Gideon Rose, ‘Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy’, World Politics, Vol. 51 (October 1998), pp. 144–172.

In what has to be the best example of the international relations conceptual equivalent of Gresham's Law, neorealism was debased to such an extent that it would soon come to stand for the virtual opposite of what it had originally been intended to represent. That the debasing was in some large measure the doing of Robert Keohane, one of the pioneers of ‘complex interdependence’ theory, only adds to the curiosity. For early applications of neorealism as a means of assessing the relative merits of a variety of ‘power assets’ (including ‘soft power’ ones) in an era in which aggregate capability was said to have lost relevance, see Robert Lieber, No Common Power (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1988); Richard Feinberg, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to US Foreign Policy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983); and David B. Dewitt and John J. Kirton, Canada as a Principal Power (Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1983). The work most often associated with the transformation of the concept was Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), which was really a debate about the pros and cons of structural realism, the label Kenneth Waltz chose for his theory.

It is unappreciated in large measure due to the mistaken assumption of so many that realism must be all about either ‘security’ (as those structuralists sometimes labelled ‘defensive realists’ stress) or ‘power’ (said to be the stellar variable for structuralists called ‘offensive realists’). But as Randall Schweller reminds us, structural realists, whether defensive or offensive, seem to have forgotten classical realism's roots, which reveal myriad objects of states' desire – including prestige, status, leadership, and market share (objects, he goes on to note, that probably ensure states will be more predisposed to competition than to cooperation). See Randall L. Schweller, ‘Realism and the Present Great Power System: Growth and Positional Conflict Over Scarce Resources’, in Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (eds), Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies After the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 28–68. On the synthesis of classicalism and constructivism, see J. Samuel Barkin, ‘Realist Constructivism’, International Studies Review, Vol. 5 (September 2003), pp. 325–342; and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘Constructivist Realism or Realist-Constructivism?’ International Studies Review, Vol. 6 (Summer 2004), pp. 337–341.

Rose, ‘Neoclassical Realism’ (note 58), pp. 152–153.

On the rise, decline, and re-emergence of historical sociology, see Harry Elmer Barnes, Historical Sociology: Its Origins and Development (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948) and Dennis Smith, The Rise of Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

On the arrival of identity as an element of conceptual high-fashion, see Glenn Chafetz, Michael Spirtas, and Benjamin Frankel, ‘Introduction: Tracing the Influence of Identity on Foreign Policy’, Security Studies, Vol. 8 (Winter 1998/99–Spring 1999), pp. vii-xxii.

See Andrew Abbott, ‘From Causes to Events: Notes on Narrative Positivism’, Sociological Methods and Research, Vol. 20 (May 1992), pp. 428–455. Also relevant here are John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Peace In Our Time? Causality, Social Facts and Narrative Knowing’, American Society of International Law: Proceedings 89th Annual Meeting (1995), pp. 93–100; Lawrence Stone, ‘The Revival of the Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past and Present, Vol. 85 (November 1979), pp. 3–24; and Ian Lustick, ‘History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 90 (September 1996), pp. 605–618.

Paul Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 94 (June 2000), pp. 251–268. Also see Margaret R. Somers, ‘“We're No Angels”: Realism, Rational Choice, and Relationality in Social Science’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104 (November 1998), pp. 722–784.

See Theda Skocpol, ‘Sociology's Historical Imagination’, in Skocpol (ed.), Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–21.

On the methodological bona fides of ‘process tracing’, see Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 64–67.

See Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path Dependence, and Explanation in Historical Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104 (November 1998), pp. 829–845.

James Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, Theory and Society, Vol. 29 (August 2000), pp. 507–548.

Adam Nagourney, ‘In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks’, New York Times, 10 December 2010 (online edition), http://www.nytimes.com (accessed 11 December 2010).

See Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes, ‘Identities and US Foreign Policy’, in Michael Cox and Doug Stokes (eds.), US Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 183–209.

See Rodney Bruce Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

This critique is made by Paul A. Kowert in ‘National Identity: Inside and Out’, Security Studies, Vol. 8 (Winter 1998/99–Spring 1999), pp. 1–34. But for a rebuttal, see Francisco Gil-White, ‘How Thick is Blood? The Plot Thickens…: If Ethnic Actors Are Primordialists, What Remains of the Circumstantialis/ Primordialist Controversy?’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 22 (September 1999), pp. 789–820.

For a sharp critique of those who would steer clear of national character while embracing other vague categories (for example ‘class’), see Dean Peabody, National Characteristics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, new and rev. edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 169. Also see, on this theme, Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Hispanic Challenge’, Foreign Policy, No. 141 (March/April 2004), pp. 30–45.

For an example, see Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

A point that is sometimes missed by writers who seem to think that national character has to be synonymous with ethnicity. For such a conflation of terms, see Victor T. Le Vine, ‘Conceptualizing “Ethnicity” and “Ethnic Conflict”: A Controversy Revisited’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 32 (Summer 1997), pp. 47–75.

See Alex Inkeles and Daniel J. Levinson, ‘National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems’, in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (eds), The Handbook of Social Psychology (2nd edn): Group Psychology and Phenomena of Interaction (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969), pp. 418–506. Also see Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character (New York: W.W. Norton, 1948).

For instance, see Yaacov Y.I. Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition, and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 270–273, where a country's strategic culture is held to be a function of both context (that is, its historical experience and geopolitical setting) and cognition, with the latter paying heed to the manner in which decisionmakers utilize myth, metaphor, analogy, and extrapolation in order to comprehend reality.

One such critic is Christopher P. Twomey in ‘Lacunae in the Study of Culture in International Security’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 29 (August 2008), pp. 338–357.

Geertz is often associated with the argument that the best we can hope for is ‘thick description’ of social reality, but one writer claims he nevertheless often strayed into the realm of implicit causality. Says this writer, the ‘riddle of what constitutes an adequate explication and how to distinguish causal claims from interpretive ones has vexed the best minds in philosophy for more than a century’. Biernacki, ‘Method and Metaphor’ (note 43), pp. 72–73. A similar argument is made in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, ‘Comparative Historical Analysis: Achievements and Agendas’, in Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (eds), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3–38.

As one analyst puts it, ‘[y]ou know you are in trouble when our culture specialists, the cultural anthropologists and sociologists, cannot agree on a definition’. Gray, ‘Out of the Wilderness’ (note 8), p. 7.

William M. Reisinger, ‘The Renaissance of a Rubric: Political Culture as Concept and Theory’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Vol. 7 (Winter 1995), pp. 328–352.

Lucian Pye, ‘Political Culture Revisited’, Political Psychology, Vol. 12 (September 1991), pp. 487–508.

Ronald Inglehart, ‘The Renaissance of Political Culture’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 82 (December 1988), pp. 1203–1230.

Reisinger, ‘Renaissance of a Rubric’ (note 83), p. 331.

See, for the level-of-analysis problem, David J. Elkins and Richard E.B. Simeon, ‘A Cause in Search of Its Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain?’ Comparative Politics, Vol. 11 (July 1979), pp. 127–145 and Ruth Lane, ‘Political Culture: Residual Category or General Theory?’ Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 25 (October 1992), pp. 362–387.

Lowell Dittmer, ‘Political Culture and Political Symbolism’, World Politics, Vol. 29 (July 1977), pp. 552–583.

Michael Walzer, ‘On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 82 (June 1967), pp. 191–204.

As argued by Edward W. Lehman, ‘On the Concept of Political Culture: A Theoretical Reassessment’, Social Forces, Vol. 50 (March 1972), pp. 361–370.

See Charles Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Thom Shanker and Steven Erlanger, ‘Gates Delivers a Blunt Warning on NATO Future’, New York Times, 11 June 2001, pp. A1, A6.