EU Strategic Culture: When the Means Becomes the End

Abstract

After being debated in academic circles for years, the idea of a common European Union strategic culture was elevated to a policy objective in the 2003 European Security Strategy. However, whether the European Union has a strategic culture or not is still up for debate. By drawing on developments in strategic culture theory, this article demonstrates that the idea of strategic culture is not only compatible with the European Union, but may be a particularly useful conceptual tool for studying actors for which cultural factors can make up for the lack of more material ones, such as borders, language, political structure, national history, and so on. Offering a fresh perspective on the European Security Strategy, it shows that a specific strategic culture has evolved in the EU, in which consensus on a comprehensive approach to security as a unique European asset has become a focal point for the fledgling European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). However, the article concludes that this does not provide for a robust strategic culture. The repeated emphasis on the EU's unique potentials as a comprehensive security actor will also invite criticism if the EU fails to mount operations that reflect its own success formula.

Notes

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Colin Gray, Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture (Fort Belvoir, VA: Defence Threat Reduction Agency, 2006).

Hyde Price, ‘European Security, Strategic Culture and the Use of Force’ (note 1)' Matlary, ‘When Soft Power Turns Hard: Is an EU Strategic Culture Possible?’ (note 1), Rynning, ‘The European Union: Towards a Strategic Culture?’ (note 1).

Cornish and Edwards, ‘Beyond the EU/NATO Dichotomy: The Beginnings of a European Strategic Culture’ (note 1); Cornish and Edwards, ‘The Strategic Culture of the European Union: A Progress Report’ (note 1); Howorth, Security and Defence Policy in the European Union (note 1).

This view is in line with the broad understanding of (strategic) culture as the context in which all (strategic) acts necessarily take place. See for example Colin Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 49–69, David Haglund, ‘What Good Is Strategic Culture? A Modest Defence of an Immodest Concept’, International Journal, Vol. 59, no. 3 (2004), pp. 479–502. I return to this discussion below.

European Council, ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy’ (Brussels: endorsed by the European Council, 11–12 December, 2003). Hereafter referred to as ESS.

ESS (note 6), p. 11.

Sven Biscop, ‘The ABC of European Security Strategy: Ambition, Benchmark, Culture’, Egmont Royal Institute of International Relations: Egmont Paper 16, 2007; Anne Deighton and Victor Mauer (eds), Securing Europe? Implementing the European Security Strategy, Zurich: ETH Centre for Security Studies, 2006, Sven Biscop and Jan Joel Andersson (eds), The EU and the European Security Strategy: Forging a Global Europe (London: Routledge, 2008), European Council, ‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy - Providing Security in a Changing World’, Brussels: Adopted by the European Council, 11 December 2008.

US Government, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, Washington DC: The White House, 2002.

Jack L. Snyder, ‘The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations’, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, R-2154-AF, 1977.

Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979); Colin Gray, ‘National Styles in Strategy: The American Example’, International Security, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1981), pp. 21–47; Carnes Lord, ‘American Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1985), pp. 269–293; Richard Pipes, ‘Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War’, Commentary 1 (1977), pp. 21–34.

Jack L. Snyder, ‘The Concept of Strategic Culture: Caveat Emptor’, in Carl G. Jacobsen (ed.), Strategic Power USA/USSR, (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 3.

For the most notorious account of differing perceptions of security and power on either side of the Atlantic, see Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003); Robert Kagan, ‘Power and Weakness – Why the United States and Europe See the World Differently’, Policy Review, 113 (June and July 2002). pp. 3–28.

David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Bradley S. Klein, ‘Hegemony and Strategic Culture: American Power Projection and Alliance Defence Politics’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1988); Bradley S. Klein, ‘The Textual Strategies of the Military: Or, Have You Read Any Good Defence Manuals Lately?’, in James Der Derian and J. Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA.: Lexington Books, 1989).

Rynning, ‘The European Union: Towards a Strategic Culture?’ (note 1).

Simon Duke, ‘CESDP and the EU Response to 11 September: Identifying the Weakest Link’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2002); Julian Lindley-French, ‘Terms of Engagement. The Paradox of American Power and the Transatlantic Dilemma Post-11 September’, Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, Chaillot Paper No. 52, 2002.

Gilles Andréani, Christoph Bertram, and Charles Grant, Europe's Military Revolution (London: Centre for European Reform, 2001); Charles Cogan, The Third Option: The Emancipation of European Defense, 1989-2000 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); Jolyon Howorth, ‘The CESDP and the Forging of a European Security Culture?’, Politique Européenne, Vol. 8 (2002), pp. 88–109.

Christopher Hill, ‘The Capability-Expectations Gap, or Conceptualising Europe's International Role’ Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 31 (1993), pp. 305—328.

According to Johnston, behaviour (dependent variable) may causally follow from strategic culture (independent variable), defined as ‘a limited ranked set of strategic preference’. In that case, the validity of strategic culture as an explanatory variable is verified, whereas in cases of non-compliance between strategic culture and behaviour, the theory must be discarded. Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Thinking About Strategic Culture’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1995), p. 48. See also Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Jeffrey Legro, Cooperation under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint During World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’ (note 5). See also Johnston and Gray's subsequent replies and replies to replies. Johnston's definition of culture has been generally discredited, since it represents a sharp departure from definitions in sociological and anthropological literature. For a detailed discussion, see Iver B. Neumann and Henrikki Heikka, ‘Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, Practice. The Social Roots of Nordic Defence’, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2005). pp. 5–23.

Gray, Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture (note 2), p. ii.

Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Alexander Wendt, ‘On Constitution and Causation in International Relations’, Review of International Relations, Vol. 24, Special Issue (1998). See also John Gerard Ruggie, ‘The False Premise of Realism’, International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1995).

Milja Kurki, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 181. See also Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Kerry Longhurst, ‘Strategic Culture’, in Gerhard Kümmel and Andreas D. Prüfert (eds), Military Sociology: The Richness of a Discipline (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2000).

Ibid., p. 305.

Ole Waever, ‘Insecurity, Security and Asecurity in the West European Non-War Community, in Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (eds), Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 71, 75.

Longhurst, ‘Strategic Culture’ (note 24), p.305, my emphasis.

Neumann and Heikka, ‘Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, Practice’ (note 20).

Cf. Ann Swidler, ‘What Anchors Cultural Practices’, in Theodore M. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001). pp. 74–92.

John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001); Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Transformation of Strategic Affairs’, Adelphi Paper 379 (London: IISS, 2006); Mary Kaldor, Mary Martin, and Sabine Selchow, ‘Human Security: A New Strategic Narrative for Europe’, International Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 2 (2007), pp. 273–288.

Freedman, The Transformation of Strategic Affairs (note 30), pp. 22–23.

Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (note 14).

Cf. John L. Austin, How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955); Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde, and Ole Waever, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Ole Waever, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in R.D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86.

Martin Ortega, ‘Building the Future: The EU's Contribution to Global Governance’, Chaillot Paper No. 100 (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2007), p. 93.

Mark Gilbert, ‘Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 46, No. 3 (2008), pp. 641–662.

Francois Heisbourg, ‘Europe's Strategic Ambitions: The Limits of Ambiguity’, Survival, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2000).

Jolyon Howorth, ‘Discourse, Ideas, and Epistemic Communities in European Security and Defence Policy’, West European Politics, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2004), pp. 211–243. Some would, however, question whether Germany is still pursuing the ‘federalism’ line.

Ibid., p. 228.

Alyson J.K. Bailes, ‘The European Security Strategy. An Evolutionary History’, Policy Paper No.10, SIPRI, Stockholm, 2005, p. 1.

‘Sarkozy in Drive to Give EU a Global Goal’, Financial Times, 27 July 2007.

European Council, ‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy – Providing Security in a Changing World’ (note 8), p. 3.

US Government, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’ (note 9); Alyson J.K. Bailes, ‘EU and US Strategic Concepts: A Mirror for Partnership and Difference?’, The International Spectator, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3 (2004), pp. 19–33; Bailes, ‘The European Security Strategy. An Evolutionary History’ (note 39), Simon Duke, ‘The European Security Strategy in a Comparative Framework: Does It Make for Secure Alliances in a Better World?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 9 (2004), pp. 459–481; Felix Berenskoetter, ‘Mapping the Mind Gap: A Comparison of US and EU Security Strategies’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2005); Asle Toje, ‘The 2003 European Union Security Strategy: A Critical Appraisal’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 10 (2005), pp. 117–133; Sven Biscop, ‘The European Security Strategy. Implementing a Distinctive Approach to Security’, Brussels: Royal Defence College (IRSD-KHID), Paper No.82 (March), 2004.

Quoted in Toje, ‘The 2003 European Union Security Strategy: A Critical Appraisal’ (note 42), p. 120.

Duke, ‘The European Security Strategy in a Comparative Framework: Does It Make for Secure Alliances in a Better World?’ (note 42); p. 461; Bailes, ‘The European Security Strategy. An Evolutionary History’ (note 39), p. 32.

Haine and Lindström, quoted in Duke, ‘The European Security Strategy in a Comparative Framework: Does It Make for Secure Alliances in a Better World?’, (note 42), p. 460.

Toje, ‘The 2003 European Union Security Strategy: A Critical Appraisal’, (note 42), p. 121.

Frank Schimmelfenning, The EU, NATO and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 265–278. However, see Gilbert, ‘Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration’ (note 35).

ESS, (note 6) p. 1. The exception was the accession of Greece, Spain and Portugal, which was a testing ground for the EU's ability to promote stability and democracy in the region. The success of this venture later became an important reference point for Eastern enlargement. See Kristi Raik, ‘The EU as a Regional Power: Extended Governance and Historical Responsibility’, in Hartmut Mayer and Henri Vogt (eds), A Responsible Europe? Ethical Foundations of EU External Affairs (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 78.

ESS (note 6), p. 1.

Hyde Price, ‘European Security, Strategic Culture and the Use of Force’ (note 1).

Peter van Ham, ‘Europe's Strategic Culture and the Relevance of War’, Oxford Journal of Good Governance, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2005), pp. 39–43; Peter van Ham, Europe's Postmodern Identity: A Critical Appraisal', International Politics, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2001), pp. 229–252.

Van Ham, ‘Europe's Strategic Culture and the Relevance of War’ (note 51), p. 40.

The fact that neither the Cold War nor the war on terror were wars in the conventional meaning of the term makes references to them as such appear all the more conspicuous in the sense that they create a feeling of urgency and lack of safety, as well as commanding a certain way of dealing with the problem.

The ‘war against terror’ was rebaptized ‘the long war’ in the 2006 NSS, which signified a somewhat reluctant acceptance of the fact that it was going to be protracted struggle rather than a war, with all the costs (the Iraq war was and remains the most expensive ever fought by the United States) and suffering it is bound to incur.

ESS (note 6), p. 5, emphasis added.

Howorth, ‘Discourse, Ideas, and Epistemic Communities in European Security and Defence Policy’ (note 31).

ESS, p. 1.

ESS, p. 1, and NSS, p. 3. Commentators differ on what to make of the frequent use of the term ‘global’ in the ESS. Bayles sees a ‘truly global approach’ as a feature it shares with the NSS: Bailes, ‘The European Security Strategy. An Evolutionary History’ (note 39), p. 15. Duke and Berenskoetter, in turn, recognize the ESS' global outlook, but conclude that it is, nonetheless, primarily concerned with regional security. Duke, ‘The European Security Strategy in a Comparative Framework: Does It Make for Secure Alliances in a Better World?’ (note 42), Berenskoetter, ‘Mapping the Mind Gap: A Comparison of US and EU Security Strategies’ (note 42).

See ESS, p. 7, and Berenskoetter, ‘Mapping the Mind Gap: A Comparison of US and EU Security Strategies’ (note 42).

See for example Toje, ‘The 2003 European Union Security Strategy: A Critical Appraisal’, (note 42), p. 121.

ESS, p. 7.

Berenskoetter, ‘Mapping the Mind Gap: A Comparison of US and EU Security Strategies’ (note 42).

ESS, p. 11.

See the debate on the EU as a civilian or normative power. Francoise Dûchene, ‘Europe in World Peace’, in R. Maine (ed.), Europe Tomorrow (London: Fontana/Collins, 1972); Karen Smith, ‘The End of Civilian Power EU: A Welcome Demise or a Cause for Concern?’ International Spectator, Vol. XXXV, No. 2 (2000); Stelios Stavridis, ‘Militarising the EU: The Concept of Civilian Power Revisited’, International Spectator, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4 (2001); Mario Telo, Europe: A Civilian Power? European Union, Global Governance, World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2002), pp. 235–258; ‘Normative Power Europe Reconsidered: Beyond the Crossroads’, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2006), pp. 182–199.

According to Asle Toje, the EU acts in accordance with what Max Weber refers to as Wertrationalität (or value rationality) rather than traditional Zweckrationalität (ends/means rationality). Toje, ‘The 2003 European Union Security Strategy: A Critical Appraisal’ (note 42).

See for example James March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989).

Cf. Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (note 14); van Ham, ‘Europe's Strategic Culture and the Relevance of War’ (note 51); van Ham, ‘Europe's Postmodern Identity: A Critical Appraisal’ (note 51).

The ESS adds organized crime and regional conflicts to the list. Note also the difference between ‘rogue’ and ‘failed’ states. While a failed state is in the ESS seen as a catalyst for other threats to emerge, a rogue state is in the NSS seen as a threat in itself, either by its own direct actions, its sponsorship of terrorists, or failure to prevent these from hurting US interests. Each term anchors fundamentally different opinions about when forceful intervention is considered legitimate.

NSS, p. 19.

Preventive engagement is described in ESS, pp. 9–11. Solana quoted in Toje, ‘The 2003 European Union Security Strategy: A Critical Appraisal’ (note 42), p. 128.

Barcelona Report, ‘A Human Security Doctrine for Europe’, Report of the Study Group on Europe's Security Capabilities, Barcelona, 15 September 2004, Biscop, ‘The European Security Strategy. Implementing a Distinctive Approach to Security’ (note 42); Biscop, ‘The ABC of European Security Strategy: Ambition, Benchmark, Culture’ (note 8).

Sven Biscop, ‘The European Security Strategy in Context: A Comprehensive Trend’, in Sven Biscop and Jan Joel Andersson (eds), The EU and the European Security Strategy: Forging a Global Europe (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 13.

Ibid; Ulrich Schneckener, ‘Theory and Practice of European Crisis Management: Test Case Macedonia’, European Yearbook of Minority Issues, 1 (2002).

European Council, ‘The Stability Pact for Central and Eastern Europe’, Paris, adopted by the European Council, 20–21 March 1995.

ESS, p. 7.

Ibid.

Biscop, ‘The European Security Strategy in Context: A Comprehensive Trend’ (note 72), p. 16.

NATO, ‘The Alliance's Strategic Vision: The Military Challenge’ ACO/ACT, Mons/Norfolk, 2004.

ESS, p. 1.

See for example Richard Gowan, ‘Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes’, E!Sharp, 1 (2009).

See Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (note 13).

Cf. Gilbert, ‘Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration’ (note 35).

For an in-depth analysis of these operations, see Per M. Norheim-Martinsen, ‘Our Work Here is Done: European Union Peacekeeping in Africa’, African Security Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2011), pp. 17–28.

Xymena Kurowska, ‘The Role of ESDP Operations’, in Michael Merlingen and Rasa Ostrauskaite (eds), European Security and Defence Policy. An Implementation Perspective, 25-42 (London: Routledge, 2009), 34.