What Can Strategic Culture Contribute to Our Understanding of Security Policies in the Asia-Pacific Region?

Abstract

This article reflects on application of the concept of strategic culture to supply analytical and policy-relevant guidance to those who ponder the future of security relations in the Asia-Pacific. Argued here is that, notwithstanding some obvious problems with the concept, there is utility in the application of strategic culture to the analysis of regional security challenges. To claim that strategic culture may not be equally applicable to all states in the Asia-Pacific region is not the same as saying it has no applicability at all, especially if the states to which it is applicable are important regional actors. This article suggests that both an old approach derivative of national character, and a new one associated with path dependence, might together prove fruitful for policy analysts and policy-makers alike, as they wrestle with what many assume to be the fundamental question of the coming half-century in the Asia-Pacific, namely whether a great power war in the region can be averted. Although there is much variation in the manner with which authors apply the master concept of strategic culture to their specific Asia-Pacific cases, each takes seriously the utility of a cultural approach to national strategic choice. So while the quest for reliable causality and predictive capability on a region-wide basis may remain that of the will-o’-the-wisp, there can be no gainsaying that, on a case-by-case basis, the authors show that the approach can demonstrate valuable insights into the policy dilemmas of cultural provenance and content confronting the Asia-Pacific.

Notes

1. In German, Im Westen nichts Neues.

2. See David G. Haglund, ‘“Let's Call the Whole Thing Off”? Security Culture as Strategic Culture’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 32 (December 2011), pp. 495–517. Also on this difficulty, see Christoph O. Meyer, ‘Convergence towards a European Strategic Culture? A Constructivist Framework for Explaining Changing Norms’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2005), pp. 523–49, citing from pp. 523–5.

3. Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Also see Huiyun Feng, ‘A Dragon on Defense: Explaining China's Strategic Culture’, in Jeannnie 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), pp. 171–87.

4. Most prominently, Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Options (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1977); and Colin S. Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1999), pp. 49–69.

5. Which is not to claim that national character was a new concept even at that time; to the contrary, scholars had been evincing interest in it for more than a century. Some argue that Tocqueville pioneered this line of social inquiry, while others trace its lineage back to David Hume, nearly a century before Tocqueville. See Reino Virtanen, ‘French National Character in the Twentieth Century’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 3701, No. 3 (1967), pp. 82–92; and Srdjan Vucetic, ‘The Search for Liberal Anglo-America: From Racial Supremacy to Multicultural Politics’, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), Anglo-America and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities beyond West and East (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 105–24, cited on p. 111.

6. For one scholar's assessment of what he takes to be the perils of conceptual expansion, applicable to international as well as to comparative politics, see Giovanni Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 64 (December 1970), pp. 1033–53. But for a rather different view, one arguing that conceptual expansion is a normal and reasonably healthy practice, cf. T.D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), pp. 26–7.

7. Although by the 1990s human security was becoming a common reference, its name was actually coined back in late January 1938, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt; see James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 354–55. On the concept itself, much has been written of late, with the following figuring among the best sources: S. Neil MacFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong, Human Security and the UN (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); Roland Paris, ‘Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?’, International Security, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2001), pp. 87–102; and David Chandler, ‘Human Security: The Dog That Didn't Bark’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2008), pp. 427–38.

8. Obtaining it in a policy address given at the Royal College of Defence Studies on 13 May 1998, by Clare Short, at the time Development Minister in the Tony Blair government; see David Law, ‘Security Sector Reform in the Euro-Atlantic Region: Unfinished Business’, in Alan Bryden and Heiner Hänggi (eds), Reform and Reconstruction of the Security Sector (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), pp. 21–45.

9. Johnston, Cultural Realism (note 3), pp. 3–5; idem, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1995), pp. 32–64. For an elaboration, see my chapter, ‘What Good Is Strategic Culture?’ in Johnson, Kartchner, and Larsen, Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction (note 3), pp. 15–31.

10. See 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; Jeffrey Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory’, World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 1 (1998), pp. 324–48; and Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

11. Michael C. Desch, ‘Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies’, International Security, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1998), pp. 141–70, citing from pp. 141–5.

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

13. Victor T. Le Vine, ‘Conceptualizing “Ethnicity” and “Ethnic Conflict”: A Controversy Revisited’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 32 (Summer 1997), pp. 47–75, quote at p. 49.

14. On that problem, see Philip Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History, Vol. 69, No. 1 (1983), pp. 910–31; and Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 1–47.

15. Hamilton Fyfe, The Illusion of National Character (London: Watts, 1940), pp. 58–9.

16. Dean Peabody, National Characteristics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 10.

17. 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 edition; Vol. 4: Group Psychology and Phenomena of Interaction) (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969), pp. 418–506, citing from pp. 424–5.

18. Morris Ginsberg, ‘National Character’, British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1942), pp. 183–205, quote at pp. 187–8.

19. Bernard C. Hennessy, ‘Psycho-Cultural Studies of National Character: Relevances for International Relations’, Background, Vol. 6 (Autumn 1962), pp. 27–49, quoting from pp. 43–5, 47.

20. On this fallacy, see David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), pp. 219–21.

21. E. Adamson Hoebel, ‘Anthropological Perspectives on National Character’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 370, No. 3 (1967), pp. 1–7, quote on p. 3.

22. Alan Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2012), pp. 437–61, quotes on pp. 438, 454.

23. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

24. See David G. Haglund and Tyson McNeil-Hay, ‘The “Germany Lobby” and US Foreign Policy: What, if Anything, Does It Tell Us about the Debate over the “Israel Lobby”?’, Ethnopolitics, Vol. 10 (September–November 2011), pp. 321–44.

25. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Israel Lobby’, London Review of Books, No. 28, 23 March 2006; and idem, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Penguin, 2007). For the debate the publications touched off, see Michael Massing, ‘The Storm over the Israel Lobby’, New York Review of Books, No. 53, 8 June 2006.

26. See his ‘The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87 (July/August 2008), pp. 28–46.

27. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

28. James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962).

29. Mead, Special Providence (note 22), pp. 219–20.

30. Jeffrey S. Lantis, ‘Strategic Culture: From Clausewitz to Constructivism’, in Johnson, Kartchner, and Larsen, Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction (note 3), pp. 34–52, quote on p. 37.

31. Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945–1995 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 170.

32. One such being Christopher P. Twomey, ‘Lacunae in the Study of Culture in International Security’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008), pp. 338–57.

33. 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. 279–84, quote on p. 284.

34. For our own precinct of social science, this dichotomy has been best captured in Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

35. See Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).

36. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 167–69.

37. See, for instance, the thoughtful critique by Andrew R. Rutten, ‘Review Essay: Politics in Time’, Independent Review, Vol. 11 (Fall 2006), pp. 299–305.

38. Paul Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 94 (June 2000), pp. 251–68, quote at p. 252. 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. 722–84.

39. Andrew Abbott, ‘From Causes to Events: Notes on Narrative Positivism’, Sociological Methods and Research, Vol. 20 (May 1992), pp. 428–55. Also relevant here are Kevin Fox Gotham and William G. Staples, ‘Narrative Analysis and the New Historical Sociology’, Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 37 (Summer 1996), pp. 481–501; 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; and Lawrence Stone, ‘The Revival of the Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past and Present, Vol. 85 (November 1979), pp. 3–24.

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

41. See Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path Dependence, and Explanation in Historical Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104 (November 1998), pp. 829–45.

42. Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen, ‘The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism’, World Politics, Vol. 59 (April 2007), pp. 341–69, quotes on p. 341.

43. James Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, Theory and Society, Vol. 29 (August 2000), pp. 507–48.

44. See Steven Philip Kramer, Does France Still Count? The French Role in the New Europe (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), where on p. 89 it is argued that improving transatlantic relations can only come about through changing ‘the culture of US–French relations, because a history of mutual dislike among much of the elite and general public is not without its effect on relations between the two states’ (emphasis added). Supporting this contention that interstate interaction can and does constitute cultural context in its own right, is Kenneth W. Terhune, ‘From National Character to National Behavior: A Reformulation’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 14 (June 1970), pp. 203–63, who in an effort to operationalize ‘national character’ stresses that ‘[p]redicting how two nations will interact by knowing the national character of only one of the nations will probably be as inexact as trying to predict the interaction between two chemical elements when the character of only one is known’ (p. 256).

45. See in particular Feng Yongping, ‘The Peaceful Transition of Power from the UK to the US’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 1 (2006), pp. 83–108.

46. See Alan Dobson and Steve Marsh (eds), Contemporary Anglo-American Relations: A ‘Special Relationship’? (London: Routledge, 2013).

47. For an example that stresses ‘racialized’ collective identity instead of path dependency as the wellspring of the Anglo-American special relationship, see Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

48. Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

49. Charles A. Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 2.

50. On the history of the bilateral relationship, see Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (New York: Grove Press, 2009); Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967); Harry Cranbrook Allen, The Anglo-American Relationship since 1783 (London: Black, 1959); Charles S. Campbell, Jr., From Revolution to Rapprochement: The United States and Great Britain, 1783–1900 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974); Robert Balmain Mowat, The Diplomatic Relations of Great Britain and the United States (London: E. Arnold, 1925).

51. See, on this crisis, Jennie A. Sloan, ‘Anglo-American Relations and the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute’, Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 4 (November 1938), pp. 486–506.

52. Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (New York: Nation Books, 2004), quote at p. 30. Geoffrey Seed, ‘British Reactions to American Imperialism Reflected in Journals of Opinion, 1898–1900′, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 73 (June 1958), pp 254–72; and Sylvia L. Hilton and Steve J. S. Ickringill (eds), European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (New York: Lang, 1999).

53. On the destroyers-bases exchange, see James R. Leutze, Bargaining for Supremacy: Anglo-American Naval Collaboration, 1937–1941 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 72–93, 114–27; and Philip Goodhart, Fifty Ships that Saved the World: The Foundation of the Anglo-American Alliance (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965).

54. This is the clear implication of John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The Gathering Storm: China's Challenge to US Power in Asia’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 3 (2010), pp. 381–96.