Conceptualising 'Strategic Culture' - A Promising Approach for the Analysis of the EU’s Security and Defence Policy?

Abstract

Theory guided work in the field of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has evolved considerably within the last years: While, at the outset, research on CSDP was remarkably often conducted in a “theoretical vacuum”, a wide array of IR as well as European Integration theories has been applied to analyse the quickly developing policy field in the meantime. This panel seeks to look into the strategic culture-approach, which stands in a constructivist tradition, emphasizes normative factors and has first and foremost been applied to the analysis of national foreign policy. Within the EU research community, the approach incrementally gained momentum after the quarrels concerning the Iraq war in 2003, when huge differences between the European nation states became obvious, particularly regarding when, how and why military force should be used. Consequently, the European Security Strategy of 2003 called for the emergence of a genuinely European strategic culture as a prerequisite for a more effective Common Foreign, Security and Defence Policy. However, the operationalisation of the strategic culture-approach remains a challenge - as demonstrated by rather heterogeneous attempts to define and “measure” strategic culture. In most of the recent studies, EU Member States form the backbone of analyses, assuming that national strategic cultures substantially shape the intergovernmentally organised CSDP and need to be increasingly convergent in order to allow for the development of a common European strategic culture. This Member States based approach clearly stands in contrast to another prominent strand of research that understands CSDP as a governance system, in which actors beyond the Member States - e.g. within the EU institutions - shape this policy field considerably. In this perspective, supranational actors explicitly need to be taken into account when looking at the development of a common European strategic culture. Hence, the panel’s primary objective is to take stock of ways to make use of - i.e. operationalise - the strategic culture-approach in order to analyse CSDP, including work that focuses on the role of supranational actors. Altogether, it seeks to assess the approach’s explanatory power, inter alia as opposed to other theory guided work in the field of CSDP.

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