This paper discusses and analyses key conceptual challenges scholars face when adapting the concept of strategic culture to the EU. Given its origins as a tool to examine national security and defence policies, important assumptions such as, for example, who the carriers of strategic culture are, and how norms and values representing strategic culture might emerge, become engrained, and are adjusted need to be re-thought to reflect the specific nature of the EU. The paper will thereby engage with a central debate in the literature, namely, whether an EU-level strategic culture should be expected to be the result of bottom-up convergence of national strategic culture, or whether it is indeed a top-down process of norm dispersion. The empirical part of the paper will draw on recent national level security strategy documents and the emerging EU-level discourse on security and defence policy.
