Strategic culture and Europeanization scholarships have been mainly concerned with explaining inertia and change in the security field of European Union (EU) member states . The Bourdieusean-inspired critique allows complementing, developing, and integrating these perspectives in order to develop a practice-oriented concept of strategic culture. While the strategic culture literature views culture as a unitary body of values, interests, and beliefs, the paper proposes a theoretical conception of strategic culture that is more open-ended and diffuse as a result of its constantly negotiated character. The analytical problem of strategic culture versus human agency, reflected in the broader International Relations (IR) literature as structure versus agency debate, is addressed through the Bourdieusean concept of habitus: a system of long-lasting dispositions inculcated by structural conditionings, an internalized code of principles acquired through socialization practices that does not determine human action but it orients strategic behavior (Jackson, 2008). Habitus offers an analytical purchase in examining actors’ behaviors as neither solely based on instrumental rationality principle, nor driven exclusively by ideational normative reflexivity). A new concept of strategic culture influenced by Bourdieu’s theory of culture as practice (Jackson, 2008) takes the following view: it analyzes strategic culture in its everyday security practice manifestation and accounts for a continuously transformative character of this process. In this perspective, interests and identities are produced through social practices at the grass roots of the EU''s everyday security and defense policy practical manifestations. The analysis is less concerned with measuring or explaining monolithic strategic culture outputs by looking at national cultures or rational interests. Instead, it explores the concentration of actors, their strategies and the structural underpinning that made the policy outputs possible in the first place.
