This paper argues that the concept of strategic culture bears significant explanatory potential for state behaviour as well as for the limited extent to which the CSDP has moved beyond an intergovernmentally organised policy field. However, when employed in research the concept often struggles to describe the precise nature of its impact on security policy and practice. At the heart of this problem lies an under-specification of the interrelationship between security policy elites and the public. For this reason this paper proposes a theoretical model combining the concepts of strategic culture and securitisation. It sees strategic culture as comprising identity derived norms on the legitimate use of state violence that are specific to and widely shared amongst a given political community. These shape behaviour and delimit the range of options for action but do not cause behaviour in particular situations. On the other hand, the special logic of securitisation does not apply in a perfectly unitary way across societies. Instead, the audience that needs to concur with securitisation moves varies as it is shaped by distinct strategic cultures. The explanatory power of this model and its implications for the CSDP will be illustrated empirically on a comparison of French, German and British decision processes in the run up to the war in Afghanistan 2001. To this end, the paper will first analyse strategic culture through cross-national comparative public and elite opinion surveys on the legitimate use of state violence and then analyse securitisation processes on the basis of parliamentary debates.
