Characterizing the European Union's Strategic Culture: An Analytical Framework

Abstract

This article does not question whether the EU has a strategic culture, but rather asks how one can investigate its nature. It creates and utilizes an analytical framework to demonstrate that the European Union's strategic culture is based on an extended concept of security and on a comprehensive, multilateral and internationally legitimated approach to threats, implying the use of military and civilian instruments in an integrated manner on over 20 common security and defence policy (CSDP) operations. It suggests that the analytical framework can also act as a stable reference point to compare and contrast the strategic cultures of a range of actors.

The European Union's Development Policy: A Balancing Act between ‘A More Comprehensive Approach’ and Creeping Securitisation

“…The CSDP has variously been described as an expression of the EU's evolving strategic culture (Biava et al, 2011) and as an underwhelming indicator of the EU's 'small power' status (Toje, 2011). The shortcomings of the missions themselvesespecially the difficulties of coordinating military and civilian actors -have been widely noted.…”

EU-Russia Strategic Energy Culture: Progressive Convergence or Regressive Dilemma?

“…Explanatory, rather than determinative, strategic culture is 'a useful' but chiefly 'constitutive context for understanding decision', but which 'does not dictate strategic behaviour', at least not independent of a range of other internal and external variables, from domestic geography to the international balance of power. 18 From this perspective, strategic culture is less a decoding mechanism to unpick the causal connections between national attitudes and ensuing strategic decisions regarding EU and Russian energy security, but a context-based tool that utilises domestic factors 'to understand the reasons and moitvations of actors'. 19 Here, policy choice arises not strictly via tradition but through 'preferred methods of operations that are more or less specific to a particular geographically based security community'.…”

“…11 Behavioural prediction focused solely upon rational-actor paradigms and game modelling proved to be wholly unsuited to uncovering the 'set of beliefs, assumptions, norms, world views and patterns of habitual behaviour held by strategic decision-makers regarding the political objectives of war, and the best way to achieve it'. 12 Within the three waves of scholarship comprising contemporary strategic culture, two key areas emerge: the Johnson-Gray debate, and the emergence of European strategic culture studies. The use of proressive and regressive scenarios to determine innovative areas of cooperation and conflict, as applied to EU-Russia energy security policies, may gradually consitute an additional approach.…”

“…6 In its lesser-known progressive form, both sides illustrate a 'culture of contact', and even commonality, on the most strategic of policies. 7 More familiar regressive episodes however, reveal ongoing ontological bifurcations in cateogrising EU approaches to governing energy as fundamentally distinct from Russian. The current limits to a viable sector-specific strategic culture are laid bare, with contemporary convergence instrumental at the best, driven by the pragmatism of saticficing needs rather than the values of establishing eastwest energy governance.…”

“…5 However, this analysis must be drawn against 'the gradual development of a shared set of rules that results from [and in] international cooperation', in which the gradual convergence of policies, as well as the approximation of the key terms and legal concepts move through minimal, mutual, and even maximum areas of convergence in energy policy. 6 In its lesser-known progressive form, both sides illustrate a 'culture of contact', and even commonality, on the most strategic of policies.…”