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Contemporary Security Policy
ISSN: 1352-3260 (Print) 1743-8764 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fcsp20
Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic
Culture Debate
Alan Bloomfield
To cite this article: Alan Bloomfield (2012) Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing
the Strategic Culture Debate, Contemporary Security Policy, 33:3, 437-461, DOI:
10.1080/13523260.2012.727679
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2012.727679
Published online: 25 Oct 2012.
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Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the
Strategic Culture Debate
ALAN BLOOMFIELD
Strategic-cultural studies continue to proliferate, but scholars still cannot agree on fundamental
matters like what a strategic culture is and what it does. This article examines the debates about
strategic culture at the philosophical level – especially the debate between Alistair Iain John-
ston, who prefers a positivist approach, and Colin Gray, who champions interpretivism – and
finds that most conceptual models suffer from one of two general problems (and some models
exhibit both). Existing models tend to be stated in a manner which is too coherent, meaning
they can’t account for occasional strategic-behavioural inconsistencies, and/or they suggest
too much continuity and cannot thereby adequately account for changes in strategic policy
over time. Instead, a model is offered which treats a singular strategic culture as containing
multiple co-existing strategic subcultures. These subcultures each present a different interpret-
ation of a state’s international social/cultural context – who a state’s ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ are –
which in turn affects how that state interprets the material variables – geography, relative
power, technological change, etc. – relevant to strategic decision-making. These different
paradigms compete in public discourse for influence over strategic decision-making. This
synthesis solves both the ‘too-coherent’ and the ‘too-much-continuity’ problems.
Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture
Ever since the ‘cultural turn’ in international relations (IR) theory the concept of
strategic culture has generated plenty of interest.
1
The basic insight which drives
strategic-cultural analysis is that traditional rationalist-materialist theoretical models
of strategic decision-making obscure the cultural differences between states. Alistair
Iain Johnston has noted that:
The neorealist paradigm assumes that states are functionally undifferentiated
units that seek power to optimize their utility. ... Strategic choices will be
... constrained only, or largely, by variables such as geography, capability
[and] threat ... Most proponents of the strategic culture approach, however,
would fundamentally disagree. ... In their view, elites socialized in different
strategic cultures will make different choices when placed in similar situations.
Since cultures are attributes of and vary across states, similar strategic realities
will be interpreted differently.
2
Strategic-culture scholars typically allege that the traditional, (supposedly) univer-
sally applicable IR theories are analytically inaccurate because in their quest for par-
simony they omit an important variable – inter-state cultural difference – that should
Contemporary Security Policy, Vol.33, No.3 (December 2012), pp.437 – 461
ISSN 1352-3260 print/1743-8764 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2012.727679 #2012 Taylor & Francis
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be taken into account.
3
Others find traditional theories ethnocentric because they
assume all international actors should operate according to a single, usually
western, standard of rationality.
4
Instead, Jack Snyder noted in 1977 in the first stra-
tegic-cultural analysis that ‘It is enlightening to think of Soviet leaders not just as
generic strategists who happen to be playing for the Red team, but as politicians
and bureaucrats who have developed and been socialized into a strategic culture
that is in many ways unique.’
5
So, while all states have a strategic culture, it is
assumed that each of these will be somewhat unique: the concept produces sui
generis findings applicable to a particular state, not universally valid theory.
6
Unfortunately, while strategic culture scholars are united in opposition to the
dominance of rationalist – materialist –universalist theorizing in IR circles, this is
about where agreement ends. In particular, the philosophical debate about how to
conceptualize states’ strategic cultures which developed in the late 1990s between
Johnston and Colin Gray remains unresolved,
7
making strategic culture a difficult
concept to deploy – indeed, one scholar has dramatically suggested that doing so
is akin to navigating ‘an unmarked minefield on a dark night’.
8
Yet strategic-cultural
analyses of particular states continue to proliferate,
9
creating the danger that as
interest in the research agenda rises more and more varied, increasingly mutually
incomprehensible ways of conducting strategic-cultural research may appear. It is
time, therefore, that a reconceptualization was attempted, to begin nudging users
of strategic culture back onto something like ‘the same page’.
The effort to do so begins with close analysis of the way strategic culture is used
in the work of two scholars. This demonstrates how confused such studies can
become in the absence of a clear idea of what strategic culture is and what it does.
Attention then turns to the Johnston – Gray debate (and several subsequent contri-
butions) to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the various models for stra-
tegic-cultural analysis currently on offer. The main thrust of the argument is that
strategic culture has hitherto been conceptualized too coherently, as something
which contains no contradictory elements, complicating the task of explaining
occasional instances of aberrant strategic behaviour. In addition, many models do
not allow for changes in strategic policy over the medium to long term – they
suggest too much strategic-cultural continuity.
Finally, the outline of a new model for strategic-cultural analysis is offered in
the latter part of the article. It is an outline only – this article stresses the reasons
why a new model is needed. Nevertheless, the model presented calls for recognition
that within each strategic culture a number of ‘subcultures’ compete for influence
over strategic decision-making. The proposed model of co-existing, competing sub-
cultures envisages various domestic groups like political parties, ethnic groups, or
institutions promoting their favoured subculture – with a particular cultural interpret-
ation of whom their state’s friends and foes are at its core – as the best way of
defining and solving the various strategic challenges and opportunities their state
faces. Acknowledging contradictory elements within a particular strategic culture
allows us to begin solving both the ‘too-coherent’ and the ‘too-much-continuity’
problems.
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‘Unhelpful’ Strategic-Cultural Analyses
It is important to draw a distinction at the outset between two broad types of strategic
decision-making: strategic policy and strategic behaviour. ‘Policy’ means strategic
decision-making in relatively long-term contexts – like strategic doctrines found in
National Security Strategy reports – while ‘behaviour’ means more short-term stra-
tegic decisions, like those made by the president (perhaps in the so-called ‘Situation
Room’) during a crisis. They are, of course, not strictly unrelated to one another:
indeed, they are mutually constitutive.
10
Yet maintaining a conceptual distinction
between policy and behaviour helps better understand the two primary problems
afflicting many models of strategic culture.
First, many existing strategic-cultural models are stated too coherently: because
they suggest that a state’s strategic culture contains no contradictory elements they
logically imply that all aspects of the strategic behaviour of a state will always be con-
sistent with its strategic culture. Such models therefore typically fail to adequately
explain how observed behavioural aberrations could occasionally occur. Second,
these sorts of models tend to assume too much continuity in strategic policy,
suggesting that it never changes. Or, perhaps more accurately, many existing
models have a tendency to become merely descriptive: they may note that a state’s
strategic policy changed; but they fail to theorize adequately about how or why it
did so. This provides little in the way of guidance to help predict when or even
whether future changes are possible or likely. Of course, ‘mere description’ itself
is not a cardinal sin – if it was, many professional historians would be condemned
to academic purgatory – yet most strategic-cultural analyses to date have been
‘pitched’ well within the mainstream, analytical IR tradition, with only a few excep-
tions emerging from the critical literature.
11
The model outlined below, at any rate,
is explanatory, and so implicitly capable of producing predictive, policy-relevant
findings.
12
Examination of a mid 1980s article by Carnes Lord, a member of what Johnston
would later call the ‘first generation’ of strategic-culture scholars, neatly illustrates
how confused strategic-cultural studies can become when the concept is not carefully
defined.
13
To begin with, Lord offered a definition: ‘Strategic culture consists in the
traditional practices and habits of thought by which military force is organized and
employed by a society in the service of its political goals.’
14
This definition contained
both ideas and behaviour, an issue which will later become a major bone of conten-
tion between Johnston and Gray. But later in his piece Lord claimed that a range of
‘factors’ cause a state’s strategic culture. These include geography, international
relationships (both alliances and adversarial relationships, plus relative power differ-
entials), military history, civil– military relationships, weapons technology, and pol-
itical culture.
15
We are left with the notion that strategic culture is essentially all things strategic;
it is an outcome after other variables have interacted, and not a cause of either stra-
tegic policy or behaviour. The model offered is not very theoretically sophisticated:
instead, it is somewhat ‘monolithic’ or inflexible. Lord never really described how the
various factors – some of which are ideational while others are material – interact
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and affect one another. He also tended to focus in his later empirical analysis more on
a single factor, political culture, without explaining exactly why he does so, other
than generally noting that ‘the military behaviour of most societies has reflected to
a high degree the political culture of those societies’.
16
The problem with this sort of overly descriptive model emerges when Lord makes
an implausibly monolithic substantive claim about American strategic culture,
namely that it has historically been ‘fundamentally defensive’.
17
He thereby fell
into the too-much-continuity trap by suggesting that American strategic culture has
not changed for over two centuries. To be sure, in the 19th century America
largely avoided major wars with European powers. However, it also violently
annexed vast territories from Mexico, carried out a near-genocidal campaign
against indigenous tribes, and the Union ‘reconquered’ the Confederacy in what
remains America’s bloodiest ever war. In the 20th century the United States tried
to avoid involvement in the world wars, and despite the enormous relative power
advantage it enjoyed immediately after 1945 it never directly ruled a Soviet-style
imperium.
18
But it also engaged in repeated ‘Banana Wars’ early in the century: it
did eventually intervene, decisively, in both world wars; and after 1945 it first
became a superpower before graduating to ‘hyperpower’ status after 1990.
America now has strategic interests in every corner of the globe and it deploys the
world’s most awesome military machine, hardly what one would expect from a
state with a ‘fundamentally defensive’ strategic culture.
Intriguingly, Lord described a conceptual model which allowed for flexibility –
after all, if strategic culture is caused by a number of variables, then if they change
presumably this would cause strategic culture to change too – however, he then
failed to untangle the lines of causation between these variables. We are left
asking numerous questions. For example, should we focus on changes in a state’s pol-
itical culture, the traditionally under-theorized variable on his list? And how does a
state’s military history affect its response to changing balances of power or advances
in technology? Later scholars identified this proliferation of variables as a key
problem with many first generation models.
19
Perhaps the fact that Lord had unwit-
tingly entered a confusing causal– conceptual maze explains why he failed to actually
apply his nascent model and instead simply focused too hard on one factor, America’s
entrenched and largely unchanging democratic political culture, which led him to the
monolithic claim that America’s strategic culture had not changed significantly in
over two centuries either. What we need, instead, is a model capable of accounting
for the observed ebbs and flows in American strategic policy over time: it must
explain the general absence of extra-continental adventurism before the 1890s; the
‘spurt’ of overseas activity from then until around 1905; the isolationist period
from then until 1941 (broken by five or six years of Wilsonian idealist engagement);
the massive mobilization effort during the Second World War; the containment
period; followed by de
´tente; etc.
A monolithic approach to conceptualizing strategic culture not only causes a ‘too-
much-continuity’ conundrum in the realm of strategic policy, it may also cause ‘too-
coherent’ problems when we turn to strategic behaviour. Consider that in the first half
of the 20th century the United States consistently avoided involvement in European
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power politics. Because these relations were with the most important states in the
international system, it is commonly accepted that America’s strategic orientation
was broadly isolationist.
20
Yet, during the same period, America intervened regularly
in Latin American states – the so-called Banana Wars – suggesting that there was
also an ‘interventionist strain’ in its strategic culture. The point is not that behavioural
aberrations like these are entirely unexplainable – they are, by realist theory, for
example – instead, an overly monolithic strategic-cultural model cannot do so
adequately.
21
Michael Evans’s 2005 study of Australian strategic decision-making demon-
strates that without clear ‘ground rules’ for conceptualizing strategic culture,
efforts to deploy the concept may fail, although here the problem is more that
Evans’s model is complex and confusing rather than unsubtle and monolithic. At
the beginning of his piece Evans explicitly favoured an ideational definition of stra-
tegic culture – it includes ‘ideas and habits of thought about war,’ and not strategic
behaviour – suggesting that a state’s strategic culture is one cause of its strategic
decision-making.
22
He then claimed that political and strategic cultures are ‘mutually
dependent variables’, but he also noted that Australia’s political culture affects both
its strategic culture (defined at this stage as its strategic policy, contained in defence
white papers) and the country’s ‘way of war-fighting’ (Australia’s strategic behav-
iour).
23
We are already, therefore, encountering definitional confusion. In particular,
Evans says strategic culture can affect political culture – they are ‘mutually depen-
dent’ after all – but does it also affect war-fighting directly? Or only indirectly,
through its effect on political culture, which then affects war-fighting directly?
Putting aside definitional problems momentarily, Evans made a central substan-
tive claim that Australia’s strategic culture/policy favours continental defence (so,
self-reliant defence of the continent), while its war-fighting/behaviour tends to
reflect forward defence principles (Australian forces are sent overseas to fight in its
major allies’ wars). Critiquing the resulting ‘dissonance’ between Australia’s stra-
tegic culture/policy and its way of war-fighting/behaviour is the main theme of
his monograph, and he advocated resolving the dissonance by unambiguously bring-
ing the former into line with the latter – so, he favoured a more consistent application
of forward defence principles.
24
Evans’s conceptualization of strategic culture contains the seeds of solutions to
both the too-much-continuity and the too-coherent problems. Interpreted through a
competing subcultures model, he finds two rival ‘traditions’ or strategic subcultures
vying for influence. Specifically, he explained how forward defence reigned supreme
in both aspects of strategic decision-making, policy and behaviour, until about 1970,
after which it was dethroned, especially in the realm of strategic culture/policy. This
then fell under the sway of continental defence principles (where the situation
remains – and he is critical of it). He could thus potentially have accounted for
long-term changes in strategic policy by exploring how and why one tradition or sub-
culture replaced another.
25
When we consider strategic behaviour, given the hints of a competing subcultures
model in Evans’s analysis, there is also conceptual space for some inconsistencies
between policy and behaviour, providing a (potential) solution to the too-coherent
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problem as well. Indeed, Evans argued in a manner superficially consistent with this,
noting that there have been occasions since 1970 (for example, the 1991 Gulf War,
Afghanistan and Iraq more recently) where Australia’s forward-defence-like war-
fighting/behaviour deviated from its otherwise generally consistent commitment to
continental defence-like strategic culture/policy.
26
Unfortunately, Evans didn’t explicitly conceptualize subcultures and theorize
about the relationships between them, which caused some confusion about what
strategic culture is and what it does. He claimed later in his piece, for example,
that Australia’s strategic culture is distorted by an obsession with geography, while
Australia’s war-fighting reflects its political values.
27
Quite apart from the fact that
by doing so he contradicted his earlier claim that a state’s political culture affects
both its strategic culture and its war-fighting, it seems strange that a material factor,
geography, affects strategic culture more while an ideational factor, values, affects
war-fighting. Values are usually considered to be a manifestation or component of
culture – perhaps he should have reversed his strategic culture/war-fighting
distinction?
28
He confused the issue further later on by claiming that there are ‘four main fea-
tures of Australian strategic culture’.
29
The first is Australia’s ‘liminal geopolitical
status’, or feelings of acute vulnerability in culturally unfamiliar Asia, which in
turn creates instinctual preferences for forward defence (especially strategic alliances
with ‘Anglo’ great powers).
30
The second feature is the ‘triumph of a continental
philosophy over island consciousness’, which apparently causes the preference for
continental defence in the more intellectual process of strategic policy-making.
Then we are told that these first two features combine to cause the third feature,
namely, the dissonance that is his main theme. Finally, he claimed that a fourth
feature – the ability of statesmen to overcome the dissonance by ‘deft use of a
values-based approach to national security’ when war-fighting in a forward-defence-
like mode – is what essentially ‘saves’ an Australia which would otherwise inappro-
priately pursue continental defence rigidly.
31
By this point Evans had rendered the concept of strategic culture analytically
impotent. It contains too much: the first two features are essentially subcultures;
yet the third feature is an ‘outcome’ (that is, dissonance between the subcultures);
and the fourth feature is strategic behaviour, which is included in his description of
what strategic culture ‘is’, despite his earlier strictly ideational definition of it. He
also contradicted his explanation of the relationships between Australia’s political
culture, its strategic culture, and its ‘way of war-fighting’. When used to describe
and explain too much, the concept of strategic culture ultimately explains very
little. The sort of confusion evident in this analysis of Australia may in part be
related to the continuing impasse between Johnston and Gray about how to concep-
tualize strategic culture.
The Johnston– Gray Debate: Johnston’s Positivism
The Johnston– Gray debate is both the most prominent and the most polarized debate
in the strategic culture literature.
32
In 1995 Johnston claimed that the first
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generation’s strategic-cultural accounts were ‘at the same time under-determined and
over-determined’.
33
By ‘over-determined’ he meant that their models suggested that
a state’s strategic culture explained all instances of its strategic behaviour when, in
fact, there may be other causes of some of them. They therefore presented a
‘mechanically deterministic implication that strategic thought led consistently to
one type of behaviour’, a conclusion similar to the general critique that many
models have been stated too-coherently.
34
By ‘under-determined’ he meant that
these models did not contain enough information to determine whether a particular
outcome was likely or not. He also observed that many models defined strategic
culture, ostensibly an independent variable (something which caused outcomes), as
including patterns of strategic behaviour. This made the models tautological
because strategic behaviour was also usually treated as a dependent variable (an
outcome).
Johnston offered an overtly positivist conceptualization of strategic culture by
treating it like an ideational explanatory variable that caused strategic behaviour –
hence the omission of behaviour from his definition.
35
He wanted to measure the
causal effect of a state’s strategic culture relative to the contributions made by
material variables like geography or relative power to strategic outcomes.
36
In
doing so he solved the too-coherent problem identified above, because when an
instance of strategic behaviour deviates from the ‘normal’ pattern the aberration
can be explained by observing that strategic-cultural preferences were overridden
by the force of other variables. In other words, a state may have been forced to act
contrary to its ordinary preferences – an example would be Japan’s unconditional
surrender in 1945.
37
There is much to like in Johnston’s approach. In particular, his method was rig-
orous and falsifiable: when applied to understanding China’s strategic culture, he
parsed the texts of a number of classical Chinese works on strategy and coded
them to identify key cultural preferences, and he then studied almost 300 cases of
strategic decision-making from the Ming Dynasty period to determine, statistically,
the tendencies of Chinese strategic decision-makers to favour certain types of stra-
tegic behaviour.
38
He was thus able to avoid the tautological position by which a stra-
tegic culture was portrayed as both a cause and an effect. Nevertheless, problems
remained which demand examination.
First, relying on ancient cultural texts to determine the content (that is, the values
and preferences) of China’s strategic culture arguably means that such a model is
afflicted by the excessive-continuity problem. Specifically, Johnston claimed that
China’s strategic culture has remained realist-like for two millennia. In his words:
parabellum assumptions have persisted across different state systems in
Chinese history – from the anarchical Warring States period, to the hierarchical
imperial Chinese system, to the increasingly interdependent post-Cold War
period.
39
Elsewhere he explained how Chairman Mao’s strategic assumptions – the ubiquitous
nature of conflict, the utility of overwhelming force, a preference for pre-emption,
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etc. – were generally consistent with this pattern. Mao, given his ‘Chinese-ness,’ was
encultured with Chinese strategic culture.
40
Yet, if we pay attention to an important aspect of culture’s effect on strategic
decision-making, namely how the identity of a state and its perceptions of other
states’ identities affects how it chooses its allies and its enemies, we begin to see
the too-much-continuity problem emerge. Stephen Walt has argued that states
balance against threats, not against power per se: material variables are not the
only ones considered: ideologies matter too, meaning ‘states sharing political, cul-
tural and other traits’ are more likely to become and remain allies while ideologically
different states appear to be ‘natural enemies’.
41
We should therefore briefly consider
China’s alliance relationships under Mao to explain why Johnston’s model is mono-
lithic. Specifically, for at least 15 years after the end of the Second World War, the
Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategic decision-making arguably reflected a
broadly Marxist/Leninist interpretation of international politics, not a parabellum/
realist interpretation. Lenin’s theory of imperialism, for example, rests on extremely
negative assumptions about capitalist states: perhaps Mao was strongly influenced by
this? Perhaps it effectively ‘achieved dominance over’ China’s traditional strategic
culture for a time?
42
History tells us that after Soviet support helped the CCP secure victory in the civil
war, in 1949 the party adopted an ideologically inspired, explicit ‘lean to one side’ –
the Communist – strategic posture.
43
Subsequently, China stubbornly (and very pain-
fully) resisted much better armed American forces in Korea, attempted to bring the
Non-Aligned Movement into the anti-capitalist camp at Bandung in 1955, and then
began supporting various Marxist liberation movements after Mao’s 1957 ‘East
wind now prevails over the West wind’ speech.
44
During most of the 1950s,
however, someone unaware of the CCP – Soviet ideological affinity may have
thought that the Soviets were a greater strategic threat: after all, they had larger,
closer land forces and shared a long, historically disputed border with China. Until
the 1960s, however, the Soviets were close allies.
Relations later deteriorated for reasons that are, admittedly, partly consistent with
the parabellum/realist tradition.
45
Nevertheless, much of the Sino – Soviet split can
also be attributed to Chinese perceptions of Soviet ideological ‘revisionism’, begin-
ning when Khrushchev accepted that there were ‘many roads’ to socialism (1955),
deepening after his denunciation of Stalin (1956), and worsening further after he
renounced the assumption that conflict between capitalism and communism was
inevitable (1957). After 1960 Soviet advisors and financial support withdrew and
relations between the Communist giants steadily deteriorated until border disputes
escalated into open violence in 1969.
46
Chinese strategic decision-making during the 1945 – 1960 period therefore seems
to have been influenced more by Marxist/Leninist ideology – and perceptions of
others’ adherence to its tenets – than by deep, centuries-old cultural realist traditions,
at least when it came to the non-trivial matter of choosing strategic friends and foes. A
closer consideration of strategic policy shifts by the Qing dynasty in the half-century
before its collapse in 1911 – from the practice of playing off the ‘foreign barbarians’
against one another, to the ‘self-strengthening movement’, then the ill-considered
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support of the Boxers as anti-Western proxies – also suggests a more complex pattern
of strategic policy-making in which Qing officials alternated between soft-balancing,
engagement and confrontational strategies.
47
Models predicated on assumptions of
millennia-long strategic-cultural continuity struggle to deal with these sorts of
mere-decades-long ebbs and flows of strategic policy.
There is a second problem with overtly positivist strategic-cultural models. First
generation models have been criticized as difficult to operationalize, but arguably the
same could be said of models that treat strategic culture as just one independent
variable among many which interact to cause strategic decision-making. Specifically,
we must ask: should we try to assign definitive, quantitative values to things like
preferences and ideas? Generally speaking, we can quantitatively measure material
variables – we can define the range and accuracy of a surface-to-air missile or
determine how frequent severe storms usually are in a particular sea – and then it
is possible to compare the weight or impact of these material variables to one
another more or less directly. But it is far from clear whether ideas can be definitively
assigned weights in the same way, or whether they can be compared directly to
material variables.
A better approach seems to be to assume that ideas or values guide interpretation
of the various material variables that affect strategic decision-making, which is not
quite the same thing: the ideas and preferences that make up a strategic culture
cannot be so easily overridden in this formulation because they operate prior to or
affect the whole ‘rational process’. Ideas may therefore act more like intervening
variables which provide meaning to material independent variables, a position
which is generally consistent with most formulations of constructivist theory.
48
Discussion returns to this last matter in more detail after other approaches to stra-
tegic-cultural analysis have been considered.
The Johnston– Gray Debate: Gray’s Interpretivism
In 1999 Colin Gray, a prominent figure in the first generation, delivered a spirited
rejoinder to Johnston, even warning scholars not to follow the latter lest they find
themselves in an ‘intellectual wasteland’. Gray called for strategic culture to be con-
ceptualized ‘contextually’, and not from a positivist philosophical position. Accord-
ingly, he included behaviour alongside ideas in his definition of strategic culture,
which for him:
comprises the persisting (but not eternal) socially transmitted ideas, attitudes,
traditions and habits of mind and preferred methods of operation [so, behav-
ioural patterns] that are more or less specific to a particular geographically
based security community that has had a necessarily unique historical
experience.
49
To support his contention that strategic culture should be defined contextually, Gray
investigated the etymology of the word ‘context’. He concluded that culture should be
conceptualized as ‘something “out there” ... or “that which surrounds”’ an actor,
meaning that in one sense it is akin to environmental pressures that ‘push’ actors
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in certain directions. But the word context can also, he noted, ‘mean “that which
weaves together” (from the Latin contextere: to weave together)’, implying that
culture exists within an actor. So, Gray thought that ‘strategic culture should be
approached both as a shaping context for behaviour and itself as a constituent of
that behaviour’.
50
The latter half of Gray’s definition seems relatively uncontroversial: strategic
culture exists as ideas/preferences which drive strategic policy and behaviour; appar-
ently ‘the domain of strategic behaviour ... is shaped by the strategic attitudes’ in the
heads of policy-makers.
51
At this point there is little difference between him and
Johnston. Yet the first part of Gray’s definition, that strategic culture is also ‘out
there’ surrounding an actor – that it is a shaping context for behaviour – is more pro-
blematic. This suggests that it includes (or ‘is the product of’?) all the factors that
cause strategic decision-making more broadly; apparently ‘the beliefs and behaviours
of the human and organisational agents of culture(s) can best be understood with
respect to seven non-exclusive categories’, which appear in detail in his book
Modern Strategy as seven ‘dimensions’ of strategy.
52
These are essentially indepen-
dent variables, both material (geography, technology, economic heft, logistic capa-
bility) and ideational (politics, ethics, strategic doctrines).
53
Gray concluded that
‘strategic culture ... [emerges] from the kind of mixed stew of ingredients that John-
ston finds, and finds so methodologically frustrating’.
54
This suggests that the ideas
which drive strategic decision-making (the ‘latter half’ of the definition) are them-
selves caused by all sorts of other environmental variables (the ‘first part’ of the
definition).
We are left, however, with a tautological strategic-cultural model. Gray openly
embraced this position, noting at one point that ‘a critic would be correct in observing
that if a strategic culture is everywhere it is, in a practicably researchable sense,
nowhere’, at another that ‘the unity of cultural influence and policy action denies
the existence of the boundaries needed for the study of cause and effect’, and he
finally asserted ‘let us state the methodologically appalling truth that there can be
no such conceptual space because all strategic behaviour is effected by human
beings who cannot help but be cultural agents’.
55
By this point Gray seemed to
suggest that culture’s effect on decision-making is so strongly deterministic that it
virtually rules out the possibility of human agency: he claimed, for example, that
‘Germans are Germans and ... have certain strategic cultural tendencies ...
Germans can’t help but behave except under the constraints of Germanic strategic
culture’, a claim which begs several tricky questions about what causes which.
56
Although Gray admitted that tautologies are unavoidable, on another occasion he
seems to have recognized the too-coherent problem emerging in his model, so he
attempted to offer a solution. He noted that Britain’s ‘overwhelmingly maritime stra-
tegic culture’ had historically led it to prefer indirect strategies of national defence
(like naval blockades, amphibious raids, subsidizing proxies, etc.). This remained
essentially unchanged during the first half of the 20th century, with the lion’s share
of the defence vote being spent on maintaining the Royal Navy’s status as the
world’s premier service. But Gray also noted that circumstances twice ‘obliged
[Britain] to play an uncharacteristically major continental military role’ by deploying
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large armies in confrontational and attritional combat during the world wars. He con-
ceded that Britain’s strategic culture does not explain this inconsistent, ‘strategically
extraordinary’ behaviour, but it does explain why after both wars Britain returned so
rapidly to its culturally preferred, traditional strategic mode.
57
Unfortunately, this position is logically untenable and inconsistent with Gray’s
preferred approach to conceptualizing strategic culture. In particular, if strategic
culture is context, a product of ‘all the variables’, then we are left wondering
where the pressure that forced Britain to act contrary to its strategic culture came
from?
58
Gray leaves no conceptual space for any such external sources of pressure
– all possible contenders are already part of the strategic-cultural context. Johnston,
however, could at least potentially explain such inconsistencies: given that his stra-
tegic culture is just one independent variable producing strategic behaviour, concep-
tual space remained for other variables to override it.
So, with a contextual strategic-cultural model of this sort we are left with a theory
suggesting that sometimes states follow their strategic-cultural preferences and at
other times they do not – but we have no idea when which will occur, or why. The
too-coherent problem remains unsolved: Gray’s exploration of the British example
is a post hoc attempt to save his monolithic formulation by explaining away a
serious inconsistency. As Johnston noted in a later piece ‘a tautology is a tautology,
whether or not it is wrapped in some “holistic” faux anti-positivism’.
59
Using a con-
textual model of this sort means we are, in effect, left with little more than a weak-
path-dependent assumption of the sort ‘things have been “that way” for a while, and
they will probably continue to be so unless something changes’, yet we have no theor-
etical guidance regarding what may precipitate change. Put in terms of the central cri-
tique offered herein, Gray’s formulation is too coherent because it cannot explain
aberrant instances of strategic behaviour, and it also demonstrates too much continu-
ity because we have no idea how, when or why strategic policy may change.
Other Strategic-Cultural Models
Other scholars have offered ways of conceptualizing strategic culture, and most
such attempts refer to the Johnston – Gray debate. Some merely note it and
seem reluctant to take a side.
60
Others prefer Johnston’s approach, while yet others
offer compromise positions: David Haglund, for example, examined the classic
German philosophical debate about whether social scientists should seek verstehen
(understanding) or erkla
¨ren (explanation) and rejected the strict separation of
positivism/interpretivism in favour of seeking ‘explicative understanding’.
61
Yet
Gray’s approach seems to have attracted the most support,
62
some of which should
be examined.
Stuart Poore agreed with Gray that strategic culture provided an ‘interpretive
prism through which decision-makers view the strategic landscape’ but he also
found some problems.
63
To remedy them Poore proposed a ‘context ... [or] ideas
all the way down’ approach whereby strategic culture ‘continually constitutes and
gives meaning to all material factors’. Yet he also noted that ‘if strategy cannot
fail to be cultural, then non-cultural or material variables can have no meaning
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outside of the cultures that condition them. Hence, a tautology is inevitable: every-
thing cultural does matter and cannot be disconnected from anything else.’
64
This model therefore seems to favour a strong interpretivist position, which is
problematic for two reasons apart from its overtly tautological implications. First,
it leaves no space for rump materialism. Conceptualizing strategic culture in this
way may mean confining ourselves entirely to discourse analysis, thereby overlook-
ing the independent effect of important material variables, in particular geography.
65
Second, this formulation may also eradicate space for human agency: the logical
implication that we draw from Poore’s assertion that policy-makers are ‘inevitably
encultured’, especially ‘all the way down’, puts too much causal explanation on
ideas and beliefs alone; at minimum he doesn’t offer (in his admittedly short
review article) a way of accounting for state agency.
Iver B. Neumann and Henrikki Heikka have arguably presented a better model.
They also rejected Johnston, noting that he ‘presumes behaviour (as “something
out there”) would not itself be a constitutive part of culture, and that it can be
studied separately from culture. This assumption is simply not tenable.’
66
They gen-
erally endorsed Gray and claimed that our understanding of strategic culture should
reflect the mutually constitutive relationship between agents and structures and that,
accordingly, scholars should follow ‘practice theory’, which focuses on the dynamic
interplay between practices and discourses, and which accepts cultural ‘change rather
than stasis as the “normal” state of affairs’.
67
Unfortunately, Neumann and Heikka’s approach may cause the reverse problem
to the one which afflicts Johnston’s – specifically, privileging cultural change may
lead to a strategic cultural model which assumes too little continuity. First, this
sort of assumption flies in the face of Thomas Berger’s and Jeffrey Legro’s
68
findings.
They found that strategic cultures can change, especially when the external environ-
ment provides a severe ‘shock’ that invalidates prevailing assumptions – like
Germany’s and Japan’s defeat in 1945, after which both nations’ strategic cultures
essentially switched from a unilateral-expansionist to a more multilateral, even pacif-
ist mode. Yet Berger and Legro ultimately concluded that strategic cultural continuity
is probably a sort of ‘default position’ because cultural practices and values tend to be
quite ‘sticky’. Second, if we accept that cultures are in constant flux, practical impe-
diments to analysis arise: specifically, we may lose confidence in the ‘freshness’ of
our findings.
Forrest E. Morgan was more equivocal about the relative values of Johnston’s
and Gray’s approaches. He specifically complemented Johnson and was implicitly
dismissive of Gray (whom he relegated to the footnotes), but Morgan also argued
that following a strictly positivist methodology is flawed because:
culture does not act independently. Culture conditions behaviour, but does not
motivate it. Therefore, while it is standard practice in scientific inquiry to study
a given phenomenon as an independent variable, doing so cannot yield reliable
results in a study of culture’s effects on behaviour .. . [and it] sets a methodo-
logical trap.
69
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Instead, decision-makers ‘do not respond to their strategic cultures; they respond to
stimuli from the strategic environment. Cultural symbols and values condition
those responses by providing decision makers interpretive context, but they do not
determine them.’ Accordingly, Morgan treated ‘culture as an intervening variable,
one that conditions a subject’s responses to external stimuli without acting indepen-
dently’.
70
This is akin to the weak interpretivist position whereby strategic culture
affects the interpretation of the various material variables in the external strategic
environment. This sort of assumption is the best place from which to begin offering
a new conceptualization of strategic culture.
The Value of Contextual/Interpretive Models
Contextual approaches to strategic culture have several strengths. For one, definitions
which contain both ideas and behaviour are more consistent with the typical defi-
nitions of culture employed by anthropologists (like Clifford Geertz) and sociologists
(for example, Raymond Williams) who study culture more closely than is common in
IR.
71
After reviewing multiple fields of social science, three cultural psychologists
also advise us to:
look at cultures [as] mental representations (and attendant behaviours) that are
distributed across individuals in a population ... this view focuses on the sta-
bilizing role of cognitive structures and schemas in the production and trans-
mission of ideas (and attendant behaviours) that achieve widespread cultural
distribution.
72
This does not definitively determine the debate in favour of definitions that include
both ideas and behaviour: while using ‘academic jargon’ consistently is commend-
able, we should also not just arbitrarily close the book on such debates. Nevertheless,
these sorts of definitions suggest that we should approach strategic culture from a
broadly interpretivist rather than a positivist philosophical position. Stuart Poore
(who supported Gray on this point) noted that ‘strategists and their institutions
cannot be acultural and hence will continuously perceive and interpret the material
realm culturally’.
73
Taken to extremes this position could, as noted above, result in
a deterministic obliteration of human agency. Yet a less extreme position simply
assumes that all real, culturally situated humans (including strategic decision-
makers) approach the challenges and opportunities of the external environment
with some degree of culturally unique interpretive bias.
The latter, weaker interpretivist position therefore implies that we should, at least
as a first stage of strategic analysis, immerse ourselves in the culture of the state under
consideration, striving to ‘see the world through their eyes’, as Ken Booth advised in
one of the earliest strategic-cultural arguments.
74
After this sort of immersion an
analyst can then ‘pull away’ towards a more detached viewpoint to glean the objec-
tive implications of the subjective beliefs which have been identified. This is essen-
tially a scientific realist variant of an interpretivist position and it is broadly consistent
with Geertz’s adaptation of Dilthey’s concept of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ into a ‘her-
meneutic spiral’.
75
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To illustrate why interpretivism would seem to have an edge over positivism in
strategic cultural analysis, consider in more detail the possible implications of adopt-
ing an overtly positivist formulation, broken down and applied to actual real-world
decision-making contexts. One way to operationalize a model with strategic
culture as a discrete, measurable independent variable would be to imagine
decision-makers sitting around a table deliberating about how to respond to a stra-
tegic crisis. When considering the evidence before them they would assign relative
weights to the material variables (geography, relative power, technology, etc.)
relevant to the situation at hand. We could then imagine the decision-makers
consciously doing the same for the strategic culture variable: they would, in effect,
be measuring the strength of their collective strategic cultural preferences.
They would then assess whether the combined weight of some of the material vari-
ables overrode the weight of their strategic-cultural preferences, or whether other
variables lent support to their strategic-cultural predispositions. They would then
choose from their list of possible responses to the crisis with rational, mathematical
certainty.
The scenario just outlined sounds rather implausible, artificial and unrealistic to
this author. Of course, Johnston, the chief proponent of positivist strategic-cultural
models, never said this is what actually happens when decision-makers in, say, the
Situation Room consider their options during a crisis, and in any event all conceptual
models are simplifications of or abstractions from reality. Still, it is hard to otherwise
operationalize a positivist strategic-cultural model to test whether it is consistent with
evidence of actual strategic decision-making by real humans.
If one approaches strategic cultural analysis from an interpretivist position then it
is possible to offer a more intuitively appealing account. Those decision-makers are
assigning relative weights to the material variables, and then they consciously weigh
them up against one another. But the implications of the weight they assign to each
material variable depend on how those variables are interpreted in the relevant
social context. The logic of this position is captured by the pithy observation that
‘a gun in the hand of a friend means something different from the gun in the hand
of an enemy’.
76
In this metaphor the gun does have some inherent meaning – it is
an object that kills, unlike a water-pistol – but its full meaning is only clear when
the social context it is being used in is determined. Put in terms of international poli-
tics, if one state considers another a ‘friend’ and that other state is close (the geogra-
phy variable), powerful (relative power) and advanced (technology), then the first
state will likely feel generally reassured. But when a ‘foe’ is close, powerful and
advanced, this is likely to elicit apprehension and perceptions of threat.
Strategic culture in this formulation is therefore not operationalized alongside the
other material variables relevant to making strategic decisions. Instead, social under-
standings of the ‘nature’ of the international system and a range of assumptions about
the ‘character’ of other international actors – matters which are logically the most
cultural aspects of strategic decision-making – would give meaning to the material
variables under consideration. In other words, the decision-makers in the Situation
Room would have brought cultural assumptions and biases about other actors in
the social world. They would then ‘populate’ the external environment with ‘social
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actors’, assigning particular roles – rival great power, close ally, neutral/irrelevant,
etc. – to these other actors.
This sort of interpretivist formulation seems to be a more accurate and realistic
way of conceptualizing strategic decision-making by culturally situated humans. It
suggests a relatively neat ‘division of labour’ when a strategic analysis is undertaken.
A state’s identity could be investigated first to determine ‘whose side’ that state per-
ceived other international actors to be on. Then, after one understands who that state
considers its friends and foes to be – and the degree to which they should be trusted
or feared – analysis could move into a more ‘rational – technical’ stage using more
traditional strategic theories to determine the type and severity of strategic threats
facing that state in more detail: is a friend strong enough to help? is a foe vulnerable
to a particular technology? When the relationship between material and ideational
factors is specified, more sophisticated, ‘fuller’ theoretical models become possible.
Solutions: Schemas and Subcultures
It has been argued above that a strategic cultural model must offer a conceptualization
which neither assumes too much continuity of, nor suggests too much coherence in, a
particular strategic culture. Such a model requires conceptualizing a state’s strategic
culture as a singular entity which contains ‘contradictory elements’, various ‘strains’
or ‘traditions’ or, as mentioned at the outset, competing subcultures.
Adopting such a model would, at minimum, bring IR scholars much closer into
line with the growing consensus concerning how to conceptualize culture which
has emerged in the fields of sociology and psychology in recent decades. Following
widespread acceptance of Max Weber’s ‘switchman’ metaphor, and then Talcott Par-
sons’s attack on ‘value-free’ rational choice models, it was common for sociologists
during most of the 20th century to treat culture as an ideational independent vari-
able.
77
The early political culture scholars followed, and studied the ‘manifestation
in aggregate, measurable form of the psychological and subjective dimensions of
politics’.
78
But in the 1970s this position came under attack, and scholars like
Michael Walzer and Lowell Dittmer argued instead for definitions of culture that
included both ideas and behaviour: for them political culture contained symbols
and myths that were ‘depositor[ies] of widespread interest and feeling’ and which
‘transmit meanings from person to person’.
79
The sociologists were also moving in this direction. Ann Swidler published an
influential article in 1986 which categorically rejected attempts to treat culture like
an independent variable and suggested that we should think of it as a ‘toolbox’
which contains interpretive ‘strategies of action’ or ‘culturally available ways of
organizing collective behaviour’.
80
Likewise, for Charles Tilly, cultures are like
‘repertoires’ that contain ‘most, if not all, the strategies we need to successfully navi-
gate our way through the social world of everyday collective human interaction’.
81
Psychologists have named these cultural tools ‘cognitive schemas’ and they treat
them as processing devices or cognitive shortcuts that help order the mass of data
which confronts us daily: they are packages of both ideas and behavioural patterns
inextricably linked together, informing or co-constituting one another. More
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specifically, schemas affect our perceptions of the world, our attribution of causality,
and the attendant behavioural responses which are considered appropriate.
82
This
conceptualization of culture is now widely accepted: by the late 1990s Paul
DiMaggio, after reviewing dozens of studies, concluded that ‘research in cognitive
psychology strongly supports the toolkit picture over the variable view’.
83
It would seem reasonable to bring the study of culture in IR into line with these
other fields: they have, after all, spent much more time and effort grappling with these
conundrums. But doing so also neatly provides solutions to the problems of excessive
continuity/coherence discussed throughout this article. Specifically, if we accept that
a state’s strategic culture contains a number of ‘strategic cognitive schemas’ – sub-
cultures – which coexist and compete for influence over the making of strategic
decisions, we can begin to solve the excessive-continuity problem by noting that
these subcultures exist in changeable relations of dominance, subordination and
latency relative to each other.
84
So, if a certain strategic policy has been in place
for decades, we can assume that a particular subculture has been dominant: it has
guided strategic decision-makers’ perceptions, their attribution of causality, and
which behavioural responses they consider most appropriate during that period.
But there are likely to be other subcultures – currently subordinate, and so of only
limited influence but still ‘waiting the wings’ so to speak, or latent and therefore
only held by a very small, marginalized minority with virtually no influence – and
one of these may one day become dominant, changing that state’s strategic policy
profoundly.
The strategic-cultural model proposed here sees these subcultures as ‘packets’ of
information about a state’s ‘strategic situation’. At their core is the most cultural
aspect of strategic decision-making – the friend/foe calculus – the process of choos-
ing whom to trust and whom to fear (and ignore). This occurs in part instinctively, but
it is also verbalized in speech acts. For example, the ubiquitous ‘Munich Metaphor’
has been regularly deployed in Australian strategic discourse to suggest a foreign
leader is untrustworthy and dangerous,
85
and sometimes also against an internal pol-
itical opponent, to suggest weakness.
86
More abstract kin-metaphors may be used to
suggest certain other states are like ‘cousins’ – Australia, Canada and New Zealand
come to mind – while Britain was for decades the ‘mother-country’ to all three.
87
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard explicitly noted that shared
liberal-democratic-capitalist values provided a strong basis for the alliance with
America, while he was equally candid about how cultural/value differences with
China meant that relationship would be managed according to different, more
business-like dynamics.
88
As mentioned earlier, the model envisaged here focuses on these cultural or iden-
tity ‘similar to/different from’ judgments as only a first stage of strategic analysis.
Because strategic subcultures are analogous to cognitive schema, they also contain
other, more technical details that logically emerge in later stages of strategic analysis
when findings and concepts from the traditional strategic literature are considered.
For example, and staying in the Australian context, the continental defence doctrine
begins from the social-contextual premise that Australia should not expect that its
allies, including America, will automatically come to its aid in strategic crises of
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low to medium risk.
89
But it also assumes that the closest states – especially New
Zealand, and increasingly Indonesia since its democratic transition – are not particu-
larly different and therefore not very threatening.
90
This sort of reasoning about Australia’s international-social context then leads
logically to particular technical strategic policies and behaviours, like reliance on
weapons systems including an over-the-horizon radar system, a small but potent
fleet of advanced long-range strike assets like air force interceptors with refuelling
capability and long-endurance navy submarines, all supported by a relatively
small, lightly armed but mobile army. There is also recognition that excessive
defence spending could provoke a regional security dilemma, so defence outlays
have hovered around 2 per cent of GDP for several decades.
91
The forward
defence subculture, however, has traditionally taken a more sanguine view about
the trustworthiness of Australia’s great, culturally similar allies – Britain before
1945, now the United States – indeed, it is typically assumed that the world is generally
better off with a liberal-democratic-capitalist (and culturally similar-to-Australia) state
as the hegemon. So, advocates of forward defence typically favour a much more
numerous, more heavily armed expeditionary army capable of deploying to large,
out-of-region conflicts, with the other services supporting it.
92
The strategic subcultures envisaged by this strategic-cultural model thus contain
an integrated mix of social/cultural and material/technical concepts. These are then
promoted by various domestic groups competing against one another to offer the
‘most accurate’ interpretation of their state’s international context and, in particular,
which other states or other international actors should be treated as friends or foes,
and from which other more technical policy advice follows. These competing iden-
tity-visions are probably most stark between ethnic groups in multinational states –
the Anglo/Quebecois divide within Canada is illustrative – but different political
parties may favour one subculture over long periods (Green parties tend to favour
disarmed neutrality, for example). Even ministries may pit themselves against one
another, competing for their favoured vision of the world (and the attendant policy
influence and funding) to be accepted as ‘the orthodoxy’.
93
Other IR scholars are already moving in this direction. It is worth noting that
Johnston found another subculture – a ‘Mencian’ or idealist-liberal-like one – had
existed during in Ming-era China, although he felt it was used as an ‘idealized dis-
course’, as a ‘smokescreen’ to put a better gloss on the regime’s actual hard-nosed
realism.
94
Beatrice Heuser has also mused about the possible direction of Pakistan’s
foreign policy given that three ‘belief-clusters’ – one fiercely anti-Indian, anti-colonial,
and nationalistic, another pro-Western and liberal, and a third which is radical Islamist –
have been contesting against one another for control over that state’s strategic policy.
95
The notion of competitionbetween ‘worldviews’ or ‘foreign policy paradigms’ isthere-
fore not entirely unknown even in the strategic-culture literature, although it remains
under-developed.
Forrest E. Morgan is the only IR scholar to date to employ the concepts of stra-
tegic culture and cognitive schemas together. He characterized schemas as ‘“cogni-
tive maps” buried deep in our subconscious that guide the processing of ... and
the retrieval of stored information’.
96
But he only investigated in depth what
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would be considered, in the model presented herein, the dominant subculture in
Second World War-era Japan: offensive-realist in one sense (determined to
expand, prepared to ruthlessly use force to do so) and mystical or spiritual in
another (expanding the Emperor’s domain, even at the cost of one’s life, was con-
sidered a divine duty), with a deeply racist view of others – especially the
Chinese – at its core.
97
The presence of another subculture, promoted by the Peace Faction, is implicit in
Morgan’s argument. This subculture was at best weak subordinate for most of the first
half of the 20th century, exerting little influence on strategic policy, or possibly a fully
latent one (so, exerting no influence at all). It took extraordinary pressure in 1945 –
six months of relentless firebombing which killed millions, the near-starvation of the
civilian population and, eventually, the dropping of two atomic bombs soon after the
Red Army invaded Manchuria – for it to dethrone the long-dominant belligerent sub-
culture.
98
But it happened, and Thomas Berger’s work supplements Morgan’s nicely
by demonstrating how a new pacifist subculture, inspired by the Peace Faction’s
wartime arguments, rose in post-war Japan to become, by the late 1950s, almost as
strongly dominant as the belligerent subculture had been prior to August 1945.
99
Accepting that there are two or more subcultures within a strategic culture can not
only retrospectively explain why strategic policy changed but, arguably, if we
become familiar with a particular state’s strategic debates we may be able to
predict that a ‘change is coming’ – and possibly even determine which of the cur-
rently subordinate subcultures may become dominant for a time. Such a model
begins solving the too-much-continuity problem by allowing scholars to explain
medium- to long-term strategic policy changes.
We can also potentially solve the too-coherent problem in the realm of strategic
behaviour by noting that there may be extraordinary circumstances which ‘force’
decision-makers to rummage around in the cultural toolbox for a solution that
better ‘fits’ the unexpected problem at hand. But after this rarely used but still ‘cul-
turally available’ tool has been applied to the problem, the crisis may pass and allow
normality to return, leaving the state’s strategic policy largely unaltered.
Thinking about strategic culture this way allows us to unravel the problem that
confounded Gray, namely, how Britain’s strategic culture was ‘overcome’ during
both world wars. After all, Britain has deployed large armies to fight attritional
battles before, and successfully – Marlborough’s and Wellington’s campaigns and
during the American Revolution, for example, and in the Boer War the Empire
had deployed over 500,000 troops for several years – so there were strategic cultural
precedents, culturally available tools/schemas, for the British to draw upon. Put
another way, Britain’s confrontational/attritional strategic behaviour in the two
world wars was inconsistent with its normal maritime/manoeuvre strategic policy
– it was an aberration – but it was nevertheless consistent with an available, pre-
viously subordinate subculture ‘whose time had come’ (twice as it turned out –
surely because Germany, the quintessential continental power, was the primary
enemy on both occasions). And when the extreme crises passed, the British reverted
rapidly back to what was for them the ‘strategic normal’ – a maritime/manoeuvre
policy – just as Gray explained.
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The Japanese, however, could not revert back to their long-dominant belligerent/
expansionist subculture after 1945. They faced a seven-year-long occupation by
Allied forces and the continuing threat of two communist behemoths (the USSR
and China) and a smaller but dangerously belligerent communist North Korea in
close proximity: they had, in short, little room for manoeuvre. This suggests how
scholars should analyse the relative fortunes – how influential they are vis-a
`-vis
one another – of the subcultures. If their more technical aspects fit the external stra-
tegic environment, if they ‘work’ – by providing security, or otherwise achieving the
state’s strategic interests – they are likely to remain or become more influential.
Contemporary Japan now faces a changed strategic environment as it tries to
adjust to the inexorable riseof an increasingly nationalistic and assertive China.
100
Stra-
tegic-behavioural deviations from Japan’s dominant pacifist subculture – deployment
of army engineers to Iraq, support for the American fleet off Pakistan, contributions to
the anti-piracy mission off Somalia – have been increasing. And they are beginning
to be reflected in changes to strategic policy: in 2005 Japan signed a security treaty
with Australia; its 2010 defence white paper announced that defence priorities would
shift towards the southern oceans; and in the same year Japan’s submarine building pro-
gramme accelerated.
101
A strategic cultural analysis may conclude that that a subculture
calling for ‘normalization’ of Japan’s strategic posture is rising in influence, although at
least one scholar has warned that the strength of the long-dominant pacifist subculture
should not be underestimated.
102
This is not to say that the range of strategic options or subcultures is unlimited, or
determined only by changes to a state’s external strategic environment: the state’s
identity, especially its relationships of affinity with other states, also set limits on
the range of options considered ‘culturally available’. Australia’s relationship with
New Zealand is illustrative: the former is five times the size of the latter demographi-
cally, had an economy more than eight times as large in 2010, and it outspends New
Zealand on defence at almost a 10:1 ratio. The ‘raw data’ from the external strategic
environment, especially the relative balance of power, would suggest that Australia
could conquer New Zealand, or at least ‘bully’ it strategically, should it so choose.
But if there is such thing as a ‘conquer the Kiwis’ subculture in Australia it
remains restricted exclusively to the realm of overtly satirical popular culture.
103
It
is strongly latent, only ‘technically available’ because it is possible to think (and
joke) about it. Indeed, treating it as a subculture at all is absurd as it has no influence
at all in serious policy circles. It is, in short, not culturally available.
Subcultures may also change positions of dominance/subordination/latency
when a state’s identity changes. Arguably New Zealand’s great strategic cultural
shift in the early 1980s had little to do with changes in its external strategic environ-
ment – the Cold War intensified a little globally, but not especially in New Zealand’s
region – and it was instead caused by domestic distaste for President Reagan’s bel-
licose nuclear rhetoric. So, perceptions of America’s identity, the degree it could be
trusted to play the role of ‘custodian of the free world’, altered. A new ‘neutralist’
strategic culture that frowned on nuclear sable-rattling rose to dominance over the tra-
ditional forward defence-like subculture that had kept New Zealand closely allied to
America and Australia since the signing of ANZUS in 1951.
104
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Something similar (but not as extreme) happened in Australia, about a decade
earlier, when anti-Vietnam protests changed the Australian public’s attitude
towards supporting large, long overseas deployments in support of American stra-
tegic goals. Profound shifts in identity were occurring in the late 1960s and early
1970s, some directly related to strategic pressures – most obviously Vietnam –
but many other ‘identity-change-inducing’ pressures were unrelated to strategic con-
cerns, like the rise of feminist, indigenous, and counter-culture movements.
105
There
was a general feeling in the 1970s that Australia had ‘come of age’ as an independent
nation, and it has been said that a ‘self-confident, distinctly Australian outlook and
spirit’ emerged for the first time.
106
So, it is no coincidence that forward defence
has played second fiddle to continental defence – which has as its underlying logic
the principle of self-reliance – since about the mid 1970s. By paying attention to
debates about what sort of international role a state should play, what it is or
should be in the world, we can gather clues about the fortunes of the various subcul-
tures as they jockey for influence over strategic decision-making.
Conclusion
While the model proposed here is a departure from previous approaches to strategic
culture, it is not a radical one: models predicated on the existence of multiple coex-
isting and competing subcultures, vying for influence over a state’s foreign policy
decision-making, already have been proposed in other contexts. McCormick and
Wittkopf concluded that after 1960 America’s Congress increasingly divided along
party or ideological lines on foreign policy matters.
107
More recently Peter Beinart
has argued that:
the war on terror is a partisan idea. When Republicans think of foreign policy,
they think of military threats ... and suggest coercive, unilateral responses.
Democrats ... see a different world, marked by economic and humanitarian
dangers.... Their favoured responses are multilateral and less militaristic.
108
The historian Walter A. McDougall splits American foreign policy history roughly
into two periods (pre- and post-1900), noting that during each era at least four ‘tra-
ditions’ coexisted and competed for influence.
109
Franz Schurmann found that
three ‘schools of thought’ – imperialist, universalist, and nationalist – vied for influ-
ence over American foreign policy in the mid 20th century, and Walter Russell Mead
found that a series of successive ‘paradigms’ or ‘myths’ shaped the various phases of
American foreign policy over the centuries.
110
There is, therefore, support for the
application of similar logic to the strategic culture debate.
Finally, a strategic cultural model featuring competing subcultures enables a com-
promise position to be extracted from the Johnston– Gray debate. From Gray we take
the notion that culture provides context; that it guides and shapes interpretation: we
just have to accept that culture is a disaggregated thing with contradictory elements
rather than a monolithic whole. From Johnston we take the goal of building falsifiable
theory. It becomes possible to test whether, when a state’s external strategic environ-
ment shifts or its culture/identity changes, a subordinate subculture may displace a
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dominant one because it fits the new external circumstances or that state’s ‘view of
itself’ better. This could be tested either counterfactually or in the future. The epis-
temological possibilities of a competing subcultures model are captured in a quote
from Ted Hopf, who applied a roughly similar model to explain Russian foreign
policy. He noted that his analysis yielded:
a relative, working truth, that is, claims to validity that I expect to be true only
in relation to other interpretive claims, not to some objective reality. The claims
to validity are ‘working’ because they operate only in comparison to other
claims; they are not the truth, but merely the most plausible account yet
offered.
111
Scholars would have to use probabilistic expressions – ‘very likely’ or ‘not really
foreseeable’ – to describe the possibility of a subordinate subculture rising to dom-
inance, and be prepared to accept that precise, mathematical, eternally valid certainty
would be unattainable. But these limitations are hardly unusual in the context of IR
theorizing. So, while academic debates will always be marked by disagreements –
that is the nature of a free and open discourse – the Johnston– Gray impasse has
persisted for too long and become too polarized. It is time to move on.
NOTES
1. Yoseph Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996).
2. Alistair Iain Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4
(1995), p. 35.
3. John Glenn, ‘Realism Versus Strategic Culture: Competition and Collaboration?’, International
Studies Review, Vol. 11 (2009), p. 523.
4. Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), p. 37.
5. ‘The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, R-2154-AF,’ RAND
Corporation (September 1977), p.4.
6. Michael Desch, ‘Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies’, International
Security, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1998), pp. 150– 5.
7. David S. McDonough, ‘Grand Strategy, Culture, and Strategic Choice: A Review’, Journal of
Military and Strategic Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2011), p. 29.
8. Rashed Uz Zaman, ‘Strategic Culture: A “Cultural” Understanding of War’, Comparative Strategy,
Vol. 28, No. 1 (2009), pp. 68 – 88.
9. Recent examples include: Jeffrey S. Lantis and Andrew Charleton, ‘Continuity or Change? The Stra-
tegic Culture of Australia,’ Comparative Strategy, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2011), pp. 291–315; Ali Ahmed,
‘Strategic Culture and Indian Self-Assurance’, Journal of Peace Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2010),
pp. 1–9; Craig B. Greathouse and Johnathan S. Miner, ‘American Strategic Culture and its Role
in the 2002 and 2006 Versions of the National Security Strategy’, Proceedings from the Georgia
Political Science Association Conference, Savannah, GA, 13 – 15 November 2008; Huiyun Feng,
Chinese Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Decision-Making: Confucianism, Leadership and
War (London: Routledge, 2007).
10. Policy guides or informs behaviour (or at least it is meant to). But if enough behavioural deviations
from formal policy occur, pressure will build to bring policy ‘into line’.
11. Bradley Klein, ‘Hegemony and Strategic Culture: American Power Projection and Alliance Defence
Politics’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1988), pp. 133–48; Robin Luckham,
‘Armament Culture’, Alternatives, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1984), pp. 1 – 44; Graeme Cheeseman, ‘Australia:
The White Experience of Fear and Dependence’, in Ken Booth and Russell Trood (eds), Strategic
Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 273 – 98.
RECONCEPTUALIZING THE STRATEGIC CULTURE DEBATE 457
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12. Most IR theory has traditionally been analytical or explanatory, implying predictive power: for a
classic discussion see J. David Singer, ‘The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations’,
World Politics, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1961), especially pp. 76– 81. For extended discussion see Martin
Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990).
13. Carnes Lord,‘American Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 5, No.3 (1985); Johnston,
‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’ (note 2), p. 37.
14. Lord, ‘American Strategic Culture’ (note 13), p. 271.
15. Ibid., pp. 272–4.
16. Ibid., p. 270.
17. Ibid., p. 275.
18. Its economy comprised almost half of global output: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers (London: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 475.
19. Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture,’ (note 2), p. 37.
20. David A. Lake, Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in its Century (Princeton, NJ: Prin-
ceton University Press, 1999), especially chapters 3 and 4.
21. Realists would argue that the US intervened in Central America because it enjoyed an enormous rela-
tive power advantage, but simultaneously feared clashing with the much stronger European powers.
22. Michael Evans, ‘The Tyranny of Dissonance: Australia’s Strategic Culture and Way of War 1901 –
2005’, Land Warfare Studies Centre Study Papers, No. 306, February 2005, p. 9.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
24. Ibid., p. 88.
25. Ibid., p. 40.
26. Ibid., pp. 51–8.
27. Ibid., p. 42.
28. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), chapter 2;
Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in
Five Nations (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1965); Lucian W. Pye, ‘Political Culture,’ in David
L. Shils (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12 (New York: Macmillan
and Free Press, 1968), p. 218; Raymond Williams, ‘The Analysis of Culture’, in John Storey (ed.),
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 3rd edn (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 2006), pp. 32–40.
29. Evans, ‘Tyranny’ (note 22), p. 23.
30. ‘Liminal’ suggests a sort of ‘identity crisis’: for example, are Australians Europeans or Asians? See
Richard A. Higgott and Kim Richard Nossal, ‘The International Politics of Liminality: Relocating
Australia in the Asia-Pacific’, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 32, No. 2 (July 2007),
pp. 169–86.
31. Evans, ‘Tyranny’ (note 22), 37 – 9.
32. The debate is specifically addressed in: Stuart Poore, ‘What is the Context? A Reply to the Gray –
Johnston Debate on Strategic Culture’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29 (2003), pp. 279 –
84; David Haglund, ‘What Good is Strategic Culture?: A Modest Defence of an Immodest
Concept’, International Journal, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 479 – 501; Forrest E. Morgan,
Compellence and the Strategic Culture of Imperial Japan: Implications for Coercive Diplomacy in
the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Mikkel V. Rasmussen, ‘“What’s the Use
of It?”: Danish Strategic Culture and the Utility of Armed Force’, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol.
40, No. 1 (2005), pp. 67 – 89; Iver B. Neumann and Henrikki Heikka, ‘Grand Strategy, Strategic
Culture, Practice: The Social Roots of Nordic Defence’, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 40, No. 1
(2005), pp. 5–23; Zaman, ‘Strategic Culture’ (note 8); McDonough, ‘Grand Strategy,’ (note 7).
33. Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, (note 2), p. 33. Examples of first generation works
include: Colin Gray, ‘Nuclear Strategy: A Case for a Theory of Victory’, International Security,
Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 54 – 87; Colin Gray, ‘National Style in Strategy’, International
Security, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1981), pp. 21–47; Richard Pipes, ‘Why the Soviet Union Thinks it Could
Fight and Win a Nuclear War’, Commentary, Vol. 64, No. 1 (1977), pp. 21 – 34; Fritz Ermath, ‘Con-
trasts in Soviet and American Strategic Thought’, International Security, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1978),
pp. 138–55.
34. Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Cultural Realism and Strategy in Maoist China’, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.),
Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), p. 181.
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35. ‘[A]n integrated system of symbols (e.g. argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors)
which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences’: Johnston, ‘Thinking about
Strategic Culture’ (note 2), p. 46.
36. Johnston, ‘Cultural Realism’ (note 34), p. 183.
37. For a book-length explanation of this case see Morgan, Compellence (note 32).
38. Primarily the ‘seven military classics,’ of which Sun Tzu’s Art of War is the best known in the West.
See Ralph Sawyer (trans.), The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (Boulder, CO: Westview,
1993). Alistair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
39. From the Latin aphorism qui desiderat pacum, praeperat bellum (‘he who desires peace, prepare for
war’).
40. Johnston, ‘Cultural Realism’ (note 34), pp. 256 – 7.
41. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 5,
33– 40.
42. Lenin: Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952).
43. Mao Zedong, ‘The People’s Democratic Dictatorship’, speech, Beijing, 30 June 1949, http://www.
marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_65.htm (accessed October 2012).
44. Lucien Pye, China: An Introduction, 3rd edn (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1984), p. 241.Mao cele-
brated what he believed (erroneously as it turned out) was the point at which Soviet power had
begun to overtake America’s. Ibid., pp. 236– 43.
45. They engaged in ‘zero-sum competition’ for influence in the Third World, adopted mercantilist
policies towards each other, and heavily militarized their border: Henry Kissinger, On China
(London: Allen Lane, 2011), chapter 10.
46. William Griffith, ‘Sino-Soviet Relations, 1964 – 1965’, The China Quarterly, Vol. 25 (Jan – Mar
1966), pp. 3–143.
47. Kissinger, On China (note 45), chapter 3.
48. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), chapter 4.
49. Colin Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of
International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1999), p. 51.
50. Ibid., p. 50.
51. Ibid., p. 56.
52. Ibid., pp. 67–8.
53. Colin Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 1.
54. Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context,’ (note 49), p. 58.
55. Ibid., pp. 56–59.
56. For example, does being German cause them to behave in a particular way? Or does their behaviour
make them German? And if their behaviour changes, will they still be German? Ibid., p. 52.
57. By deeply cutting spending on the army, while cutting the Royal Navy’s budget far less,
proportionately.
58. Poore, ‘What is the Context?’ (note 32), pp. 281 – 3.
59. Alistair Iain Johnston, ‘StrategicCultures Revisited,’ Review of International Studi es, Vol. 25 (1999), p. 520.
60. Zaman, ‘Strategic Culture’ (note 8).
61. Rajesh Basrur, ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture,’ Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 38,
No. 1 (2001), pp. 181 – 98; Haglund, ‘What Good is Strategic Culture?’(note 33).
62. McDonough, ‘Grand Strategy,’ (note 7), p. 28.
63. Poore, ‘What is the Context?’ (note 32), pp. 280 – 1.
64. Ibid., p 282.
65. Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 109 – 34 (note 48).
66. Neumann and Heikka, ‘Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, Practice’ (note 32), p. 9.
67. Ibid., p. 11.
68. Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security Policy in Germany and Japan
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 9; Jeffrey Legro, ‘The Transformation
of Policy Ideas,’ American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2000), pp. 419 – 32.
69. Morgan, Compellence (note 32), p. 8.
70. Ibid.
71. Williams defines culture as ‘a description of a particular way of life which finds expression in insti-
tutions and behaviour’: ‘The Analysis of Culture,’ (note 29), p. 56. Clifford Geertz defines culture as
‘socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people ...do things’: The Interpretation
of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 12.
RECONCEPTUALIZING THE STRATEGIC CULTURE DEBATE 459
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72. Douglas L. Medin, Sara J. Unsworth, and Lawrence Hirschfeld, ‘Culture, Categorization and
Reasoning’, in Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen (eds), Handbook of Cultural Psychology
(New York: Guildford Press, 2007), pp. 615 – 44.
73. Poore, ‘What is the Context?’ (note 32), p. 282.
74. Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (note 4), p. 37.
75. Alexander Wendt and Ian Shapiro, ‘The Difference that Realism Makes: Social Science and the
Politics of Consent’, Politics & Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1992), pp. 197 – 223. Geertz advises scholars
to repeat the ‘immersion/pulling away’ process many times to refine their theories (hence the ‘spiral’:
it goes ‘back and forth’ and also ‘forward/up’); ‘From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of
Anthropological Understanding’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 28,
No. 1 (1974), pp. 43 – 5.
76. Alexander Wendt, ‘On the Via Media: A Response to the Critics’, Review of International Studies,
Vol. 26 (2000), p. 166: see also Douglas V. Porpora, ‘Cultural Rules and Material Relations’, Socio-
logical Theory, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1993), pp. 212 – 29.
77. Max Weber, ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’, in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(eds), From Max Weber (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1946 [1923]), p. 280. Talcott Parsons,
The Structure of Action (New York: Free Press, 1937), pp. 697 – 726.
78. Pye, ‘Political Culture’ (note 28), p. 218. See also Gabriel Almond, ‘Comparative Political Systems’,
Journal of Politics, Vol. 18 (1956), p. 396.
79. David J. Elkins and Richard E.B. Simeon, ‘A Cause in Search of an Effect, or What does Political
Culture Explain?’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1979), pp. 127– 45; Michael Walzer, ‘On
the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2 (1967),
191–204; Lowell Dittmer, ‘Political Culture and Political Symbolism’, World Politics, Vol. 29,
No. 4 (July 1977), 552–83; Quote from Dittmer, ‘Political Culture and Political Symbolism,’
World Politics, Vol. 29, No. 4 (July 1977), pp. 552– 83.
80. Ann Swidler, ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 57,
No. 2 (1986), pp. 273 – 86.
81. ‘How to Detect, Describe and Explain Repertoires of Contention,’ Working Paper No. 150, Centre of
Study of Social Change, New School of Social Research, 1992, p. 17.
82. Stephen C. Levinson, ‘Language and Space’, Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 25 (1996),
pp. 353–82; Alexander Luria, ‘The Problem of the Historical Nature of Psychological Processes’,
International Journal of Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 6 (1971), pp. 259 – 72; Nobuhiro Nagashima, ‘A
Reversed World: Or is it? The Japanese Way of Communicating and their Attitudes towards Other
Cultures’, in Robin Horton and Ruth Finnigan (eds), Modes of Thinking: Essays on Thinking in
Western and Non-Western Societies (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), pp. 92 – 111.
83. Paul DiMaggio, ‘Culture and Cognition,’ Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 23 (1997), p. 267.
84. Scholars working in British Cultural Studies (the ‘Birmingham School’) would consider the notion of
a ‘dominant’ subculture nonsensical: subcultures are necessarily subordinate to ‘mainstream’ culture
– see Dick Hebdige, Sub-culture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979) – the model pre-
sented here does not follow this convention.
85. For example, a cartoon in the Advertiser newspaper from 1963 depicted Indonesian President Sukarno
as a Hitler-like rat: in Neville Meaney, Australia and the World: A Documentary History from the
1870s to the 1970s (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1985), p. 661.
86. Arthur Calwell, the leader of the Opposition Australian Labour Party, criticizing the Prime Minister
Robert Menzies. Speech, reported verbatim in Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 1962.
87. Robert Menzies, Attorney General, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (Australia),House of
Representatives (‘Hansard’), 1936 Session, Vol. CLI29 September 1936, p. 622.
88. On America, see: speech, John Howard, to the Liberal Party State Conference, Perth, 20 July 2002.
On China see: speech, John Howard, ‘Australia’s International Relations – Ready for the Future,’
Menzies Research Centre, Canberra, 22 August 2001.
89. It is assumed in a high-risk situation – an invasion from a hostile power, for example – that allies
would intervene. See Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force (Canberra, Australia Government
Publishing Service, 1997), p. 46.
90. For the classic ‘purist’ formulation of continental defence see: Paul Dibb, Review of Australia’s
Defence Capabilities (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986).
91. Hugh White, ‘A Focused Force: Australia’s Defence Priorities in the Asian Century,’ Lowy Institute
Paper No. 26 (2009), chapter 6, http://lowyinstitute.cachefly.net/files/pubfiles/White%2C_A_
focused_force.pdf (accessed 23 February 2012).
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92. Coral Bell, Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy, 3rd ed. (St Leonards: Allen &
Unwin, 1993). See also Greg Melleuish, ‘The West, the Anglo-sphere and the Ideal of the Common-
wealth’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 55 No. 2 (2009), pp. 233 – 47.
93. Regarding Canada, see: Justin Massie, ‘Regional Strategic Sub-cultures: Canadians and the Use of
Force in Iraq and Afghanistan’, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2008), pp. 19–48.
The Australian Defence and Foreign Affairs departments have battled for decades for their favoured
‘international visions’: Kim Richard Nossal, ‘Seeing Things? The Adornment of “Security” in
Australia and Canada’, Australian Journal of International Affairs,Vol.49,No.1(May1995),
pp. 33–47.
94. Johnston, Cultural Realism (note 38), p. 220.
95. Beatrice Heuser, ‘Beliefs, Culture, Proliferation and Nuclear Weapons,’ Journal of Strategic Studies,
Vol. 23, No. 1 (2000), pp. 75 – 100.
96. Morgan, Compellence (note 32), p. 22.
97. Ibid., chapter 3.
98. Ibid., chapter 6.
99. Thomas U. Berger, ‘Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan’, in Katzenstein
(ed.), Culture of National Security (note 34), pp. 317 – 56.
100. Yuki Okamoto, ‘Great Power Relations in Asia: A Japanese Perspective’, Survival, Vol. 51, No. 6
(2009/2010), pp. 29– 35.
101. Nick Bisley, ‘The Japan –Australia Security Declaration and the Changing Regional Security Setting:
Wheels, Webs and Beyond?’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 1 (2008),
pp. 38–52. Martin Fackler, ‘Japan Announces Defence Policy to Counter China’, New York
Times, 16 December 2010: Defence of Japan 2010 (Tokyo: Ministry of Defence, 2010); Kyle
Mizokami, ‘Japan Increasing Size of Submarine Fleet’, Japan Security Watch, New Pacific Institute,
27 July 2010.
102. Tadashi Anno, ‘Japanese Politics and Security Cooperation with Australia: The Limits of
“Normalisation”’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 1 (2011), pp. 24–39.
103. See FHM (For Him Magazine), August 2004; satirical advertisements prepared for a comedic
television show also played on the theme in 2008: http://www.youtube.com (search for ‘Australia
invades New Zealand’).
104. Simon Dalby, ‘The “Kiwi Disease”: Geopolitical Discourse in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the South
Pacific’, Political Geography, Vol. 12, No.5 (1993), pp. 437– 56.
105. Alan Bloomfield, ‘Australia’s Strategic Culture: An Investigation of the Concept of Strategic Culture
and its Application to the Australian Case’, PhD Thesis, Queen’s University, Canada, 1 November
2011.
106. Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 230 – 1.
107. James M. McCormick and Eugene R. Wittkopf, ‘Bipartisanship, Partisanship and Ideology in US
Congressional– Executive Foreign Policy Relations’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 52, No. 4 (1990),
pp. 1077– 98.
108. Peter Beinart, ‘When Politics no Longer Stops at the Water’s Edge: Partisan Polarisation and Foreign
Policy,’ in Pietro S. Nivola and David W. Brady (eds), Red and Blue Nation? Characteristics and
Causes of America’s Polarized Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2006), p. 151.
109. The first four are ‘liberty/exceptionalism’, ‘unilateralism/isolationism’, ‘the American/Monroe
system’, and ‘expansionism/Manifest Destiny’. The second four are ‘progressive imperialism’, ‘Wil-
sonianism/liberal internationalism’, ‘containment’, and ‘global meliorism’: Walter A. McDougall,
Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
110. Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents and Contradic-
tions of World Politics (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence:
American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (New York: Knopf, 2001), chapter 3.
111. Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies,Moscow,
1955 & 1999 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 24.
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