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42 views2 pages

Strategic Culture Definition

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falseclown9
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8 The Concept of Strategic

Culture Affirmed
Ken Booth

WHAT IS STRATEGIC CULTURE?

The concept of strategic culture refers to a nation's traditions, values,


attitudes, patterns of behaviour, habits, symbols, achievements and
particular ways of adapting to the environment and solving problems with
respect to the threat or use of force.
A strategic culture is persistent over time, but neither particular elements
nor a particular culture as a whole are immutable. Nevertheless, those
elements together or in part deserving to be called 'cultural' do tend to
outlast all but major changes in military technology, domestic arrangements
or the international environment.
The strategic culture of a nation derives from its history, geography and
political culture, and it represents the aggregation of the attitudes and
patterns of behaviour of the most influential voices; these may be,
depending on the nation, the political elite, the military establishment
and/or public opinion.
A strategic culture defines a set of patterns of and for a nation's behaviour
on war and peace issues. It helps shape but does not determine how a nation
interacts with others in the security field. Other explanations (e.g.,
technological push) playa greater or lesser role in particular circumstances.
Strategic culture helps shape behaviour on such issues as the use of force in
international politics, sensitivity to external dangers, civil-military relations
and strategic doctrine. As a result of continuities in these matters, it is
legitimate to talk about a particular national 'style! in the theory and practice
of strategy.

SNYDER REVISITED

The history of science shows that important breakthroughs have sometimes


occurred as a result of accident. One substance is mistakenly or clumsily or
unknowingly dropped on another, and a new path of research is opened. A
similar process can also occur in social science; this seems to have been the
case with the important concept of strategic culture. Jack Snyder, in his
important, provocative but limited introductory chapter tells us that the
phrase 'strategic culture', which he coined, was not meant in the sense in
which it has subsequently come to be used. It seems he almost dropped the

121
C. G. Jacobsen (ed.), Strategic Power: USA/USSR
© Carl G. Jacobsen 1990
122 Strategic Power: USAf USSR

words 'strategic' and 'culture' together in a fit of absent-mindedness; he


certainly gave their combination a different significance than that invested by
the contributors to this book. Nevertheless, the conceptual accident which
led to the coining of the phrase is one for which the strategic community is
deeply in Jack Snyder's debt.
The phrase 'strategic culture' was first used by Snyder in a paper published
in 1977. The key paragraph stated: 1
It is useful to look at the Soviet approach to strategic thinking as a unique
'strategic culture'. Individuals are socialized into a distinctively Soviet
mode of strategic thinking. As a result of this socialization process, a set of
general beliefs, attitudes and behavioral patterns with regard to nuclear
strategy has achieved a state of semipermanence that places them on the
level of 'culture' rather than mere 'policy' . Of course, attitudes may change
as a result of changes in technology and the international environment.
However, new problems are not assessed objectively. Rather, they are
seen through the perceptual lens provided by the strategic culture.
Snyder explains in his introductory chapter to this volume that when he wrote
those words, what he was referring to was not the idea of 'culture' in the
conventional sense, but rather to the 'specific differences in the domestic or
international circumstances' in which Soviet thinking about nuclear war had
developed. The term 'culture' was used, he said, to suggest that once a
distinctive approach to strategy had taken hold, it tended to continue despite
changes in the circumstances that gave rise to it. It was persistence rather than
the implications of cultural distinctiveness that most attracted his attention.
The term 'culture' had therefore been used somewhat idiosyncratically by
Snyder, who points out that in his subsequent works he dropped the phrase
'strategic culture'. Neither his particular usage nor his dropping of it have
been generally recognized.
Whatever Snyder himself originally meant when he used the term 'strategic
culture' his accidental coinage gave focus to a set of ideas which were not new
but whose intellectual time had finally come. The notion that different
nations have distinctive ways of thinking and behaving on war and peace
issues has been long understood, but it has rarely if ever been exposed to
systematic scholarly examination. By the second half of the 1970s the time was
long overdue for such an examination. Thus, if the coinage of the term was
accidental, it was not an accident that it was taken up with such interest by
other strategic analysts, since by the mid-1970s a small but growing number of
people (both on the right and on the left of the strategic debate) were
becoming increasingly discontented with the theory and practice of strategy.
One dimension of this new wave of discontent expressed itself in an interest
in such issues as ethnocentrism, national style and distinctive national 'ways
of war'. The mid-1970s witnessed a burgeoning reaction in the strategic
studies field against the intellectual hegemony of 'American Strategic Man'

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