Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate

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 Johnston, 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 interpretation 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.