Before the Zeitenwende: A word-embedding analysis of strategic culture as an institution in German Bundestag debates, 1953–2021

This article asks how far German strategic culture shifted between 1953 and 2021 and whether strategic-subcultural competition inside the Bundestag conveyed external shocks into observable change. Adopting a historical-institutionalist lens that treats strategic culture as an institution of rules, ideas, and norms, the study focuses on the rules pillar—the legal and procedural framework governing the use of force. Using a new word-embedding model (conText), it analyses the entire corpus of security-related Bundestag speeches from legislative periods 2–19 to calculate cosine distances between party-specific vectors, producing a longitudinal, party-pair dataset spanning both Cold- and post-Cold War eras. Findings show a pattern of prolonged stability interrupted by episodic disruption: rhetorical divergence spikes after German reunification (1990) and Russia’s annexation of Crimea (2014), driven by ideological outsiders, before floor-time rules, committee scrutiny and budget cycles restore a modified consensus. Integrating strategic-subcultural competition with historical-institutionalist mechanisms clarifies why unification, more than Kosovo or Crimea, marks a critical juncture. Methodologically, the study demonstrates how large-scale, reproducible text-as-data techniques can trace strategic-cultural change and deliver a baseline against which the post-2022 Zeitenwende can be evaluated.