Strategic Cultural Change and the Challenge for Security Policy

Germany and the Bundeswehr's Deployment to Afghanistan

C. Hilpert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137383785
• eBook ISBN: 9781137383792
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For more than a decade, international troops have been deployed to Afghanistan. Out of all NATO members, this mission was the most difficult for Germany that had thus far never engaged in combat and offensive military activities. This book analyses how Germany's experiences in Afghanistan have changed the country's strategic culture.

1

On the Cultural Foundations of Warfare

Ways of war

The notion that national or tribal cultures have an influence on warfare has a long history in human thought. One of the oldest studies in which cultural ways of war play a role are the writings of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, written in 431 BCE, he describes the differing backgrounds of the adversaries Sparta and Athens in order to describe how they battled each other; their cultures had a direct impact on the ways in which they led their respective forces. Much later, in 1932, the British army officer and military historian Basil Liddell Hart put forward the claim that there existed such a thing as a national way of war; in The British Way in Warfare, he observed that Britain avoided sending large armies to fight on the Continent, but instead utilized its navy to put economic pressure on its enemies. In this way Britain used an indirect approach.¹

During the Cold War, similar cultural studies gained momentum in response to the dominant theoretical paradigm of International Relations (IR): realism. During the Cold War, realist theory, with its emphasis on the competitive behavior of states, was largely consistent with the central features of the bipolar international system. The theory had immense explanatory power when applied to the conflicts and wars of the 1950s and 1960s.

The advent of culture in security studies, however, challenged the realist paradigm. It was the political scientist Jack Snyder who, in the 1970s, developed the concept of strategic culture. Finding that the decision-making processes of the Soviet political elite could not be explained by rational choice or game theory, Snyder opted for a cultural perspective: Soviet (and American) decision-makers did not act ‘as though they were culture-free systems analysts and game theoreticians.’² He argued that the Soviet Union’s distinctive history, its political institutions and its own unique culture shaped its stance on its contemporary security policy. Snyder argued that it would be wrong to assume that the Soviets were guided by the same set of beliefs and attitudes as those of US policy-makers. Subsequently, his work on strategic culture influenced generations of scholars and produced a rich, varied research agenda which paved the way to a wave of theories and notions that all more or less challenged the dominant International Relations theory of (neo)realism.

The early scholarship following Snyder used strategic culture in a highly descriptive way.³ It focused almost exclusively on US–Soviet relations and the nuclear arms race. Colin Gray, for instance, argued that there were distinctive US and Soviet approaches to nuclear strategy which could be explained on the basis of these nations’ respective history, geography, behavior, and traditions.⁴ Writing in 1979, Ken Booth, like Snyder, criticized the prevalence of ethnocentrism in security studies; the golden age of strategic studies, Booth found, led to the prevalence of distinctively American ideas and theories that completely lacked a cultural component.⁵

All of these early studies attempted to explain state behavior with cultural variables, which has to do largely with the Cold War roots of the theory. Always fearing that the Cold War would turn hot, social scientists were naturally interested in understanding Soviet strategic planning and thinking better. Strategic culture was thought suitable to give a better idea of what guided the Soviet political elite.

However, the integration of behavior into a definition of strategic culture and then using this culture to explain state behavior is a tautological argument, as Johnston stated in criticism.⁶ This remains, until today, one of the main battle lines in strategic cultural scholarship: Does strategic culture also includes practices, behavioral patterns and actions, or does it not? Thus, the works of strategic culture of the 1990s distinguish themselves through a more rigorous and methodological approach; behavior is usually excluded in definitions of strategic culture in order to avoid the tautological arguments of the early works. In search of a falsifiable definition, Johnston, for instance, defines the concept as an

‘integrated system of symbols (e.g. argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors) which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious.’⁷

Johnston makes the notion of symbols the center of his definition, understanding them exclusively in a linguistic way, namely as ‘argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors.’ Overall, however, his work has rightly been criticized for using a reified concept of culture, outdated and no longer used in the social sciences.⁸ He neglects more recent scholarship on culture for the sake of finding a falsifiable definition – an important point to which I shall return below.

Strategic cultures

Generally, there exist almost as many understandings of what strategic culture actually means as scholars who have written about it. Most importantly, however, as Neumann and Heikka maintain, the literature on strategic culture has for some time now been using an outdated concept of (strategic) culture which is no longer used in other branches of the social sciences.⁹ Following Ann Swidler, Neumann and Heikka suggest an understanding of culture as the co-constitutive effects between discourse and practices.¹⁰ Practice theory, to them, is a way to deal with strategic culture and to ‘bring the debate about strategic (and political) culture away from the exhausting and exhausted focus on how ideas and behaviour relate to one another.’¹¹ Generally, bringing together discourse and practices is an attempt which tries to bridge previous academic divides and to integrate different research approaches and agendas.¹²

While presenting a scientifically valuable further development of previous studies, Neumann and Heikka’s approach abandons the concept of norms entirely: ‘We follow the general turn of anthropology and sociology away from an analysis based on beliefs, ideas, norms, and so on, in favour of a new theoretical bifurcation.’¹³ But what, then, are the actors’ motivations underlying discourse and practices? Are they rational? Or driven by normative considerations? In fact, the achievement of cultural explanations was specifically to call attention to the fact that explanations other than the structural or rational exist, and that norms and values possess explanatory power.

Though Swidler rightly asserts that including practices in definitions of culture ‘gave the study of culture an empirical object,’¹⁴ her work neglects generations of studies in the (strategic) culture literature that have shown that norms and values do in fact influence policies and that policy-makers are aware of their cultural, normative background. Furthermore, she argues: ‘A focus on discourse then reintroduces the world of language, symbols, and meanings without making them anyone-in-particular’s meanings.’¹⁵ But what are symbols based on, if not (among others) ideas, values, and norms?

A focus on discourse, it is argued here, allows the norms and ideas being communicated to be analyzed. Norms and values – to which strategic culture pays so much attention – are visible in the discourse of politicians who have to justify their policies, and who do so by referring to shared norms, values, and goals. In fact, a great part of the political discourse is based on norms; as Finnemore and Sikkink argue, ‘norms prompt justifications for action and leave an extensive trail of communication among actors that we can study.’¹⁶

So what is the content of discourse? Tailored to this study, I understand discourse as, first, Germany’s self-understanding – that is, how the Federal Republic perceives itself and its role within the international community. The perception of one’s role and responsibility in the world also informs the second part of discourse, namely legitimizations of the use of military force; why use military force in the first place? German politicians, for instance, often extensively justify the Bundeswehr’s deployment abroad with humanitarian reasons, closely related to how the Federal Republic perceives itself. The third part of discourse is strategy: what goals the military are to achieve, and the perceived nature of the military operation. Strategy is thus closely connected to the reason why politicians send in the military in the first place, namely legitimization. Strategy and the way the nature of the mission is perceived are also closely interlinked, because the kind of conflict also influences the strategy being pursued.

The most important factor relating to the three domains, posited to encompass discourse (self-perception, legitimizations, and strategy), is that they do not automatically lead to certain actions or political decisions. Rather, they demarcate the ideational framework in which certain courses of action are possible while others are not. These possible courses of action may eventually become action in the sense of repeated behavioral patterns or established institutions, both here called practices. To include such practices in my definition is key, as it can thus give an indication of when processes of change are complete and find practical application. So, for instance, factors which have the potential to change German strategic culture may merely evoke a new, altered rhetoric, without leading to any changes in how things are actually done. Only in combination with practices, the final institutionalization of repeated patterns of behavior, will I be able to truly assess change. In other words, a process of change is only complete with institutionalization.

Like Neumann and Heikka, I understand practices as the three categories of civil–military relations, procurement/finances, and doctrine. In contrast to Neumann and Heikka, however, this work employs a rather narrow understanding of civil–military relations, following Feaver, as ‘institutions of political control.’¹⁷ This understanding also closely corresponds to a defining feature of German strategic culture, namely the importance of the principle of Primat der Politik (Primacy of Politics). The role of the German parliament, for instance, stands at the center of this analysis, because it is an important element of political control of the Bundeswehr. Notwithstanding this example, the above understanding of civil–military relations being a core part of strategic culture would also be applicable to other cases, like US civil–military relations, or how political control over the military is being designed; this, after all, always tells us a lot about a society’s relation to warfare. Neumann and Heikka, for instance, use their understanding in order to explain the attitude of the Nordic countries specifically.

The second part of practices is doctrine, most importantly Germany’s official defense policy papers, the Defense Policy Guidelines (DPG, Verteidigungspolitische Richtlinien) and the White Book (Weißbuch), which determine the main challenges and threats to the Federal Republic and the abstract planning on how to address those. How this doctrine was translated into command and control structures and further practices, for instance, relating to the German concept of Vernetzte Sicherheit (Networked Security¹⁸) is also discussed in this book. Another important part of doctrine are the Rules of Engagement (ROE) on the use of military force. At the tactical level, the ROE truly reflect the German way of warfare, as they set out precisely what German soldiers may and may not do.

Including doctrine in this analysis touches on a specific critique that I levy against the more recent works of the strategic culture literature: There is a lot of talk about strategy in strategic culture, but when it comes to the empirical section of these works, they only talk about politics and policies. But strategy is about ends, ways, and means of military force. Most scholars have failed to take strategic culture down to the strategic–operational level; they have failed to talk about the details which distinguish them from broader categories like Maull’s Civil Power concept. They stop with the decision to send forces into foreign countries; they stop with high politics. Longhurst, Berger, Duffield, and Lantis, to name just those who wrote about Germany, essentially focused on how Germany’s historical legacy of two World Wars still influences current security policy at the political level.¹⁹ But strategic culture is more. Strategic culture influences not only whether forces will be sent, but also how these forces have to behave once they are in a foreign country. I thus broaden my understanding of strategic culture to explicitly include the military aspect; in other words, I bring strategic culture back to its historical predecessors, the relation between culture and warfare.

The third set of practices – procurement and defense expeditures – is an important, clearly visible manifestation of strategic culture. The material equipment of the armed forces, together with the development of the defense budget, reveals the standing of the military within the state and how much the state is willing to invest in its security. According to the most highly decorated German general since World War II, Klaus Naumann (ret.), the military budget of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  On the Cultural Foundations of Warfare
• 2  Setting the Scene: The US War on Terrorism
• 3  Alliance Solidarity after 9/11
• 4  Escalation in Afghanistan
• 5  The Stabilization Narrative Explodes
• 6  German Forms of Counterinsurgency
• 7  Afghanistans Legacy?
• Conclusion
• Annex: Coding Bundestag Speeches
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index