Introduction
There seem to be endless calls for foreign intervention in different crisis spots all over the world. Crises and problems of varying character such as civil wars, failed states, militant Islamism and terrorism call for attention and action. One tool that can be used for handling these crises is military intervention. However, European countries neither can nor wish to participate in efforts to address all crises and conflicts. Disagreement on threat perceptions, economic constraints, and weak domestic political support are examples of the obstacles that prevent military intervention. Against this background we present a comparative study of why militarily capable European states decide to participate, or not to participate, in international military operations. The book examines the behaviour of France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Poland in relation to four military operations, namely International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) (Afghanistan), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) (Iraq), European Union Naval Force Operation (EU NAVFOR) Atalanta (Somalia), and Operation Unified Protector (OUP) (Libya).
The concept of strategic culture is central to the analysis conducted in this book. As an academic concept it has been debated since the 1970s, but more recently it has attracted the attention of a number of scholars who debate its usefulness for studying actor identities and behaviour in security and defence. We rely on the concept of strategic culture to outline an analytical framework. In our conception, strategic culture represents the normative and institutional setting within which political decisions are shaped, made, and justified. More specifically, it consists of the normative and regulatory framework that enables some decisions but at the same time restrains other decisions with regard to participation in international military operations. The analytical focus in this book, therefore, revolves around the normative and regulatory frameworks for each country, including the decision-making process and the relationship between the political and military strategic levels. We study both political decision-making and the involvement of the armed forces in decision-making. As a result, this book shows how strategic culture affects participation and non-participation in different operations for each country studied.
Each country is considered in a separate chapter and for each we ask what the strategic culture (the normative and regulative frameworks) looks like. Similarly, for each operation studied we ask how participation or non-participation has been justified. We also examine the types of capacity the states commit to the territories where they deploy. The concluding chapter, as part of the comparative analysis, softens the otherwise dichotomous relationship between participation and non-participation by discussing attitudes towards participation and the different ways in which states can participate in international operations. The comparative analysis undertaken in the final chapter aims to generate general discussion and draw theoretically inferred conclusions about why European countries participate or do not participate in international military operations.
European states face several challenges with respect to international military operations that could arise in the future. One challenge is mission fatigue after the exhaustive missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes called ‘the Iraq syndrome’ (Egnell 2013, pp. 222–3). This is observed not only in reduced political interest to deploy troops, but also in weak domestic opinions in favour of military operations abroad. In 2014, for example, only 43 % of Europeans believed that NATO should be engaged in military operations outside the USA and Europe. There were, however, significant variations within Europe: 55 % of the French thought NATO should be engaged outside the USA and Europe, whereas 69 % of Greeks, 63 % of Germans, and 59 % of Italians thought NATO should not be engaged in such operations. In Poland 43 % were in favour and 42 % against, and in the UK 49 % were in favour and 42 % were against (German Marshall Fund 2015).
There are reasons to believe that public hesitancy towards international military operations is not specifically tied to NATO, but rather conforms to a general trend. One example of such hesitancy was the British failure to pass a parliamentary vote in favour of intervention in Syria in the autumn of 2013, even though in the UK parliamentary control of international operations was previously seen to be amongst the weakest in Europe (Matlary 2009, p. 159). Countries also face challenges because of the financial constraints brought about by the ‘age of austerity’ (Valasek 2011); economic constraints have thus turned into a legitimate part of the discussion of security and defence policies in some countries (examples from this book are Greece, Poland, and the UK). A third challenge is divergent or contested threat perceptions, where common action is hampered due to the variation in threat assessments. Despite these challenges, international military operations do take place, and the results presented in this book help to explain why.
Given our double focus on the political and military levels, a substantive contribution to this study is the incorporation of the concept of civil–military relations as an aspect of strategic culture. Such an approach was suggested by Snyder (1977), but to our knowledge it has not been common in studies about strategic culture that have followed since. According to Huntington’s (arguably the most important writer on civil–military relations) analysis, the idea is not far-fetched: “civil-military relations is the principal institutional component of military security policy”, which he treats as an aspect of national security policy (1957, p. 1). While Huntington did not specifically discuss participation in international military operations, he did closely study the use of military force. He further emphasised that “the nature of the decisions on these issues [including the use of military force] is determined by the institutional pattern through which the decisions are made” (1957, p. 2), which necessarily includes civil–military relations.
Another aspect of strategic culture which is discussed in this book is the role of the executive and its strength relative to the parliament in decisions to use force, which varies between democracies in Western Europe (Wagner 2006), as well as the elaboration of the decision-making process and the number of actors involved in that process.
This introductory chapter situates the book in relation to the literature on strategic culture and international operations. It outlines the theoretical foundations for the concept of strategic culture and how we have arrived at our definition of the concept. Furthermore, we present our operationalisation of normative and regulative frameworks for participation in international operations, i.e. what we have looked for when studying different countries’ strategic cultures. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodological aspects and a brief overview of the four different military operations studied in this book.
The Concept of Strategic Culture and International Military Operations
To begin, we must explain how we have arrived at our definition of strategic culture as the normative and regulatory frameworks that enable some decisions, but at the same time restrain other decisions with regard to participation in international military operations. This conceptualisation of strategic culture is narrower than the definitions that have previously been used in the literature. As a scholarly concept, strategic culture has evolved since the 1970s (some authors even claim that it has its roots in research from the 1940s), when US and Soviet nuclear strategies were studied by Snyder (Snyder 1977; Schmit and Zyla 2011). Since then, the concept has been used in different ways, resulting in a scholarly debate about how it should be defined and studied—specifically, what kind of variable it is. The debate can be categorised into three generations (or waves) (Johnston 1995); the different generations have been summarised by a number scholars (e.g. Glenn et al. 2004; Lock 2010; Schmit and Zyla 2011; Bloomfield 2012; Biehl et al. 2013). In general, these generations have all dealt with the issues of how to define strategic culture, what kind of variable it is, if there is a causal relationship between strategic culture and behaviour (which is related to what kind of variable it is—is it an independent variable, and if so, does it have a causal relationship to behaviour?), and what should the study of strategic culture entail. All these aspects of the different generations will be discussed below and then related to our own definition of strategic culture.
The idea of the first generation was to challenge other dominant theories of the time such as neorealism, which emphasised actor rationality (Glenn et al. 2004; Biehl et al. 2013). Snyder (1977) defined strategic culture as “the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behaviour that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy” (p. 8). As outlined by Snyder, individuals are socialised into a strategic culture. In this way, the first generation students of strategic culture saw it as a “context for understanding, rather than explanatory causality for behaviour” (Gray 1999, p. 49). Gray therefore questioned whether strategic culture could be a causal variable, contending that, as part of the context, it transcends both cause and effect. In his view it is simply not possible to treat strategic culture as an independent variable that can be used to falsify a theory; it would be the same as viewing people as having separable bodies and minds because strategic culture is a part of both humans and their behaviour, and institutions.
When studying Soviet strategic culture, Snyder looked at the strategic situation, the historical legacy, and the role of the Soviet armed forces in the policy process. With regard to nuclear strategy, Snyder concluded that the strategic positions of the USA and the USSR were different due to their different geographic positions in relation to Europe. From the US point of view, the use of nuclear capacities as deterrent risked invoking a general nuclear war that would destroy the countries it was set out to defend. This meant that the USA had to strategise the limited use of nuclear weapons, which the Soviets never needed to do; from the Soviet point of view, nuclear war would not be limited, which meant that they never needed to develop a doctrine for restricted nuclear war (Snyder 1977, p. 23). The historical legacy of the USSR pointed out by Snyder is also related to geography in that it meant that the country had experience of war on its territory, which again made it different from the USA (p. 28). With regard to the role of the military in the Soviet policy process, Snyder stated that “[t]he Soviet strategic culture has been heavily influenced by the willingness of the military to seek a dominant position in the promulgation of strategic doctrine and a significant voice in decisions on force posture” (1977, p. 29). The military’s tactics to achieve this (and success in doing so) have differed depending on who the political leader has been; but over time the military became important in the formulation of strategic doctrine and policy.
One author whose work has been labelled as belonging to the second generation of strategic culture studies is Klein (1988), who stated that “[s]trategic culture refers to the way in which a modern hegemonic state relies upon internationally deployed force” (p. 136). Therefore, strategic culture “involves widely available orientations to violence and to the ways in which the state can legitimately use violence against putative enemies” (p. 136). An important aspect here is the way in which violence is legitimised. According to Klein, the study of strategic culture is the study of “the cultural hegemony of organised state violence” (p. 136) but he also claims that “hegemony concerns the production of legitimacy”. This means that an important role of strategic culture is to legitimise policy. At the same time, Klein makes a distinction between what is said—the declaratory policy, and what is done—the operational action policy (p. 138). According to Klein, strategic culture then refers to the declaratory policy—what can be said. In this way strategic culture itself embeds constraints on policies; Klein criticised realists because they saw these constraints as the realities of international relations. Klein thus questions the causal link between strategic culture and behaviour because strategic culture only encompasses the declaratory policy, not the operational action policy. Researchers can then study both the declaratory policy which legitimises military activities, and the operational action policy. Klein, as did Snyder, studied strategic culture in relation to policy on nuclear deterrence, but, as shown above, he also discussed the role of strategic culture on the more general use of international force.
The third generation conceptualised strategic culture as “an independent or intervening variable affecting state behaviour” (Schmidt and Zyla 2011, p. 486). ...
