Can You Get There from Here? Difficulties in Generating EU Strategic Culture

Despite conceptual and methodological ambiguities, strategic culture has become a useful notion in international politics. An extension of this is the emergence of debates concerning the EU’s endeavors to cultivate a strategic culture at a supranational level. The EU has functioned as a constructivist laboratory insofar as its integration has been synonymous with the formation of institutional identity and decision-making processes that are building blocks of strategic culture. Employing the definition of strategic culture as the interplay of discourse and practice arrived at through an elite-negotiated reality, we undertake a document analysis that addresses an often neglected issue: what are some of the mechanisms that have led EU strategic culture to advance or stagnate? Beyond simple constructivist accounts, we investigate EU strategic culture formation through lessons gleaned from political and organizational/institutional psychology’s understanding of how biased reasoning affects decision-making. We claim that groupthink bias and other biases within the decision-making apparatuses of EU institutions have shaped EU strategic culture formation. This approach enables us to better understand the specific nature of the EU’s efforts to solidify its strategic culture, as well as the prospects for the EU to coherently execute grand strategy addressing challenges in the EU neighborhood and the Indo-Pacific.