Strategic culture, securitisation and the use of force: post-9/11 security practices of liberal democracies

This book proposes a new theoretical framework which combines the concept of strategic culture with the concept of securitisation.

In doing so, it places strategic culture as a contextual factor in relation to other material and institutional contextual factors and spells out how these factors impact on a democratic state's decisions on the use of force against existential threats interacts with the role of decision-makers' particular language employed to justify their actions. Extant literature describes this role through the concept of securitisation. This new theoretical model therefore allows for an assessment of the role and relevance of strategic culture vis-à-vis institutions, material capabilities and more circumstantial factors related to the agency of decisions on the use of force by the state.

On this theoretical basis, the book argues that even though the political elites of liberal states enjoy a high degree of autonomy in decisions on the use of force, their actions nonetheless largely follow idiosyncratic patterns pertaining to a state's particular identity conceptions, both in its internal and its international security practices. Despite globalisation, European integration and the internationalisation of security challenges across liberal democracies, identity-derived national strategic cultures dominate security policy decisions time and again. These differences in behaviour cut across the similarities between France, Germany and the UK as well as between Australia and Canada in their size and power capabilities, their regime type, and their alliances. But they are relatively coherent as regards domestic and international security policy domains. This prompts the book's overarching research question: Why have liberal states reacted with different levels in the use of force to the security challenges that emerged in the wake of 9/11?

To address this question, the book examines the three most important security policy decisions of the two-year post-9/11 time period: the war against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere, domestic anti-terrorism measures and the war against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The book analyses strategic cultures, securitisation processes and other state attributes through a wide variety of sources, including public opinion polls, elite discourse, media coverage, and the scholarly literature. In this way, the book spells out that to a large degree, the differences in post-9/11 state practice regarding the use of force by democratic states reflect the strong role and relevance of distinct and persistent strategic cultures. This concerns not only their use of military force internationally but also policies to combat terrorism domestically.

This book will be of much interest to students of strategic culture, securitisation, European politics, security studies and IR in general.