What good is strategic culture?

What good is strategic culture?: A modest defence of an immodest concept

Haglund, David G. International Journal59.3 (Summer 2004): 479-502

 Abstrak (ringkasan)

Abstrak

Be that as it may, the debate between enthusiasts of Verstehen and advocates of Erklaren is an old one in the history of ideas, with echoes going back far longer than a century, and detectable even today in the manner in which the concept, strategic culture, gets used. Erklaren is associated with a Galilean approach to causal explanation in science (as in, "this took place because that did"), while Verstehen makes appeal to an Aristotelian approach, stressing teleological accounts (as in, "this happened so that that should occur"). But it was only in the late nineteenth century that the social sciences experienced their own "great awakening," with the emergence of a "positivism" displaying clear affinities to the Galilean tradition. Opposed to this would surface an antipositivism, a philosophy of science at times labelled "idealism," but one that would be better remembered as "hermeneutics." It was the German philosopher Johann Gustav Droysen who coined the distinction between Verstehen and Erklaren, with the former being said (by him) to be the method of the historical sciences, and the latter that of the natural sciences.(27)

By the very same token, [Colin S. Gray] is right to object to the dismissal of realists as "acultural, ahistorical" automatons. It is ironic enough to find constructivist tents pitched inside positivist epistemological campgrounds; even more ironic is the discovery of realists grazing in the pastures of interpretivism. For what else can this variety of realist be said to be doing when state action is ascribed to endogenous, identity-derived categories, rather than deduced from assessments of a systemic structure revealed through relative capability? Adrian Hyde-Price and Lisbeth Aggestam are on the mark when they note that realists of a non-structural kidney have been enjoying "a renewed burst of life, particularly as the limitations of Waltzian parsimony become ever clearer."(38) Some have seen fit to label this more reflective theoretical orientation "neoclassical" realism.(39) It is usually a bad idea to attach the prefix "neo-" to otherwise serviceable concepts, as witnessed by the tortured semantic career of "neorealism," which not only never was required as a means of conveying the meaning amply supplied by "structural" realism, but which completely reversed the original sense some did propose to attach to the "neorealism" that first appeared on the scene in the early 1980s, as an inventory of the accoutrements of sound policy in an era of "complex interdependence"--i.e., an inventory that denied the utility of an aggregate construe of power!(40)

It is, of course, one thing to invoke path dependence as the mechanism by which history can be said to continue to matter in the shaping of foreign (including security) policy, for instance in the general, and common-sensical, observation that choices made long in the past can go on limiting policy options in the future.(47) Yet it is quite another thing actually to tease out, or "trace,"(48) the process(es) by which path dependence manages to yield the context called strategic culture. Strategic culturalists exploring the behavioural component of context will find themselves being drawn ever closer to historical sociology, and will as a result have to come to grips with concepts closely related to path dependence. Among these latter, two stand out: temporal sequencing, and contingency. For path dependence cannot mean sensitive dependence upon "initial conditions;" rather, it must suggest a break point after which the ability of those initial conditions to shape the future altered substantially.(49) Some will label that break point "contingency," by which they will mean the development required to have set in train a new inertia, one in which the "path" led either to the efficient reproduction of cooperation (sometimes called "self-reinforcing sequences") or the reverse, the efficient reproduction of conflict and discord (called "reactive sequences").(50) Which it is to be, and why, can be expected to provide work for strategic culturalists who take their concept to mean the "context" revealed by behaviour, and who understand strategic culture as virtually indistinguishable from a country's historical record.

INTRODUCTION

Oscar Wilde famously referred to fox-hunting as the "unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible." With apologies to Wilde, those of us bounding off over conceptual hedges in quest of strategic culture might be called the unintelligible in pursuit of the incomprehensible. For no matter how achingly compelling is the need to render our concepts sharp "tools" for analysis, we unfailingly get entangled in constant wrangling over their very definition, with the result being that the passage of time often results in spreading confusion instead of enlightenment. This is so, notwithstanding the expressed hope of many that the same passage of time might reasonably be expected to generate a "literature" capable of penetrating and dispelling the conceptual fog, by speaking definitional truth to us.

But if the literature on strategic culture is to resemble that on every other political concept, it will be apparent that not only is the body of writing on our topic often bereft of literary merit, but it will inevitably produce noteworthy, unavoidable, and ongoing dissension in the analytical ranks: truths perhaps, when taken singly and contemplatively, but no overarching truth. Still, our failure to come to agreement over the term's meaning and applicability should be neither surprising nor particularly discouraging; it simply illustrates we are dealing with an interesting concept that, as with all such concepts, can be used to advantage if used carefully.

Strategic culture might not be a metaconcept in the way, say, that "power" is, but there is utility in the comparison. Consider that power is supposed to be one of the key notions at our disposal when we wax theoretical about international relations and foreign policy, and yet what strikes the student of power analysisis how much basic disagreement there can be over this word's meaning. If power is nothing other than aggregate capability, as many structural realists insist it is,(1) then certain claims about the "structure" of the international system (and mutatis mutandis, as we shall see below, strategic culture) become possible to make. Among the most important such claims is the one that enables us to discern a systemic pecking order predicated upon "relative capability," so that we are enabled to develop such other important concepts as unipolarity, bipolarity, or multipolarity in a bid to describe and comprehend that system. But if you follow the injunction of others, and regard power as simply another way of saying "influence," then all descriptive bets are off, and theories about how and why states act become increasingly complicated, because dependent upon a myriad of situationally specific contexts.(2)

The point is not that there is something abnormal about the way the debate rages over the mega-concept, power; to the contrary, the debate is completely normal, and indeed, necessary, for unless there is healthy and substantial scholarly divisiveness about concepts, there can be no advance of theoretical knowledge in social science.(3) And while it is perhaps possible to imagine consensual understanding enveloping some political concepts, the cases when such occurs must be rare, and a concept about which we can say there exists basal agreement is probably not a very important tool for anyone's use.

Thus, if strategic culture is to follow the normal trajectory of political concepts (and here we should note it isstill in its relative infancy, having been apparently first employed under that name only in the late 1970s),(4) then we can expect not only that debates about its meaning will be ceaseless, but that it will be prone, as are all concepts, to expansion. Churchill's quip about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the rest serves as a useful reminder about how unexceptional conceptual discord really is. And no less exceptional, even though one might wish it to be otherwise, is conceptual expansion.(5) This is so not only because of the very ambiguity of the concepts we deploy (no mean consideration in itself), but also because of the impact of changing conditions on the words we use to describe and understand the conditions. One political philosopher, T. D. Weldon, insists that because circumstances change, we must continually adjust the manner in which we express them. The adjustment can take two forms: we can either invent a new concept, or we can expand a familiar word or concept. "Usually," says Weldon, "the second method is preferred, partly because it avoids more confusion than it creates, indeed it seldom confuses anybody but political philosophers, and partly because the extended use has often come to be adopted uncritically in the natural course of events."(6)

Actually, our concept may just be in the early stages of expansion, given its relative youth, but its two "parent" elements are considerably older, and have probably spent more time than was good for them on the stretching rack. Thus, its nominal infancy to the contrary notwithstanding, strategic culture comes to us with a family history of conceptual confusion, one that has left its mark.

TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF STRATEGIC CULTURE?

Ample foretaste of the debate about what strategic culture is to signify has been provided by earlier discussions over "culture" as a social variable, for as Raymond Williams has noted, the word ranks as one of the two or three most difficult in the English language (and he could have added, in any other language).(7) If things were not murky enough as a result of the nominative half of our concept, what shall we say of its modifier, "strategic"? Put this adjective and this noun together, and you get a sense of why Alastair Iain Johnston should have complained about how "remarkably undefined" is our concept.(8)

How could it be otherwise, in view of the parental elements' own definitional promiscuity? Let us take the modifier, strategic, for starters, as it is probably the less unruly parent. Although many seem to think that the root formation of strategic, "strategy," must be about things martial--and by extension, so too must strategicculture(9)--this does not have to be the case. Strategy can be about military matters, and often is, but those who insist it must always be called to the colours do it, and us, a disservice. The term actually connotes much more: used most commonly (as in the "strategic planning" that is all the rage in academic--and other--administrative circles these days) it simply seeks to establish a "rational" link between ends and means. Thinking or acting strategically stands for the attempt to correlate, in a manner that can pass basic cost-benefit muster, your goals with the resources at your disposal to meet those goals, and vice versa. As John Lewis Gaddis explains, "by 'strategy,' I mean quite simply the process by which ends are related to means, intentions to capabilities, objectives to resources."(10)

Things begin to get more complex when we couple the adjective with its noun, for unless we know what ismeant by "culture," we are at a complete loss to determine its relationship to strategy. To be sure, culturehas become a very popular notion in the human (or social) sciences, never more so than over the past dozen or so years, for reasons I relate in the section that follows. It has been a decade since two sociologists told us that now that culture's ship had come in, the time was ripe for social scientists to do an "inventory of its cargo."(11) But before we could take a peek inside the cargo hold, we had first to locate its hatch, meaning that we needed to come to some understanding of the basic structure of this vessel called culture. This was all the more necessary because the concept's earlier career had been such as to lead to its being branded, with reason, a "semantic monstrosity."(12)

If it had stood for anything consistently since Giovanni Andres introduced it, back in 1781, under the name coltura (by which he meant to imply the conditions of human attainment preserved in writing), it was the notion of extension, or growth. And grow it did: in less than a century it was expanded from the written to all other forms of registering the achievements of humanity, so that the anthropologist, Edward B. Tylor, could conceive of it a seminal 1865 work as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."(13)

Culture did not only possess importance as a register of civilization's noblest accomplishments (its "high," or big-C, variant); it was also beginning to take on an epistemological function, helping those who engaged in studying collective life to develop ways of thinking about what was important in group cognition. An early discipline to feel the effects of culture's epistemological role would be history, where the "new history" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ("old," actually, from today's standpoint) stood out against dominant perspectives associated with Leopold von Ranke's "scientific" approach to history, and Edward Freeman's notion of history as merely being the record of "past politics."(14)

The old "new" history faced an uphill climb, especially in America in the first half of the twentieth century, where it seemed downright antediluvian to argue against a hard-headed economic interpretation of history propagated by the Progressive (or Wisconsin) school, for whom class interests provided the most elegant and satisfactory answer to the large questions about America's past. But after the Second World War, it became not just possible but well-nigh obligatory for American history and politics to be examined under a new, cultural, lamp--one that shone light into such heretofore underanalyzed collective categories as ethnicity and social-psychological propensities toward irrationality. And though it might not have been easy a half-century ago to identify what culture was, it was more than possible to signal two areas of enquiry that properly belonged to the new cultural history: ideas and ethnicity. Thus intellectual history and ethnocultural studies began to emerge as important subdisciplines in their own right, each subsumed under the broader, cultural, rubric.(15)

What was occurring in history was also taking place in most of the other human sciences, with anthropologists among the most noteworthy contributors. And if no one could define culture to everyone's satisfaction, the name of one anthropologist in particular would become a consensus repeater on most lists of authorial "must reads." This was Clifford Geertz, whose 1973 book, The Interpretation of Cultures, quickly established itself as the locus classicus in the field of cultural studies. What Geertz did was to propose that we regard culture as consisting in "socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do... things."(16)

Geertz's book, which has been adjudged "phenomenally influential,"(17) not only contributed to culture's growing popularity in social sciences outside of anthropology (with economics and psychology being notable holdouts), it also provided the opportunity for analysts of international security with a fascination for the emerging notion of strategic culture to contemplate actually defining their concept. For sure, definitional consensus would, in the nature of things, remain elusive, but some analysts began taking their cues from the cognitive instructions implicit in Geertz's work. More and more, and again following Geertz, culture was being conceived as a system of symbols by which collectivities transmit knowledge across time and space. As William Sewell put it, culture was nothing other than the "semiotic dimension of human social practice in general."(18)

It was this recognition of the symbolic content of culture that Alastair Iain Johnston seized upon in offering what is, to date, the most ambitious and sophisticated attempt at defining strategic culture. Its Geertzian pedigree is obvious, for as Johnston defines it, strategic culture consists in

an integrated system of symbols (i.e., argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors, etc.) that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting grand 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.(19)

Lest it be thought that his reference above to "military force" makes his construe a narrowly bounded one, Johnston goes on to stipulate that the "grand strategic preferences" at whose service strategic culture must be placed entail more than purely military considerations, and include all those economic and political, as well as military, aspects of national power that must be brought to bear upon the task of accomplishing "national goals."

It may not be particularly easy to put into application Johnston's definition of our concept (notwithstanding that it may be the most elegant one going); still, it is not so difficult to detect what he had in mind in choosing to argue that strategic culture deserves to be taken seriously. First on his target list are those who minimize, or dismiss outright, ideational factors when they theorize "explanatory" variables in international security. Most visible in his cross hairs is the group he calls the "neorealists," i.e., the structural realists who he says are oblivious of the role of culture and history when they conceive the basis of state action. There is clearly something to the allegation, and even if it was Kenneth Waltz who primarily served to inspire his critique, Johnston's admonition could apply equally well to Robert Kagan's recent invocation of strategic culture as a quintessentially "dependent variable" (my words, not Kagan's) in international security matters. To Kagan, strategic culture certainly may exist, but it stands for effect, not cause, being entirely explicable in terms of something else--relative capability. This accounts for America's being "from Mars" and quick to countenance martial solutions to security challenges, while Europe is (mainly) "from Venus," and reluctant to frame responses in the same way as its whilom friend across the Atlantic.(20)

The structural realists may be Johnston's principal objects of pursuit, but they are not his only quarry. He isalso concerned with improving upon the work of two prior "generations" of strategic culturalists. In particular, he chides a) the "first generation" of strategic culturalists, chiefly area-studies specialists of the Cold War period with an interest in the Soviet Union, for their indifference to specifying their variables, and b) the "second generation," Gramscians of the late Cold War/early post-Cold War period, for their laziness in tracing the manner in which they would link their causes and effects.(21)

In the end, and despite his criticism of "positivists," Johnston remains at one with them on the importance of establishing reliable causality, though he recognizes the complexity of the challenge. Accordingly, he makes a determined effort to demonstrate how it is that the past continues to influence contemporary strategic choices (in his case, Chinese), in such a way as to constrain, or bound, rationality in state decision-making.(22) The irony is that Johnston's methodological rigour aligns him with his principal theoretical foes, the structural realists, with whom he shares a conviction that a certain kind of causal "explanation" is possible and therefore desirable, and distances him from so many of those who have otherwise themselves taken the cultural "turn" in international security, and who see it as their primary task to "understand," not "explain," strategic reality in any reliably causal manner.

TURN, TURN, TURN: THE RE-EMERGENCE OF CULTURE IN SECURITY STUDIES

What has been called the cultural (also sociological, as well as historical) "turn" in the human sciences was primarily a result of forces internal to the various disciplines and fields of inquiry involved, and reflected nothing so much as the latest phase in a continuous agreement to disagree over the very purpose of those sciences. But in international security studies, there was also an important external stimulus at work, which did much to fortify the recent re-emergence of culture as a category of importance. In this section I address these two sources of change, starting with the explanation/understanding debate, which was itself a legacy of the earlier "turn" at the end of the nineteenth century that resulted in the "new" (i.e., old) cultural history--a turn that witnessed, and was a manifestation of, the emergence of the hermeneutical tradition associated with Wilhelm Dilthey, who had an enormous influence upon the thinking of Max Weber.(23)

When Alastair Iain Johnston criticized what he termed the first-generation's inability or unwillingness, or both, to distinguish between cause and effect, he touched an epistemological nerve. Colin Gray's rebuttal of the charge constituted something of a tu quoque, for Gray presumed to tar Johnston with the same "positivist" allegation Johnston had brought to bear against those "ahistorical, aculturalist" structuralists who had spurred him to action. Gray's rejoinder made two significant points: 1) not all realists (in whose ranks Gray included himself) were ahistorical or aculturalist; and 2) it was wrong to assume that strategic culture could be a causal variable, the best that could be hoped for being to regard it as "context," a category transcending both cause and effect. Gray essayed his own concise definition of the concept: "Strategic culture is the world of mind, feeling, and habit in behaviour."(24)

In his response to Johnston, Gray staked out his own position on the explanation/understanding debate, one that put him close to the interpretivist side of the house and at some philosophical distance from the alleged "positivism" of his fellow-travelling realists. (Not only this, but Gray, who had developed a reputation during the Cold War as an anti-Soviet hawk, also found reason to heap praise upon the leading Marxian scholar ofculture, Raymond Williams!) Ultimately, however, there remained an ineradicable Forrest Gump aspect to Gray's use of strategic culture as context rather than causality, his insistence that "culture is as culture does"(25) sounding more than vaguely reminiscent of Tom Hanks's film recitation, "stupid is as stupid does."

Perhaps strategic-culture-as-context underspecifies too much, but there really need be nothing stupid about denying that the search for reliable causality must be the sine qua non of social science, nor can the rejection of such causality be taken to be synonymous with the rejection of theory; indeed, what Gray was chiefly articulating was a case for an hermeneutical approach to strategic culture. In so doing, he made explicit appeal to the contributions of two theorists of international relations, Martin Hollis and Steve Smith. (In the event, he would have been better off relying upon only half of the tandem, as the two authors end up on different pages when it comes to assessing the relative merits of a Weberian Verstehen, whose earmark is the attempt to understand action from the perspective of the intentional actor, and a more structural Erklaren, predicated upon the kind of causal explanations from without that one finds--or expects to find--in the natural sciences; Hollis plumps for the former, Smith for the latter.)(26)

Be that as it may, the debate between enthusiasts of Verstehen and advocates of Erklaren is an old one in the history of ideas, with echoes going back far longer than a century, and detectable even today in the manner in which the concept, strategic culture, gets used. Erklaren is associated with a Galilean approach to causal explanation in science (as in, "this took place because that did"), while Verstehen makes appeal to an Aristotelian approach, stressing teleological accounts (as in, "this happened so that that should occur"). But it was only in the late nineteenth century that the social sciences experienced their own "great awakening," with the emergence of a "positivism" displaying clear affinities to the Galilean tradition. Opposed to this would surface an antipositivism, a philosophy of science at times labelled "idealism," but one that would be better remembered as "hermeneutics." It was the German philosopher Johann Gustav Droysen who coined the distinction between Verstehen and Erklaren, with the former being said (by him) to be the method of the historical sciences, and the latter that of the natural sciences.(27)

The battle begun a century ago continues today, and the Johnston-Gray tussle over the definition of strategicculture reflects a more general split among social scientists, who cannot seem to decide whether they should follow Emile Durkheim down the path of positivism, or Max Weber along the road to interpretivism. This debate has possibly outlived its usefulness, as more than one philosopher of science is prepared to tell you that the distinction between explanation and understanding can be overdrawn, and perhaps should be laid to rest, in favour of agreement that what we are really trying to generate, or must at least content ourselves with, issome modicum of "explicative understanding."(28) If this is so, then both Durkheim and Weber are after the same thing, and the path of positivism turns out to be a wide one, indeed.

In the two sections that follow, I am going to advert to this debate in illustrating what I take to be the two principal ways in which strategic culture might be invoked in the analysis of foreign policy. But in what remains of this section, I wish to turn to the other relevant feature of the recent cultural turn in international security, namely the structural earthquake set off by the ending of the Cold War, disappearance of the Soviet Union, and collapse of the bipolar era.

The ending of bipolarity obviously made life more complicated for those who had assimilated what Kenneth Waltz had to say about the basic stability of bipolarity.(29) Not that everyone was in agreement with Waltz during the Cold War, not even all realists,(30) but at least there was for a time a certain descriptive merit in taking as seriously as Waltz did the implications of the bipolar world--implications that ceased to be worth thinking about once their structural precondition disappeared. Many assumed that the (temporary?) derailing of structural realism a la Waltz meant the end of realist hegemony in international relations theory, hence the emphasis upon the "turn" the discipline was ostensibly in the process of making, away from realism and toward some other body of theory, constructivism to be precise.

So the turn was argued to be very much a "constructivist" one, in which "cultural" variables were going increasingly to make themselves felt in states' decision-making, post-bipolarity. And with culture's appearance as a variable to reckon with came another concept that was bound to be important: "identity."(31) This latter concept would be elevated to a central position in constructivist accounts of international outcomes, occupying for these theorists a position as central as that held by "power" for a certain kind of realist theoretician; identity would be the core organizing concept for realism's challenger, structuring cognition and prefiguring "interests."(32) If some might have raised the quibble that this new core concept was itself riddled with ambiguity,(33) the rejoinder came quickly that power's ambiguity had never stopped structural realists from placing it upon their theoretical pedestal.

Lost sight of as a result of the brouhaha attending the constructivist challenge to realist primacy were three matters that would have implications for the way in which we might employ strategic culture. First, culture was not a particularly novel variable in international security. Secondly, not all constructivists could be said to be antipositivists. And thirdly, not all realists could be accused of being "aculturalists."

Regarding the first of these matters, it cannot even be said that strategic culture, albeit under some other label, had been unexplored theoretically prior to the decade in which it received its name, that of the 1970s. We can accept that culture and conflict have been intermeshed for as long as there has been strife among social groupings, but the systematic, scientific, study of the relationship between culture and conflict really began to take off during the Second World War, stimulated by funding provided by an American government eager to acquire operational insight into the national (strategic-cultural) "character" of its German and Japanese enemies. To this end, theory was essential. Johnston's three generations might be accurately enumerated insofar as concerns discussions of strategic culturalists so named, but it is apparent, as Michael Desch has shown, that there was at least one significant previous generation of "culturalists" who sought to demonstrate how and to what effect culture and strategic outcomes could be interrelated. Like Moliere's M. Jourdain, this generation was speaking prose--the prose of strategic culture--without realizing it. Thus, the real first-generationers in the field of security studies were those cultural anthropologists motivated in the 1940s to demonstrate how "national character" had an impact upon a state's development of strategic will.(34)

Desch's other two generational cohorts, the second and third, correspond roughly to Johnston's first and third generations, and what is particularly worthy of note is Desch's contention that what he calls the third (i.e., post-Cold War) generation is, by dint of the emphasis it places upon "ideational" variables, less attached to positivist approaches to the study of security than are competing paradigms within the field, such as realism. However, if what Desch intends to demonstrate is that realism "explains" strategic outcomes better than cultural accounts, then it must be because of something other than realism's positivist epistemology (if it indeed has such an epistemology). What I think Desch really meant to suggest is that structural realist, and not all realist, accounts trump culturalist ones, with the latter able, at best, to supplement realism: "In short, the new strategic culturalist theories will not supplant realist theories in national security studies because, by themselves, they have very limited explanatory power."(35)

Two things need to be said about this. First, it simply is not correct to argue that constructivist accounts that elevate ideational factors to the role of "explanatory" (or "independent") variables must be antipositivist. Not all constructivists deserve to be placed outside the positivist pale, even if they might themselves insist upon the relegation. What is at issue here, and was demonstrated by the rejoinders Desch's article attracted,(36)is not necessarily whether causal "explanation" is desirable (or possible), but rather what sorts of explanation have greater persuasiveness, those derived from assessments of relative capability, or those embedded in national and international norms and discourses? While it would be wrong to argue all constructivists are positivists, it is equally fallacious to claim none (or at most, only a few) are.

At the very least, those constructivists who insist upon the autonomous, causal, prowess of ideas and discourse can be taken as positivists even within a restrictive understanding of positivism that emphasizes a nomothetic, or "covering-law" conception of explanation. But if David Dessler is to be believed, the positivist strain in constructivism extends more broadly, including those favouring, as did Weber, a "particularistic" and narrative-dependent rendering of causation. Whether we are prepared to include even Weber in the ranks of the positivists (a companionship that would have surprised him probably as much as Durkheim), it still can be said that constructivism per se need not be antithetical to the quest for reliable causality.(37)

By the very same token, Colin Gray is right to object to the dismissal of realists as "acultural, ahistorical" automatons. It is ironic enough to find constructivist tents pitched inside positivist epistemological campgrounds; even more ironic is the discovery of realists grazing in the pastures of interpretivism. For what else can this variety of realist be said to be doing when state action is ascribed to endogenous, identity-derived categories, rather than deduced from assessments of a systemic structure revealed through relative capability? Adrian Hyde-Price and Lisbeth Aggestam are on the mark when they note that realists of a non-structural kidney have been enjoying "a renewed burst of life, particularly as the limitations of Waltzian parsimony become ever clearer."(38) Some have seen fit to label this more reflective theoretical orientation "neoclassical" realism.(39) It is usually a bad idea to attach the prefix "neo-" to otherwise serviceable concepts, as witnessed by the tortured semantic career of "neorealism," which not only never was required as a means of conveying the meaning amply supplied by "structural" realism, but which completely reversed the original sense some did propose to attach to the "neorealism" that first appeared on the scene in the early 1980s, as an inventory of the accoutrements of sound policy in an era of "complex interdependence"--i.e., an inventory that denied the utility of an aggregate construe of power!(40)

STRATEGIC CULTURE AS CONTEXT: HISTORY, IDENTITY, CHARACTER

Whether the above-mentioned variant of realism actually requires being called "neoclassical" need not distract us from pondering how the relative demise of structuralism should have stimulated a resurgence of interesting work on the part of traditional (or "classical") realists. This is not to say that constructivists were themselves absent from the renewal process; quite the contrary, it is simply to claim that they did not own the process, and to remark on a (generally unappreciated) synthesis of constructivism and classicalism.(41) And if Gideon Rose might be scolded for abetting the neologists, he certainly deserves praise for drawing to our attention the preferred methodology of this genre of non-structural realists, who he instructs us place a premium upon "theoretically informed narratives, ideally supplemented by explicit counterfactual analysis, that trace the ways different factors combine to yield particular foreign policies."(42)

Here is a clue to the first of two ways in which strategic culture conceived as context can be put to work. What culture-as-context analysts seek to do is explicate foreign policies in terms either of 1) how particular states have acted in the past (i.e., their previous behaviour is argued to have great bearing on their current and future options), or 2) how states are thought by their own and other peoples as being likely to act based on the "way they are" (i.e., their identity, or character, is said to predispose them toward certain policies). Analysts who employ strategic culture as a means of accounting for behaviour's impact often turn to historical sociology for guidance; those who prefer to put the emphasis upon conceptions attending identity also avail themselves of approaches with a long-established pedigree, subsumed under the rubric national character. If both approaches are similar in dating from the first half of the twentieth century, a difference worth noting isthat historical sociology has regained scholarly respectability after having been for some years in eclipse,(43) while national character studies, under that name, remain controversial, though when repackaged under the label "national identity" they not only become respectable, they become the vogue.(44)

Whatever else might divide them, strategic culturalists are dissatisfied with structuralist accounts of foreign policy choice; they may or may not be in agreement as to the attainability of reliable causality, but they do accept that cultural context, and therefore history, should "matter." How history should matter, no one can say exactly, but many analysts have been turning to narrative to supply explicative energy.(45) Their turn to narrative has led them to focus on the process (or phenomenon) known as "path dependence." Path dependence, as Paul Pierson observes, stands in contradistinction to certain assumptions of rational-choice theory that claim "large" causes should result in "large" outcomes.(46) As such, path dependence will have an ever-more congenial ring in the ears of some strategic culturalists, whose anti-structuralist epistemology, coupled with their conviction that patterns of behaviour are "culturally" significant variables, will entice them to search for the cultural origins and character of path-dependent foreign policy choices.

It is, of course, one thing to invoke path dependence as the mechanism by which history can be said to continue to matter in the shaping of foreign (including security) policy, for instance in the general, and common-sensical, observation that choices made long in the past can go on limiting policy options in the future.(47) Yet it is quite another thing actually to tease out, or "trace,"(48) the process(es) by which path dependence manages to yield the context called strategic culture. Strategic culturalists exploring the behavioural component of context will find themselves being drawn ever closer to historical sociology, and will as a result have to come to grips with concepts closely related to path dependence. Among these latter, two stand out: temporal sequencing, and contingency. For path dependence cannot mean sensitive dependence upon "initial conditions;" rather, it must suggest a break point after which the ability of those initial conditions to shape the future altered substantially.(49) Some will label that break point "contingency," by which they will mean the development required to have set in train a new inertia, one in which the "path" led either to the efficient reproduction of cooperation (sometimes called "self-reinforcing sequences") or the reverse, the efficient reproduction of conflict and discord (called "reactive sequences").(50) Which it is to be, and why, can be expected to provide work for strategic culturalists who take their concept to mean the "context" revealed by behaviour, and who understand strategic culture as virtually indistinguishable from a country's historical record.

But as I said above, other strategic culturalists have taken contextual clues from elsewhere, and have not relied upon the behavioural record as evidenced in history. Not that they hold the past per se to be without instruction; rather they prefer to delve into "national character" as the source of whatever is deemed to be cultural in foreign policy. But they usually do not identify the object of their intellectual curiosity by that name. So what do they call it? In a word, "identity," a category that is held by constructivist and classical realist alike to endow meaning to "interest"--including and especially the "national interest." To be sure, there is nothing about identity that requires that its group, or societal, referent be the state or nation; collective identity accounts of international security phenomena are certainly not rare, or insignificant, and they might feature, inter alia, such transnational variables as religion or liberal-democracy, to take two common referents. But when it comes to the strategic culture of any particular country, the group referent reduces to the state or nation, and even to subnational identity groupings.(51)

Interestingly, for all the attention accorded these days to identity, even and especially the "national" variant thereof, there is a marked reluctance of scholars openly to embrace the erstwhile concept of "national character," held by some to be a retrogressive notion that smacks of "essentialist," or "primordialist" categories.(52) If what is being alleged is that national character has been found guilty by prior association with "hereditarian" or racist assumptions about international relations, then one can easily see why it should have fallen out of favour; but if it is being avoided in name (though not in practice) because it is, as are most political concepts, ambiguous and even self-contradictory, then the shunning becomes less easy to justify, given the generic problems associated with political concepts, and especially given that national character's replacement by national identity merely substitutes one essentially contested category for another, in the process violating Ockham's razor.(53)

It can come as no surprise that even those social scientists who continue to employ the concept by its name disagree over its definition. Indeed, some will willingly concede that it resists defining--but is nevertheless too important to discard! One such scholar is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for whom national character raises important questions about the ability of America's creedal (constitutional) identity to withstand the challenge of a contemporary ethnic politics subsumed under the name "multiculturalism."(54) Although Schlesinger's pessimism on this score may not be justified, he is certainly correct in noting the important part played by ethnicity in discussions about national character. What this implies for analysts who interpret strategic cultureas context is, or should be, apparent: the impact of ethnicity as a conditioning element in foreign policy makingis a worthy object for their scholarly attentions. They might not think of themselves in this connection, but analysts who attempt to come to grips with the impact of ethnic diasporas in liberal-pluralist (or other kinds of) societies can be said to be working in the field of strategic culture.(55)

Attempts to assess the impact of a country's ethnic mix on its grand strategy do not exhaust the category of national character, of course. A major alternative manner in which the category is applied relates to the social-psychological variable known as "modal personality." Unlike ethnicity-based approaches to national character, studies that rely upon modal personality (i.e., a statistical notion for expressing personalities that appear with great frequency among members of a particular society) concentrate upon three major sources of evidence of a national character: personality assessments of individuals, psychological analyses of collective adult phenomena, and psychological assessments of child-rearing practices.(56)

Then there are, of course, those "non-ethnic" attributes of identity/character that can and do attest to how countries see themselves and others, and as I argue below, these too form part of the strategic-cultural approach to foreign policy, for they go to the very means by which collective cognition is enshrined and transmitted.

STRATEGIC CULTURE AS COGNITION: SYMBOLISM, MYTH, METAPHOR

There are enough similarities between strategic culture as context and strategic culture as cognition for anyone to make too big a fuss about their analytical separability; nevertheless, there is at least one difference worth noting, and it speaks to the very core of the explicative enterprise. Recall the thrust of Johnston's criticism of Gray, namely that his use of strategic culture was hopelessly muddled, as it so blurred the distinction between independent and dependent variables as to eliminate any prospect of strategic culturebeing of anyone's use in trying to sort cause from effect. I have hinted that this criticism has merit only to the extent one is committed to the notion of reliable causality; the more Laodicean the analyst is regarding the attainability of reliable causality, the less problematical becomes strategic culture as context. After all, and heretical though it might sound to some, if taxonomy and the kind of systematic understanding conveyed through interpretation are themselves part of the explicative enterprise, then even culture as context can serve us profitably, by helping us see things in foreign policy we might otherwise have missed.

Some are unhappy with this thought, which seems to them to be defeatist, going as it does against the grain of aspiring to the kind of knowledge that presumably can only be ours if we distinguish our "variables" in a credible manner. And it is in this respect that the second major category of strategic culture comes into play. Itis no coincidence that the causal ambitiousness of Alistair Iain Johnston should have led him to a Geertzian approach to his topic (even though many will tell you, perhaps wrongly, that Geertz himself was agnostic on the issue of reliable causality).(57) But it is not just, or even perhaps chiefly, to Geertz that Johnston isindebted, for his approach to the subdisciplinary derivative, strategic culture, puts it squarely into alignment with an earlier tradition that had arisen in the main body of the discipline of political science, the tradition of "political culture," which we are about to see has remarkable affinities with our category in this section, strategic culture as cognition.

If the basic problem with culture as context is definitional fuzziness, culture as cognition holds out the promise of definitional clarity. Once the definition has been sufficiently "precised," why not envision using it as an independent variable? And what could be better than "political culture" to blaze the trail for strategicculture, for did not the career of the former concept demonstrate that it slew the very same definitional dragon whose breath has been heating up the debate over the latter concept? Why not turn to political culture as a means of "operationalizing" strategic culture?

The argument, on the surface, is not a bad one: for just as strategic culture is, political culture used to be itself subject to a variety of definitions; indeed, one critic observed that there were almost as many different meanings of political culture as there were political scientists professing an interest in it.(58) When it first burst on the scene in political science, during the 1930s and 1940s, it was as a result of the same interdisciplinary transfusion process that would bring culture into the purview of those who contemplated strategy, and it was again the anthropologists who were making the initial running. What happened in the subfield of strategy also occurred in the discipline more broadly: culture was often equated with "character" in the early days, but the more the latter was dissected the more it grew suspect as a useful category. By 1956, some two decades earlier than in the case of strategic culture, "political culture" got its name, yet even though Gabriel Almond might have told us what we should call it, he could not decree what it meant. Debate continued as to whether it was to signify the "generalized personality" of a people, or the collectivity's history, or something else altogether. By the late 1960s, political culture was well on the way to the conceptual dustheap.(59)

Political culture's rebound owed a bit to changes in the international system attending the Cold War's end, but it was primarily discontent on the part of some analysts with rational-choice modelling and game theory that gave the concept a new lease on life in the 1980s and 1990s.(60) For while the concept might have taken a nose-dive in the late 1960s and early 1970s, its core question--namely how to tap the subjective orientations of societies' members so as to account for political differences cross-nationally--never had gone out of fashion.(61) What had changed in the period between the decline and re-emergence of political culture was that a new element had been injected into the discussions of political scientists when they pondered how to assess "culture." That element was symbolism.

Symbolism helped resuscitate political culture in two ways. First, it solved the "level-of-analysis" problem hobbling political culture, for much of the early work by Almond and his associates relied upon survey data that, while it might indicate much of value about the perceptions and psychological state of individuals, seemed incapable of generating usable knowledge about the cognitive patterns of collectivities. Individuals, after all, had personalities, but only collectivities could be said to possess cultures, and the trick was to find a way to go from the individual to the collective level of analysis if culture was to mean anything. Symbolism provided the answer, enabling theorists to explore the social ideas of individuals.(62)

Symbolism could do this because of its second major contribution, which was to draw us to the cognitive devices that social groupings rely upon, as Lowell Dittmer phrased it, to "transmit meanings from person to person despite vast distances of space and time." Dittmer invited us to think of those devices, which include but are not limited to imagery and metaphor, as being identical to what the poet, T. S. Eliot, called "objective correlatives," namely mechanisms for the efficient expression of feelings. In this regard, symbols become a "depository of widespread interest and feeling." And for Dittmer, the task of those who would employ politicalculture must be nothing other than the systematic, scientific analysis of society's key symbols.(63) For, as Michael Walzer nicely put the same thought, symbols and images tell us "more than we can easily repeat."(64)

From the above, it will be apparent how strategic culture as cognition might serve in shaping a research agenda, and this is so whether or not one believes in reliable causality. What I mean is that even if this category of strategic culture proves incapable of serving as anyone's independent variable, it can still do valuable scientific duty as a "specifying," or conditioning element, in explicative understandings of strategy, just as political culture supplies a conditioning element in political choice.(65) Analysts whose interest in strategicculture is situated primarily in the cognitive category might, for instance, be drawn to efforts at explicating strategic choice through the study of such nonliteral forms of communication as myth and metaphor, to take just the two most obvious such examples.(66)

CONCLUSIONS

This "modest" defence of strategic culture has not rested upon any particularly ambitious vision of the concept. Nor has it depended in any way upon the concept's being invested in redemptive qualities. Although some analysts do proclaim an interest in "culture" because of a dissatisfaction with realism, I am not of those who desire our concept to assume the outsized proportions necessitated by a liberationist agenda. Instead, I have sought to argue that categories of analysis associated with the concept of strategic culture can be, and should be, of interest to a variety of scholars who are motivated to understand how and why states end up making certain choices in grand strategy.

I have made two major claims in this article. First, I have noted that strategic culture shares with other concepts the quality of being contentious: here, the primary epistemological contest pits those who have faith in reliable causality against those who show a more agnostic disposition. There can be merit in both stances.

Secondly, I have sought to embed the roots of strategic culture in two different (but not totally so) substrata. Strategic culture as context is in turn divisible into a) national historical behaviour, and b) national character and identity. As cognition, strategic culture is descended from the cognate concept of political culture, and as such has its most salient quality in the dimension of symbolism.

Strategic culture may be, to some, a "theory," but if it is such an entity I confess to being too obtuse to grasp it. Instead, I propose we think of strategic culture as a research program, one in which certain topics would seem natural objects of our curiosity. I conclude by nominating three such topics, though others could easily be added to the list: 1) path dependence and "rational" strategic choice; 2) ethnicity and foreign policy; and 3) the key symbols (especially myths and metaphors) of grand strategy.

(1) On the necessity for structural realists to conceive of power as "aggregate capability," see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 60.

(2) For a vigorous rejection of the understanding of power as aggregate capability, see David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), esp. chap. 4: "Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends versus Old Tendencies."

(3) Some would disagree, and insist that unless we can come to agreed working definitions, we can never assign a value to our terms, thus cannot hope to measure them "scientifically." This insistence strikes me as being, in its own way, unscientific, if by the term science we simply mean the systematic organization and use of knowledge in a given area of inquiry. For a refreshingly catholic view of such a way to organize thinking about foreign policy, see James N. Rosenau, The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy, rev. and enl. ed. (London: Frances Pinter, 1980).

(4) Jack Snyder is often credited with being the first writer explicitly to employ the rubric, in his The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Options (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1977).

(5) For a cautionary reminder, see Giovanni Sartori, "Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics," American Political Science Review 64 (December 1970): 1033-53. But for a tacit recognition that the problem may be immune to resolution, see David Collier and James E. Mahon, " 'Conceptual Stretching' Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis," American Political Science Review 87 (December 1999): 845-55.

(6) T. D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), pp. 26-27.

(7) Williams, cited by William H. Sewell, Jr., "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 35-61. For an extensive catalogue of culture's many, and at times contradictory, meanings, see A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

(8) Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 1.

(9) For such a bounded application of strategic culture, see Yitzhak Klein, "A Theory of Strategic Culture," Comparative Strategy 10 (January-March 1991): 3-23. Sometimes, an even more limiting modifier than strategicis chosen, as in the case of the debate over French military doctrine during the interwar period. For that debate see Elizabeth Kier, "Culture and Military Doctrine: France between the Wars," International Security 19 (Spring 1995): 65-93; Idem, Imagining War: French Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Douglas Porch, "Military 'Culture' and the Fall of France in 1940: A Review Essay," International Security 24 (Spring 2000): 157-80.

(10) John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. viii.

(11) Ronald Jepperson and Ann Swidler, "What Properties of Culture Should We Measure?" Poetics 22 (1994): 359-71, quote at pp. 359-60.

(12) Donald R. Kelley, "The Old Cultural History," History of the Human Sciences 9 (August 1996): 101-26, quote at p. 101.

(13) Ibid., p. 109. Tylor's book was entitled Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization; the earlier work by Andres was called The Origin, Processes, and Current State of All Literature.

(14) Kelley, "Old Cultural History," pp. 114-16.

(15) Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 6-9.

(16) Quoted in ibid., p. 12.

(17) Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, "Introduction," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, pp. 1-32, quotation at p. 3.

(18) Sewell, "Concept(s) of Culture," p. 48.

(19) Johnston, Cultural Realism, pp. 36-37. Also see his "Thinking about Strategic Culture," International Security 19 (Spring 1995): 32-64.

(20) Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

(21) Examples, respectively, of first- and second-generationers, as Johnston interprets them, are Colin S. Gray, "Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back," Review of International Studies 25 (January 1999): 49-69; and Bradley Klein, "Hegemony and Strategic Culture: American Power Projection and Alliance Defence Politics," Review of International Studies 14 (April 1988): 133-48.

(22) Johnston, Cultural Realism, pp. 1-2, 37-39.

(23) Kelley, "Old Cultural History," p. 117.

(24) Gray, "Strategic Culture as Context," p. 58 (emphasis in original).

(25) Ibid., p. 69.

(26) Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 72-74, 206-15.

(27) Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 4-6.

(28) Ibid., pp. 134-35. Also see Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, pp. 62-92; and Patrick L. Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).

(29) Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

(30) See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for a reminder that bipolarity might just be unstable and very dangerous.

(31) Jeffrey Checkel, "The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory," World Politics 50 (January 1998): 324-48; Sujata Chakrabarti Pasic, "Culturing International Relations Theory: A Call for Extension," in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 85-104.

(32) Ted Hopf, "The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory," International Security 23 (Summer 1998): 171-200.

(33) For the argument that "identity" is simply too loose and self-contradictory a category to provide guidance for serious analysis, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond 'Identity'," Theory and Society 29 (February 2000): 1-47.

(34) On the prominence of anthropologists among this pioneering generation of strategic culturalists, see E. Adamson Hoebel, "Anthropological Perspectives on National Character," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 370 (March 1967): 1-7.

(35) Michael C. Desch, "Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies," International Security 23 (Summer 1998): 141-70, quote at p. 170.

(36) For some examples of the criticisms unleashed in his direction, see the separate contributions of John S. Duffield, Theo Farrell, and Richard Price, under the heading "Isms and Schisms: Culturalism versus Realism in Security Studies," International Security 24 (Summer 1999): 156-72.

(37) See David Dessler, "Constructivism within a Positivist Social Science," Review of International Studies 25 (January 1999): 123-37.

(38) Adrian Hyde-Price and Lisbeth Aggestam, "Conclusion: Exploring the New Agenda," in Security and Identity in Europe: Exploring the New Agenda, ed. Aggestam and Hyde-Price (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), pp. 234-62, quote at p. 240.

(39) See, for an intelligent application of the neologism, Gideon Rose, "Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy," World Politics 51 (October 1998): 144-72.

(40) In what has to be the best example of the international relations conceptual equivalent of Gresham's Law, neorealism was debased to such an extent that it would soon come to stand for the virtual opposite of what it had originally been intended to represent. That the debasing was in some large measure the doing of Robert Keohane, one of pioneers of "complex interdependence" theory, only adds to the curiosity. For early applications of neorealism as a means of assessing the relative merits of a variety of "power assets" (including "soft power" ones) in an era in which aggregate capability was said to have lost relevance, see Robert Lieber, No Common Power (Glenview, ILL: Scott Foresman, 1988); Richard Feinberg, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to US Foreign Policy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); and David B. Dewitt and John J. Kirton, Canada as a Principal Power (Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1983). The work most often associated with the transformation of the concept was Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), which really was a debate about the pros and cons of structural realism, the label Kenneth Waltz chose for his theory.

(41) It is unappreciated in large measure due to the mistaken assumption of so many that realism must be all about either "security" (as those structuralists sometimes labelled "defensive realists" stress) or "power" (said to be the stellar variable for structuralists called "offensive realists"). But as Randall Schweller reminds us, structural realists, whether defensive or offensive, seem to have forgotten classical realism's roots, which reveal a myriad of objects of states' desire-including prestige, status, leadership, and market share (objects, he goes on to note, that probably ensure states will be more predisposed to competition than to cooperation). See Randall L. Schweller, "Realism and the Present Great Power System: Growth and Positional Conflict Over Scarce Resources," in Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies After the Cold War, Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 28-68.

(42) Rose, "Neoclassical Realism," pp. 152-53.

(43) On the rise, decline, and re-emergence of historical sociology, see Harry Elmer Barnes, Historical Sociology: Its Origins and Development (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948); and Dennis Smith, The Rise of Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

(44) On the current fashionable status of identity, see Glenn Chafetz, Michael Spirtas, and Benjamin Frankel, "Introduction: Tracing the Influence of Identity on Foreign Policy," Security Studies 8 (Winter 1998/99-Spring 1999): vii-xxii.

(45) See John Gerard Ruggie, "Peace In Our Time? Causality, Social Facts and Narrative Knowing," American Society of International Law: Proceedings 89th Annual Meeting (1995): 93-100; and Ian Lustick, "History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias," American Political Science Review 90 (September 1996): 605-18.

(46) Paul Pierson, "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics," American Political Science Review 94 (June 2000): 251-68.

(47) See Theda Skocpol, "Sociology's Historical Imagination," in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1-21.

(48) On the methodological bona fides of "process tracing," see Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 64-67.

(49) See Jack A. Goldstone, "Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path Dependence, and Explanation in Historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 104 (November 1998): 829-45.

(50) James Mahoney, "Path Dependence in Historical Sociology," Theory and Society 29 (August 2000): 507-48.

(51) See Rodney Bruce Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

(52) This critique is made by Paul A. Kowert, "National Identity: Inside and Out." Security Studies 8 (Winter 1998/99-Spring 1999): 1-34.

(53) For a sharp critique of those who would steer clear of national character while embracing other vague categories, see Dean Peabody, National Characteristics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

(54) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, new and rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 169. Also see, on this theme, Samuel P. Huntington, "The Hispanic Challenge," Foreign Policy, no. 141 (March/April 2004), pp. 30-45.

(55) For an example, see Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

(56) See Alex Inkeles and Daniel J. Levinson, "National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems," in The Handbook of Social Psychology, 2d ed. Group Psychology and Phenomena of Interaction, Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, eds., (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969), 4: 418-506. Also see Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948).

(57) Geertz is associated with the argument that the best we can hope for is "thick description" of social reality, but one writer claims he nevertheless strayed into the realm of implicit causality. Says this writer, the "riddle of what constitutes an adequate explication and how to distinguish causal claims from interpretive ones has vexed the best minds in philosophy for more than a century." Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor," pp. 72-73.

(58) William M. Reisinger, "The Renaissance of a Rubric: Political Culture as Concept and Theory," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 7 (Winter 1995): 328-52.

(59) Lucien Pye, "Political Culture Revisited," Political Psychology 12 (September 1991): 487-508.

(60) Ronald Inglehart, "The Renaissance of Political Culture," American Political Science Review 82 (December 1988): 1203-30.

(61) Reisinger, "Renaissance of a Rubric," p. 331.

(62) See, for the level-of-analysis problem, David J. Elkins and Richard E. B. Simeon, "A Cause in Search of Its Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain?" Comparative Politics 11 (July 1979): 127-45; and Ruth Lane, "Political Culture: Residual Category or General Theory?" Comparative Political Studies 25 (October 1992): 362-87.

(63) Lowell Dittmer, "Political Culture and Political Symbolism," World Politics 29 (July 1977): 552-83.

(64) Michael Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967): 191-204, quote at p. 196.

(65) As argued by Edward W. Lehman, "On the Concept of Political Culture: A Theoretical Reassessment," Social Forces 50 (March 1972): 361-70.

(66) Examples would include Cyril Buffet and Beatrice Heuser, eds., Haunted By History: Myths in International Relations (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1998); and David G. Haglund, "The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited: (Geo)Political Metaphor and the Logic of Canadian Foreign Policy," American Review of Canadian Studies 29 (Summer 1999): 215-39.