Towards a better operationalisation of strategic culture: A rejoinder to Endres, Mader and Schoen

We welcome the constructive remarks made by Fabian Endres, Matthias Mader and Harald Schoen (hereafter EMS), who push our collective research agenda on public opinion and strategic culture forward. There are too few attempts at replication in social science. Although their comment largely supports the main conclusions of our article, they also point to a number of conceptual disagreements and even a data management error that deserve a discussion. The first conceptual point EMS make concerns the Eurobarometer question we use as an indicator to distinguish outward-looking from inward-looking individuals with regards to Europe's influence. Question 31 in Eurobarometer 54.1 asks interviewees if they consider ‘[a]sserting the political and diplomatic importance of the European Union around the world’ to be a priority or not. Our assumption in the article is that there is no a priori link between one's attitude towards power projection and one's preference about the European defence project. We maintain that the desire to assert the political and diplomatic importance of the EU is not a priori (i.e., conceptually) linked to the European defence project. In fact, there turns out to be only a modest empirical association (bivariate correlation = 0.2). Our conceptual decision makes sense with reference to a period (2000) when the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) was only beginning to be framed as a crisis management policy – that is, an outward looking project. Until the end of the Cold War, European defence was explicitly about the defence of Western Europe, not about the projection of its influence abroad. The recent, but in fact recurring, proposal made by Jean-Claude Juncker for a European army against a resurgent Russia echoes this distinct perspective on European defence. There were, and still are, good reasons to think that for many people, even today, European defence is about defending Europe's territory, not about peace operations in sub-Saharan Africa. So we do not believe that the wording ‘political and diplomatic influence’ (i.e., projection) is tautological with ‘defence’. The Eurobarometer question, however, also mentions the European Union and thus does not, as EMS point out, refer to power projection in general. We were conscious of the limitations of this question, but in the end decided (and three EJPR reviewers accepted) that it was not tautological. The remedy offered by EMS shows the difficulties of finding a better indicator. They propose selecting the following answer in Eurobarometer 54.1 to measure humanitarian internationalism: ‘It is the task of the army [emphasis ours] to help other countries in case of natural, ecological or nuclear disaster, or combating famine, or clearing minefields, etc.’ This question strikes us as equally affected by an underlying bias. Here, there is no implicit link with the European Union, but there is a very explicit one with defence since the question puts the army in front and centre. What about respondents who believe that the army should not have any role at all in their humanitarian internationalism? Unfortunately, the survey does not tell us how many of these people exist, but we suspect many Green voters fit into that category. The challenge here is to imagine power projection without a referent. Can you project power in abstracto, as EMS suggest we should measure? In the indicator we selected, mentioning the European Union excludes outward-looking individuals who only want their own nation-state (or region, or religion, or whatever – we did not assume that strategic cultures are national) to exert political and diplomatic influence. Clearly, the interviewees who answered ‘yes’ are not hostile to the EU. But with the indicator EMS suggest, mentioning the army excludes humanitarian internationalists who do not want any military dimension attached to it (i.e., they don't want the army to be involved). Given the limitations of the Eurobarometer questionnaire, which we both acknowledge, we still believe that the question we selected allowed us to make a conceptually and empirically founded distinction between a general posture towards European power projection and specific preferences about European defence. Of course, a better, but unavailable question would have gone something like this: ‘Do you think it is better to prioritise domestic or international security issues?’ None of the two questions we selected unambiguously measures the notions of hard versus soft security, or inward- vs outward-looking. On both issues, we faced a trade-off between, on the one hand, the thematic exhaustiveness and sample representativeness of Eurobarometer 54.1, and, on the other hand, the problematic measures Eurobarometer data force analysts to employ. On this point, we join EMS in wishing that we can build our own questionnaires, and that ‘the collection and analysis of panel data [will] remove endogeneity concerns, which loom large in cross-sectional attitudinal research even if directional hypotheses are well grounded in theory’. That said, the data management error EMS identify, whereby we mislabelled ‘humanitarians’ for ‘pacifists’ in the analysis, is embarrassing and we must thank our colleagues for bringing it to our attention. Below we offer our own re-analysis after the corrections EMS suggest (see Tables 1 and 2). We are somewhat comforted by the fact that the replication, after correcting this labelling error, largely confirms the picture we painted. But we are also mindful that it could have been otherwise. On a specific point, EMS’ analysis shows that, contrary to what our results suggested, most supporters of European defence actually understand what ESDP is about: being outward-looking. Our published article underestimated the weight of believing in European power projection to explain support for European defence. The higher support that, relative to humanitarians (outward-looking and adhering to a soft conception of security), we thought we had found among pacifists (inward-looking and adhering to a soft conception of security), turned out to be due to the switch. We are glad that EMS found a more plausible result for pacifists versus humanitarians, which we had indeed described as a ‘puzzling’ result in the article. Fortunately, the new analysis does not affect the validation of most of our hypotheses (see Table 3 and Figure 1). Our published results confirmed H2 about the greater support of globalists for conflict intervention. The re-analysis we perform below does not change this result substantively. We had also partially confirmed H1, whereby traditionalists support the task of territorial defence more than humanitarians and pacifists (but not globalists). Again, the re-analysis does not change this result substantively. We had not found a great deal of support for H3 about the relationship between pacifists and guaranteeing peace. Our wrongly labelled pacifists were indeed a bit more supportive than humanitarians, but not more than the other categories. Here the inversion between humanitarians and pacifists matters and, once corrected, the analysis shows that humanitarians and globalists are significantly more supportive of this task than pacifists. Thus this hypothesis no longer receives any support. Finally, we had found moderate support for H4 about the relationship between humanitarians and humanitarian missions because traditionalists were significantly less supportive of these missions than humanitarians. The re-analysis shows similar results. The signs are in the right direction, but they are not significant vis-à-vis globalists and pacifists. Average marginal effects (with 95 per cent confidence intervals). Notes: For model 1 (Defending Europe), a positive value (X−axis) means an increase in the proportion of respondents who support Defending Europe if we change the posture from Traditionalist to Globalist. Country effects are computed with France as reference. All in all, we are humbled by the replication of the statistical analysis, which improves its robustness. It is important, however, to underline that we never argued that there is a single way of conceptualising strategic cultures, that our typology was superior to the several ones that have been proposed in the literature (including, now, that of EMS) or that the association between different strategic postures and Petersberg tasks was a hierarchical one. We were cautious to limit our argument to the claim that strategic cultures matter, both to explain the level of support for European defence and to understand that people adhering to different strategic postures prioritise different dimensions of European defence. EMS's own analysis supports this claim, which goes against a literature that has almost exclusively emphasised nationality. As EMS argue, national identity/nationalism is a critical factor in understanding support for European defence, but it is a factor that is likely to be context-dependent. For our part, we find the one-dimensional conceptualisation of strategic cultures proposed by EMS useful. It distinguishes humanitarian internationalists and militarists, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive categories. Conceptually, we are worried that they collapse people who support NGO-type humanitarian work and people who support combat-ready and dictator-friendly EUFOR Chad in the humanitarian internationalist category, but their empirical results suggest that there is something to this characterisation. Our own conceptualisation is more in line with the American and European literatures, which are usually two-dimensional because they include, on one dimension, attitudes vis-à-vis the world (e.g., internationalists and isolationists) and, on the other, attitudes vis-à-vis the use of force (e.g., hawks and doves), thus trying to create mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groups. We do not take issue with a one-dimensional conceptualisation so long as the objective is simply to show that pre-existent strategic postures matter. In addition, EMS's distinction has the merit of being parsimonious. But for the next step, which will be to map out social representations of security among Europeans, we will probably need more than a one-dimensional space. We look forward to continuing this discussion with our colleagues.

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