Towards an Explicative Understanding of Strategic Culture: The Cases of Australia and Canada.

Strategic culture remains a highly contested but potentially vital concept in the analysis of security policy. This paper contributes to the strategic culture debate by using the cases of Australia and Canada to assess the utility of strategic culture as an explanatory tool. Much of the debate over strategic culture hinges on the proper relationship between the ideational and material variables in analyzing a country's security policy, and the attendant difficulties of distinguishing between strategic culture and strategic behaviour. We argue that if strategic culture is defined in an inclusive way to include ideational factors, material factors, and strategic behaviour, one will develop a richer understanding of a country's strategic situation. Using this approach, this paper undertakes a long-range historical survey of strategic culture in these two countries. We show that in both countries, strategic culture remains relatively stable for extended periods of time, usually changing only when patterns of global power shift, and provides a better explanation for contemporary security policy in both countries than perspectives that focus on purely material or ideational factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]