pub919 cultural dimensions of strategy and policy

8/9/2019 PUB919 Cultural Dimensions of Strategy and Policy

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CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF STRATEGYAND POLICY

Jiyul Kim

May 2009

The views expressed in this report are those of the authorand do not necessarily reect the ofcial policy or position ofthe Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, orthe U.S. Government. Authors of Strategic Studies Institute(SSI) publications enjoy full academic freedom, provided

they do not disclose classied information, jeopardizeoperations security, or misrepresent ofcial U.S. policy.Such academic freedom empowers them to offer new andsometimes controversial perspectives in the interest offurthering debate on key issues. This report is cleared forpublic release; distribution is unlimited.

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This paper is the product of many people over the last 3 years,when the U.S. Army War College (USAWC) decided that a newapproach was required for the regional studies courses. Instead ofan approach based solely on U.S. interests, it was determined thatan approach that takes the perspective of the other side would bemore useful; in essence, to use culture as a means to determine thewhat and the why of the others interests that could help in theformulation of U.S. strategy and policy, its implementation and afavorable outcome.

In the spring of 2006 the six regional directors gathered toformulate our rst effort. To them, this paper owes its initial debt:Dr. Craig Nation (Eurasia), Dr. Gabriel Marcella (Americas), Dr.Larry Goodson (Middle East), Colonel Bob Applegate (Europe),and Colonel Tom Dempsey (Africa). Dr. Nation in particulardeveloped the initial framework now known as the AnalyticalCultural Framework for Strategy and Policy (ACFSP). It originallyconsisted of six dimensions instead of the three that are presentedin the current version. The original version of the frameworkpresented here was a bare bones affair, the product of a hurriedeffort that is too often true in military bureaucracy; but it providedthe intellectual foundation for a new series of regional studiescourses offered to the USAWC class of 2007. The frameworkwas further rened for the class of 2008, but was still far from acomplete conception.

For the Class of 2009, the USAWC decided to introducethese cultural concepts and framework to the students in thebeginning of the year as part of the Strategic Thinking course.Thus, the framework is included in the rst course of the corecurriculum where students are introduced to fundamentalthinking approaches (for example, creative, systematic, ethical,and historical) that will inform their study for the rest of the yearas well in future assignments.

This paper is the foundation of that lesson in culture andserves as one of the theoretical pillars for the rest of the corecurriculum and the regional studies courses. It representsthoughts and feedback provided by many members of the facultyand students from the Class of 2008. Particular gratitude isextended to the following for their extraordinary contributions:Ambassador Cynthia Erd, Colonel Charles Van Bebber, RichardSmyth, Colonel Dwight Raymond, Colonel (Ret.) Don Boose, andAloysius ONeill.


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ISBN 1-58487-389-2


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FOREWORD

This Letort Paper explores the intersection of culturewith strategy and policy. Given the recent emphasisand attention on cultural aspects of national security,this is a timely and appropriate contribution. Theconcepts and framework provided herein have formedthe foundation for how the U.S. Army War Collegehas incorporated culture in the study of strategy andpolicy, including its new approach to regional studies.This framework is not presented in a dogmatic fashion,but as one way to incorporate culture into strategic andpolitical thinking.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publishthis foundational document on how we may approachthe consideration of cultural factors in the formulationof strategy and policy.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.DirectorStrategic Studies Institute


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JIYUL KIM is the Director of Asian Studies and theCoordinator for Regional Studies at the U.S. Army WarCollege. He was formerly an intelligence ofcer andthen, for the past 20 years, a Japan and Korea ForeignArea Ofcer serving in a variety of eld and policyassignments. He has published on Asian policy issues,history, and archaeology. Colonel Kim holds a BAfrom the University of Pennsylvania in Anthropologyand Biology, an MA from Harvard University in EastAsian Regional Studies, and is currently completingdoctoral work in History and East Asian Languages atHarvard.


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SUMMARY

There has been a growing recognition in the post-Cold War era that culture has increasingly become afactor in determining the course of todays complexand interconnected world. The U.S. experience inAfghanistan and Iraq extended this trend to nationalsecurity and military operations. One might call thisthe Department of Defenses cultural turn. The focusthus far has been on the importance of culture at thetactical and operational levels.

There is also a growing recognition by the nationalsecurity community that culture is an important factor atthe policy and strategy levels. The ability to understandand appreciate the role and impact of culture on policyand strategy is increasingly seen as a critical strategicthinking skill. Cultural prociency at the policy and

strategic levels means the ability to consider history,values, ideology, politics, religion, and other culturaldimensions and assess their potential effect on policyand strategy.

A more useful way to consider the role of culture insecurity studies than through the levels of war (tactical,operational, and strategic) is a framework that includesthe following three dimensions: cultural considerationsat the individual level; cultural considerations in tacticaland operational level military operations; and culturalconsiderations at the political and strategic levels.

Policymakers and strategists tend to view situationsthrough their own cultural and strategic lens withinsufcient consideration and calculation of theothers perspective and interests. The Analytical

Cultural Framework for Strategy and Policy (ACFSP)is one systematic and analytical approach to the vitaltask of viewing the world through many lenses. The


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national security community is interested in culturalfeatures or dimensions that drive political and strategic

action and behavior. The ACFSP identies basiccultural dimensions that seem to be of fundamentalimportance in determining such behavior and thus areof importance in policy and strategy formulation andoutcomes. These dimensions are (1) Identity, or thebasis for dening identity and its linkage to interests;(2) Political Culture, or the structure of power anddecisionmaking; and (3) Resilience, or the capacity orability to resist, adapt or succumb to external forces.Identity is the most important, because it ultimatelydetermines purpose, values and interests that form thefoundation for policy and strategy to attain or preservethose interests.


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CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF STRATEGYAND POLICY

WHY CULTURE?

We face a world today without the relatively simpleand comforting dichotomy of the Cold War. It is aworld made increasingly more complex by the forces ofnationalism and unprecedented globalization releasedby the end of the Cold War. Since the early 1990s, thepost-Cold War era, there has been a growing recognitionamong scholars that culture has increasingly becomea factor in determining the course of todays complexand interconnected world. A well-known scholar ofstrategic culture, Jeffrey Lantis, wrote,

Culture has become fashionable in mainstreaminternational relations scholarship in the post-Cold Warera. One of the most surprising aspects of the renaissanceof scholarly interest in culture has been the emergingconsensus in national security policy studies that culturecan affect signicantly grand strategy and state behavior.Scholars and practitioners have begun to interpretevents like the U.S.-China standoff over a downed spyplane in 2001 or escalating tensions between Palestiniansand Israelis through the lens of national identity andculture.1

Although scholars may have recognized this,practitioners at rst did not. One criticism that canbe leveled against U.S. national security and foreignpolicy of the 1990s is that it failed to recognize andaddress the immense potentially destabilizing andconict generating cultural and political changes

unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Much of thisforce had to do with the release of pent up demandsfor self-determination by a variety of cultural groups


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determined by ethnicity, religion, and language.Suppressed groups found space to emerge and quickly

turned into political forces and movements in thepursuit of formerly unattainable interests (separation,independence, domination) dened by previouslyunviable identities (ethno-religious nationalism).

The various small wars of the 1990s turned into thedeadly wars of the 2000s. The U.S. experience thus farin Afghanistan and Iraq principally, but other placesas well, and in particular due to the reemergence ofcounterinsurgency as a major task, has alerted thepractitioners of policy and strategy, politicians andmilitary leaders, to the importance of culture at thetactical and operational levels. One might call thisthe Department of Defenses (DoD) cultural turn,therefore the emphasis placed on culture as an impor-tant if not a decisive factor in countering insurgencies.2

There is also a growing recognition by the nationalsecurity community that culture is an important factorat the policy and strategic levels although most of thecurrent effort and resources for the cultural turn aredevoted to the tactical and operational ght. It is theeducation of strategic leaders, civilian and military,that is the rst step toward increasing the expertise ofpolicymakers and strategic planners. Considerations ofhow culture affects our political and strategic actionsand behavior and the actions and behavior of othershave become vital strategic tasks. Thus, the abilityto understand and appreciate the role and impact ofculture on policy and strategy is increasingly seen as acritical strategic thinking skill.

Cultural prociency at the policy and strategic levels

means the ability to consider history, values, ideology,politics, religion, and other cultural dimensions andassess their potential effect on policy and strategy. In


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the current security environment it is an imperativeskill for:

Working cooperatively with rising powers suchas China and India;

Dealing successfully with new partners andallies as well as new challenges with old alliesand partners;

Responding effectively to ideological, religious,and ethnic extremism;

Waging an effective counterinsurgency cam-paign;

Coping constructively with anti-Americanism; Handling successfully or defeating transnational

challenges and threats; and, Building strong coalitions encompassing differ-

ent cultures.

The Analytical Cultural Framework for Strategy andPolicy (ACFSP) provides one approach, a systematicand analytical tool for exploring the cultural aspectsof the political and strategic landscape to help developthe strategic skill for taking account of cultural factorsin policymaking and strategy formulation. The ACFSPwill be discussed in greater detail later.

CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF LEADERSHIP,OPERATIONS AND STRATEGY

It is too easy to think of the role of culture in theworld of national security strategy and militaryoperations as a single dimensional phenomenon. Thatis to say, consideration of cultural specics is too often

conated to one comprehensive set that is conceivedand perceived as widely applicable across the length,breadth, and depth of the space we call national securitystrategy and military operations.


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One approach to get a better resolution of the roleof culture is to consider three distinct dimensions of

culture as factors operating in the world of nationalsecurity strategy and military operations: culturalconsiderations at the individual level; cultural considerationsin tactical and operational level military operations; andcultural considerations at the political and strategic levels.This is not to imply that these dimensions are separateand distinct, because there are signicant areas ofoverlap and mutually supporting as well as hierarchicalrelationships among them. Cultural considerations at the individual levelencompasses the cultural dimensions of leadership,management, and interpersonal communicationsand relations. Languages, cultural dos and donts,and negotiation skills are examples of what thisdimension would consider. Current emphasis on

cultural understanding, cultural awareness, andlanguages in the U.S. military, born of new challengesin Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, is designed largelyto address this dimension. Cultural considerations in tactical and operational levelmilitary operations examines cultural factors that caninuence the success or failure of tactical actions andcampaigns. This may be the most familiar for most sol-diers. At the tactical level, tactics, training, small unitleadership traits, weapons design, and such are someaspects of the tactical battleeld that have culturalcomponents. Why is it that the Russian/Soviet andChinese military did not hesitate to use human waveattacks? Why did western armies use human waveattacks in World War I? More recently, the emphasis

on counterinsurgency has given birth to the conceptof Human Terrain System and Human Terrain Teamsat tactical levels that brings culture directly into the


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tactical ght. At the operational level, we are dealingwith campaigns. And in designing campaigns with

the greatest chance for success, one must considerthe interplay and harmonization of cultural factorssuch as service and agency organizational culturesand the cultures of allies in forming a capable joint,interagency, and multinational force operating ina foreign land. In addition, military leaders mustconsider the cultural dimension of the opponent suchas civil-military relations (political control), military-societal ties (popular support), and military force(senior leadership style, operational level doctrine andtraining philosophy, and military culture) among otherfactors. The Armys Counterinsurgency Field Manual(FM) 3-24 (December 2006), and Operations FM 3-0(February 2008), represent examples of how culturalfactors have now become prominent aspects of the

tactical and operational level ghts.A recent British conference on the relationship

between culture and conict considered how the abovetwo dimensions interrelate,

Any military operation involves peoplelots of them.And more often than not the people come from differentbackgrounds. A commander has to interact with the

different groups under his or her command, allies,neutrals, locals caught up in the operation and, ofcourse the enemy, all of them distinctive in some way.In a counter-insurgency campaign the picture is furtherclouded by having to engage closely with local peoplefor extended periods, and often there is supercially nomeans to tell the locals from the enemy. All this means thatthe commander needs understandingunderstandingof the inuences that impact on the behaviour of all these

people. One of the signicant inuences is culture.

Culture is a fundamental ingredient of life. . . . We allsee things through the lenses that our culture providesus with. But different groups have different cultures,


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and thats where the trouble starts when groupsnd themselves in contact with each other. Culturaldifferences can lead to limitations on any ability tosee things from the other persons or groups point ofview, lack of communication, and misunderstandings(sometime lethal). Culture therefore has a profoundeffect on the successful conduct of military operations.3

Cultural considerations at the political and strategiclevels deal with the impact of cultural factors in theformulation, implementation, and outcome of policy

and strategy. It is concerned with cultural factors thatcan affect political and strategic decisions, actions,and behaviors. This is the dimension that we aremost concerned with, and the ACFSP provides oneapproach for considering this dimension in a systematicmanner.4

Before getting into the details of the ACFSP, we

must consider one nal fundamental preparatorysubject, the denition of culture.

WHAT IS CULTURE?

Culture is the fundamental, although not the onlyfactor, for dening and understanding the humancondition.5 Culture affects how people think and act.

It can be considered as the way humans and societiesassign meaning to the world around them and denetheir place in that world. It is manifested in many waysincluding languages and words; ideas and ideologies;customs and traditions; beliefs and religions; ritualsand ceremonies; settlement patterns; art and music;architecture and furniture; dress and fashion;

games; images; in short, anything that is symbolicor representative of the values, norms, perceptions,interests, and biases of a culture.6


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The study of culture, to deeply explore anddiscover the symbols and symbolic systems and, more

importantly, their meanings, requires consideration ofa number of interrelated parameters. These include,

Formation: How does culture form? Agency: Who and what are the sources of

cultures formation and change? Process: Through what ways and means is

culture formed and changed? Boundary: What limits and bounds culture in

time and space? Variability: How do cultures differ? What are

the reasons for the differences? Stability: How stable is culture? What enhances

stability or causes instability? Coherence: What logic if any connects the

different parts of a culture?

Effect on thought: How does culture affectthinking and decision making?

The German political economist and sociologistMax Weber (1864-1920) saw man as an animal sus-pended in webs of signicance that he himself hasspun. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz(1926-2007) extended this notion by equating culturewith Webers webs of signicance.7 In Weber andGeertzs conception, man was like a spider in the mid-dle of his web except that the strands were not madeof silk, but of those values, perceptions, and normsthat were signicant and meaningful to him. Thus, themain task in analyzing culture is to understand thespecics of what are signicant and meaningful, the

meanings represented by the strands of the websof signicance. Conducting this task requiresinterpretation of the symbolic forms and systems to


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tease out the meanings they contain. This approachhas had a great inuence on how humanists and

social scientists today understand, apply, and analyzeculture.

It is important to recognize that human beingsare not born with a particular culture (the webs ofsignicance), but culture is constructed through aprocess of conscious and unconscious socializationand acculturation (human interactions) within theparticular situation that an individual was born into.This particular situation can encompass a wide rangeof factors from the individualistic and biological, suchas gender and race, to an ever-widening circle of social,political, economic, religious, organizational, and ethniclevels of human organization (family, community,ethnic community, religious order, economic class,village/town/city, state/province, nation, region,

and the world). Therefore, in trying to come to gripswith how culture operates, we must recognize that itvaries enormously through space and time. Variabilityover space is reected by the variety of cultures in theworld at a given moment in time. Variability over timeis best seen in history. History is thus, in part, a recordof cultural change over time.

Culture operates at different levels ranging fromthe individual to various levels of collectivities (clan,organization, tribe, village, town, city, state, nation,and world). Culture at each level is rarely the sumof the cultures of the lower levels. At the individuallevel, culture affects interpersonal communicationsand relations, while at the collective level it affectsintercollective (e.g., interclan, intertown, interstate)

communications and relations. The strategic leadershould consider these two dimensions of cultureas distinctive. There is clearly an overlap between


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culture at the individual level and at the collectivelevel, especially if we consider decisionmakers. But a

framework that distinguishes between the two couldhelp with the study of the cultural dimension of policyand strategy.

When considering interactions at the individualand the collective levels of culture, it is important torecognize the signicant variance that often existswithin a particular organization or society. In otherwords, generalized rules or lists cannot possiblyaccount for the nearly innite variability one is likelyto nd among the individuals of a given collectivity.A perceptive strategic leader must always considerthis variability from a given or supposed norm for thegroup.

THE ANALYTICAL CULTURAL FRAMEWORK

FOR STRATEGY AND POLICY (ACFSP).

Policymakers and strategists tend to view situationsthrough their own cultural and strategic lens withinsufcient consideration and calculation of theothers perspective and interests. How should we ap-proach the task of appreciating and understanding thedifferent lenses through which other people, groups,societies, nations, and regions view themselves andthe world? The ACFSP is one approach to the vital taskof viewing the world through many lenses. The nationalsecurity community is most interested in culturalfeatures or dimensions that drive political and strategicaction and behavior. The ACFSP identies basiccultural dimensions that seem to be of fundamental

importance in determining political and strategic actionand behavior and thus are of importance in policy and


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strategy formulation and outcomes. These dimensionsare,

Identity: the basis for dening identity and itslinkage to interests.

Political Culture: the structure of power anddecisionmaking.

Resilience: the capacity or ability to resist, adapt,or succumb to external forces.

We will consider these dimensions in an Americancontext to illustrate how they affect American valuesand interests and therefore American policy andstrategy.

The ACFSP and the United States.

Consider rst the revolutionary circumstances

of Americas national origin and the foundingdocuments, in particular, the Declaration ofIndependence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, andthe Federalist Papers. The United States has a uniquerevolutionary origin that redened how societyshould be organized. Democracy and republicanism,freedom and liberty, equality, Manifest Destiny, andother fundamental conceptions of man and society,combined with a pioneering spirit, individualism, andentrepreneurialism that early established a unique andenduring American identity. Tocquevilles account ofAmerican society in the early 19th century is valuableprecisely because it demonstrates how little Americansociety and Americans have changed in the last 200years.8

Protestantism combined with capitalism to fan atremendous appetite for innovation, adaptation, andprogress.9 America became a synonym and a symbol for


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a land of innovative and adaptive people. Along withgrowing prosperity came the dominance of middle

class livelihood, values, and practices that formed thebackbone of American society. These ideas and valuesinteracted with history, resulting in a richer, and somewould say a more positive, development of Americansociety and identity. Without being comprehensive,consider the following historical developments inaddition to the revolutionary origins and conceptionsof social and political organization mentioned earlierand how they may have affected the way Americanssaw themselves and their place and purpose in theworld:

Isolationism Slavery The Civil War The Spanish-American War and Imperialism

Immigration and multicultural and multiethnicsociety

World War I The Depression World War II and Americas permanent global

role The Cold War and the development of the

national security state The rise of the military-industrial complex The Civil Rights movement The End of the Cold War and September 11,

2001 (9/11).

What does all this mean in terms of Americanidentity, political culture, and resilience? First,

American citizenship and identity are based onplace and, more importantly, on the idea of beingan American rather by than blood.10 This forms the


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foundation of the American identity and differentiatesAmerican citizens from those of most of the world who

predominantly privilege bloodline. Second, Americanpolitical culture evolved from a revolutionary distrustof strong central authority (kings and tyrants) andthus emphasizes the protection of individual andlocal rights and privileges and the principle of checksand balances over the efcient functioning of thegovernment. This has resulted in a political culture thatis particularly complex. Finally, one test of Americanresilience is Americas relationship with globalization.Perhaps more than any other society, the United Stateshas been able to innovate and adapt to the forces ofglobalization. Indeed, America has been and remainsone of the engines of globalization. Another test ofresilience is how America approaches its integrationwith transnational institutions (e.g., the United Nations

[UN] or the World Trade Organization [WTO]). Itdoes so with the determination to protect individualand national prerogatives while remaining open toinstitutions that support its ideas of liberal democracy,economic openness, and universal human rights.

These cultural considerations affect Americanpolicy and strategy. To begin with, most Americanshave a distinct worldview and beliefs about Americasplace in that world. That view is very much foundedon the legacy of 18th century enlightenment that alsoanimated Americas founding revolution. A democraticworld with a capitalist economic system based on freetrade is Americas idealized utopia, and Americans seeAmerica as destined to have a leading role in bringingabout such a world.

Other societies may share many aspects of whatconstitutes American identity, political culture, andresilience, but not identically. In the same manner,


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every other society reects a unique combination ofidentity, political culture, and resilience.

COMMON THEMES ACROSS THE ACFSPDIMENSIONS

Modernity and Nationalism form the rst commontheme. They are two aspects of the modern worldthat play key roles in all the dimensions. Modernityhas both material (e.g., industrialization, scienticand technological developments, and the informationrevolution) and ideational aspects (e.g., different ideasabout political and economic organization such asdemocracy, autocracy, and socialism). Nationalism hastaken many variant forms rooted in the traditionalpast as well as in the new political and geographicalarrangements of the modern era (ethnic, religious, and

nation-state political).11

Another common theme is that culture is a subjective

and emotional entity and process and thus inherentlyunpredictable. This contrasts with rationalism orrational choice theory that has been prized in socialsciences, because it seems to provide a way to predict.The predictive shortcomings of rational choice theoryas the basis for human thought and action can be seeneverywhere in daily life from the unpredictability ofthe performance of the stock market to the uncertaintiesof international relations.12 In the world of policy andstrategy, it is prediction that is the prize of analysis.Human beings, individually or collectively, do notalways think and behave in rational ways. The conceptof rationality itself is relative and is subject to differing

conceptions and denitions based on culture. Thebest that may be possible is to gain some insight intowhat might be most probable. It is precisely because


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we are creatures of emotions and passions that the onlyway to more fully comprehend our thoughts and actions is

through cultural understanding that can provide predictiveinsights to the seemingly irrational patterns of thought andbehavior.

The criticality of history is another common theme.History makes man and his society, and its principalcontemporary expression is culture. Without history,there is no culture. But history is an interpretive eld,more subjective than objective. Thus, each dimensionof the framework must be appreciated as the productof both the accumulation of actual historical experienceas well as the revisionism brought by memory andinterpretation of that history. In doing so, one must alsoconsider that memory and interpretation of history areoften incomplete, selective, or distorted.

History, therefore, serves two important functions:

as agent and process that determines specic tangibleand intangible cultural forms; and as an instrument ofculture, usually purposefully distorted or adapted forcontemporary and, most often, political purposes. Formany modern nation-states, the distortion often takesthe form of inventing or exaggerating a heroic past thatserves to legitimize the regime while inspiring andhelping to mobilize the populace for national projects.Examples abound throughout the world and in history.More often than not they are rooted in dictatorships:Hitlers Nazi Germany, Stalins Soviet Union, SaddamsIraq, and Kim Il Sungs North Korea. A long recordof deliberately distorted and politicized history tosupport the state can be found too in most East Asiannations such as China, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea,

and Taiwan. Indeed, there is probably no place in theworld where one cannot nd evidence of manipulationof history for political purposes. Deliberate distortions,


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exaggerations, omissions, and even inventions becomereadily apparent when one digs a little deeper into the

historiography (how history is studied and written) ofa particular society.

Identity.

Identity can be comprised of race, gender,generation, family, clan, class, ethnicity, tribe, religion,locality, nation, and region. One aspect of culture thatseems to matter greatly at the political and strategiclevels is those cultural factors that determine identity.Identity is perhaps the most important of the ACFSPdimensions, because it ultimately determines purpose,values and interests that form the foundation for policyand strategy to attain or preserve those interests.

Identity is a fundamental trait that is essential to man

and societies. Identity can very well stand as anotherway to say culture.13 It denes existence, purpose,destiny, and, sometimes, fate. It provides a sense ofself worth, dignity, and community. Man exists both asan individual and as a member of a group, a collective,and thus an examination of identity must also recognizethe existence of differing individual and collectiveidentities. At the individual level, identity begins witha base of biologically inherited features on which isbuilt a superstructure of cultural or acquired elements.Race, gender, and family are clearly the most obviousand consequential biologically inherited identity traits.Superimposed on these are socially inherited featuressuch as ethnicity, religion, clan, class, and tribe. Theboundary between biological and social inheritances is

often blurred. Ultimately, however, social inheritancesare changeable, while biological inheritances are not.


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While individual identity is important for theindividual, it may not necessarily be of equal or similar

importance at the collective level. Collective identityalmost always consists of fewer traits than reectedby the sum of the individual identities of its members,because, by necessity, collective identity is based onfeatures that are shared by all or most members of thecollective. However, in terms of political and socialpower, collective identity is almost always far morethan the sum of the individuals, because it has thepotential to mobilize the collective and thus politicalpower. For example, at the nation-state level, leaderswho can fuse individual with national identity caninspire the people of the nation to sacrice for nationalsurvival and glory. The ability to mobilize a nationis essential in strategy, in the conduct of foreign anddomestic policy, and is absolutely paramount for the

enterprise of war. In as much as policy and strategy areoriented toward a particular collectivity rather than anindividual, be it a subnational, national, regional, ortrans-national entity, it is collective identity that we aremost concerned with in considerations of policy andstrategy.

As with individual identity, collective identity iscomposed of both biologically and socially inheritedtraits, but often the biological or blood traits aremore ctional and mythical than real. Ultimately, it isthe collective social agreement on what commonalitybinds the collective that is most important. Even ifevery member shared exactly the same features ofindividual identities, biological and social, they couldnot form a collective identity unless they agreed on the

basis for their coming together.Collective identity also exists in widely ranging

forms creating intricate layers of overlap and hierarchy.


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Indeed, it would be the rare society that exhibited onlyone collective identity, and thus we must consider

the existence of a multiplicity of collective identities.These identities also provide indications of socialand political fault lines containing the potentialfor future divisions. While the collective identitiesexist simultaneously, they can usually be denedhierarchically. Some are more important than others.Each individual and collective sorts and prioritizes,often consciously, but sometimes not. The identitythat occupies the top of the hierarchy provides thegreatest potential for signicant and powerful politicalforce, often with implications for peace and conict.For most of the modern age (i.e., since the late 18thcentury) nation-state political nationalism has been themost important and powerful collective identity andone that has had direct war and peace implications.

Although suppressed by the confrontation betweencapitalism and communism during the Cold War, thepost-Cold War period has witnessed a resurgence ofnationalism. But the form of nationalism that becameprominent in the post-Cold War era has been more ofthe ethnic and religious variety rather than nation-statepolitical nationalism. The post-9/11 era has added tothe increasingly complex situation by highlighting thepotency of religious and ethnic extremism.

When considering more specically the sourcesof collective identity, especially those that result inpolitical power (and, therefore, the power to mobilizethe collective toward a common purpose), we cannotescape considering history. As stated earlier, historymakes man and his society (collectivity), while culture

is historys principal contemporary expression. Thethought that there is no culture without history, thatculture is a historical product, can be extended to the


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notion that there can be no identity without history.History is based on interpretation and subject to

constant revision and reinterpretation. But what is thebasis of the revisions and reinterpretations? Here weare considering not academic history, but the popularmass view of history. It is usually a simplied andreduced version of history. New evidence plays a part,but even more so is the collective memory of thathistory, memory that may be actual but is more likelyselective, subjective, or manufactured. That history cannever be denitive (we will always need historians)points to an important aspect of identity, that it isdynamic and changeable. It need not be permanent.

Politically, the most potent collective identity inthe modern era has been the nation-state. Nationitself is an old concept and in the traditional sense,membership in a nation is determined by a common

identity based on one or more of a number of physicaland cultural factors such as origin, ancestry, location,religion, language, and shared history. In the modernera, a powerful new foundation for nationhood wasintroduced with the concept of the nation-state thatcombined national fervor with political organization.Modern forms of national identity can thus serve asthe basis for powerful collective actions, especially inthe political, social, economic, cultural, and strategicarenas. The sources of national identity of modern na-tion-states are often based on a shifting amalgamationof the old and traditional (ancestry, location, religion)with the new (recent history). Thus, nation-stateidentity is usually articially or deliberately createdrather than deriving as the natural and spontaneous

consequences of a nations history. Every nationglories what it is and what it represents, and thustends toward glossing over history that does not t that


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story (narrative). This becomes all the more evidentin nations whose boundaries were arbitrarily created

rather than historically evolved. Nations created bycolonial powers, especially in the Middle East, Africa,and Asia, are good examples of this phenomenon. Thusit is not uncommon for national leaders to evoke anduse history deliberately as an instrument of unity andmobilization. In such usage, history is often distortedor even falsied.14

Nationalism is not the only basis for collective iden-tity with consequential political power. Transnationalidentities have also proven to create potent politicalpower. Some, such as extremism (religious, ethnic,political) and criminal activity, can be destructiveand threatening to order. Others are potentiallyconstructive, such as collective identities that, forexample, advocate worldwide human rights, seek to

preserve and promote labor rights in the context of aglobalizing society, promote open and tolerant societyfor the free exchange of ideas and information, buildglobal consensus over climate change as a commonglobal problem, encourage religious expressions ofuniversal brotherhood, and advance internationalefforts for peaceful conict resolution. A more focusedform of trans-national identity is regionalism. Regionalidentity may be seen simply as an extension of thenational identities of the region, a summation of thecommon aspects of national identities, or there may bea basis for considering regional identity as somethingdistinct in and of itself that is beyond nationalidentities. Subnational collective identities such astribe or sect have also proven to possess increasingly

potent political force in those parts of the world wherethe nation-state is weak or where the state is seen asremote from individual or group concerns.


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Political Culture.

Political culture is comprised of a political system,political tradition, political institution, decisionmaking,faith and religion, and strategic culture. Aristotlefamously once said that Man is by nature a politicalanimal. What does this mean in terms of thoughts,decisions, and actions? What we are most interestedin is how being political is translated into real worldoutcomes. Identity provides a foundation for collectiveunity and mobilization, but politics provide theinstrument and the means to mobilize the collectiveleading to actions and results.

Political culture can be dened as the set of values,beliefs, traditions, perceptions, expectations, attitudes,practices, and institutions that a particular society

harbors about how the political system and processesshould operate and what sort of governmental andeconomic life should be pursued. Political cultureis dynamic and changeable because it is a historicalproduct. Some factors that contribute to the formationof a particular political culture include historicalexperience, religious tradition, collective values,founding principles, geographical location andconguration, strategic environment (for example,relative vulnerability or security), economic capacity,and demographics.

A most important factor of political culture is thephilosophical attitude taken toward the meaning ofprogress and development. If one accepts the notionthat modernity and modernization originated and have

been dened by the West, one must also consider theproblems of western bias in the modernization scenario.The essential question in this debate is whether there is


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only one correct path to modernization (civilization)and its implied sense of progress or a multiplicity of

paths (e.g., a Confucian way that could explain thesuccessful developmental paths taken by East Asiannations). This is an important issue because of itsprofound effect on the kind of political culture thatdevelops. It is also important within the context ofthe American quest to spread liberal democracy andmarket economy around the world. Americas notionof progress, combined with its sense of having a leadingrole to spread it, is intimately involved in the processthat denes interests, policy, and strategy.

An increasingly important factor in the constructionof political culture has been faith and religion. Thishas been especially true in the post-Cold War era andespecially so in societies with signicant nonsecularpolitical traditions. The role of religion in political

culture is not difcult to understand if we recognizethe role of religion in identity formation. A key issuein political culture is the extent to which those whoseidentity is primarily religious or ethnically basedwill also show allegiance to the nation-state and/ortransnational institutions.

Political culture also forms two key supportinginstruments of its expression that are of interestfor policy and strategy: political system and strategicculture. Political system refers to how political power isorganized, with particular emphasis on identifying andunderstanding the basis for power, its distribution, andhierarchy. Consideration of political system includesexamination of the role of history, class, religion, race,ethnicity, gender, geography (physical, social, and

cultural), demography, and power fault lines thatdetermine power centers, connections, and operations.The world has a spectrum of political systems varying


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from failed states and diffuse power structures tocentralized systems such as autocracy. In between these

extremes are various gradations of systems such asdemocracy. Within each of these systems is a spectrumof players and institutions that have political powerand inuence. These players and institutions usuallyhave differential access to tangible and intangibleresources (e.g., material, nancial, inuencial, moral).The state itself is a structure of power that performsessential functions: security, governance, conictresolution, and services. To perform such functions, itneeds to have persuasive and/or coercive capabilitythat is legitimized by social contract in a democracy,the mandate of heaven in some societies, and in othersis literally hijacked by despots. Within all politicalsystems are rules of the game about how power isobtained, used, and transferred.

Strategic culture is a relatively new concept thatarose in the post-Cold War era. It arose in reaction totwo developments. First was the shock of the failureof the social scientic approach in predicting the endof the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Unionand European communism. This led to a search forone or more missing factors that could have led toa more accurate predictive analysis.15 The seconddevelopment was the realization that each nationhad a unique perspective that affected the way itperceived, interpreted, analyzed, and reacted to eventsand developments. It was a realization that no singleuniversal law governed how all nations behaved.These two developments led to considerations of cultureas an important factor in collective behavior (including

that of the nation-state) and thus policy and strategy,and out of it emerged the idea of strategic culture.16Strategic culture can thus be dened as the concept thatconsiders how cultural factors affect strategic behavior.


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It is the unique collective perspective rooted in histor-ical experience, memory of that experience, and collect-

ive values that leads to particular policy and strategyformulations and outcomes. Strategic culture thus bothenables and constrains actions and reactions regardingstrategic choices, priorities, security, diplomacy, andthe use of force.Lantis, a leading scholar of strategicculture, provided a summary of the current state ofstrategic cultural studies:

Today, scholars have rediscovered the theory of strategicculture to explain national security policy. Alastair Johnstons exploration in 1995 of cultural realism inChinese security policy during the Ming dynasty, forexample, suggests that societal characteristics haveinuenced state behavior throughout much of the historyof human civilization. Others have devoted attention tostudying the surprising German and Japanese securitypolicy reticence in the post-Cold War era and have

suggested that their unique antimilitarist strategiccultures account for most of the continuity in theirbehavior from 1990 to the present.17

Resilience.

Resilience is the response to globalization, openness totransnational institutions, and coping with environmental

pressures, and refers to the capacity or ability of a cultureto resist, adapt, or succumb to external forces. It is a testof the cultures stability and coherence and a measureof the endurance of its identity and political culture.Thus, it can help us understand either the permanenceor changeability of the values and interests thatdetermine a particular cultures strategy and policy.

Probably the greatest external force affectingcultures around the world and testing culturalresilience is globalization. Globalization is a termincreasingly used to dene the contemporary world


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order and system. While the specic focus is often onthe economic and the informational, from a historical

perspective globalization should be considered as thecurrent version or phase of modernity that encompassesboth material and non-material dimensions. Therehave been other periods of globalization,18 but theglobalization that we are facing today may be of suchenormity and penetration that we do not yet have thehistorical basis to inform us of its potential impact.

Although globalization is a term most often asso-ciated with economics and information, we considerit in its broadest terms to include economic, social,technological, political, informational, and ideationalfactors. A key notion to consider is interdependenceand a dynamic that is more involuntary than voluntary.Thus there is a sense that globalization is a force thatcannot be controlled, but can only be accommodated

or mitigated. One aspect of the debate on globalizationis whether or not it undermines nationalism. On theone hand, there is plenty of evidence that it does so.On the other hand, it seems, on occasion, to serve as aninstrument to enhance nationalism.

In the mid-1990s, Samuel Huntington raisedthe notion of a Clash of Civilizations withinter-civilizational friction raised by the forces ofglobalization resulting in inevitable conict.19 Thethesis has come under a great deal of criticism, inparticular from those who believe that Huntingtonscivilizational groupings, based largely on religion butnot exclusively so, over-simplies and over-generalizesactual diversity of identity and potential fault lines ofconict. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has been one of

the most vocal critics of the Clash of Civilizationstheory. An economist who integrates economics withsocial action and cultural processes, Sens most recent


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criticism labeled Huntingtons approach crude andmisleading not only because it oversimplies culture

while marginalizing political-economic factors, butalso because it incorrectly leads to the thought thatconict between different cultures is inevitable. Sencalled for a more nuanced and sophisticated analysisthat recognizes the immense diversity and plurality ofidentities while integrating political-economic factorsin determining the causes of violence and conict. Hewrote, . . . poverty and inequality are importantlylinked with violence and lack of peace, but they have tobe seen together with divisions in which other factors,such as nationality, culture, religion, community,language, and literature play their parts.20

Finally, an important component of globalizationis understanding the linkage between globalizationand growing anti-West-ism, and in particular anti-

Americanism. Many people in the world considerglobalization synonymous with Americanization orWesternization. Perhaps it is unfair, but much of theworld also considers America as the primary source ofglobalization, especially those aspects of globalizationthat are seen to undermine traditional society andvalues.

Another important test of resilience is how aculture approaches its integration with transnationalinstitutions such as the UN or the WTO. It may takea parochial position focused on the preservation of itsown interest at the cost of the larger interest for whichthe institution was created. Alternatively, it may bewilling to sacrice parochial interest for the good ofthe larger community. An increasingly important

arena for this interaction is emerging in environmentalconcerns and in particular with carbon emission, globalwarming, and climate change. The Kyoto protocol was


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a key international effort to address this challengecollectively, but international responses have been

mixed. Why that is and how viable are the positionstaken provide insight into each cultures resilience.

CONCLUSION

Two sets of factors determine human thoughts,decisions, behavior, actions, and reactions: biologicaland cultural. Biological factors are more prominent indetermining individual thoughts and behavior thanit would be with human collectivities. At the humancollective level, the level that strategy and policy areconcerned with (e.g., a nation-state), cultural factorsare dominant. It is thus an imperative that strategy andpolicy formulation, the way they are implemented, andthe outcome to be expected must consider the cultural

dimensions. The Analytical Cultural Framework forStrategy and Policy, its three dimensions of Identity,Political Culture, and Resilience, provides one ap-proach. It may not be a denitive approach, and nosuch claim is made, but the framework provides aspecic way to get at the complex issue of how culturegures into strategic and political behavior.

The key points to take away are these: rst, thatstrategy and policy are driven by Ends or Objectives;second, that these Ends are determined by interests;third, that interests are derived from the sense ofpurpose and core values that a particular collectivityconsiders to be the foundation of who they are; fourth,that the sense of purpose and core values arise fromthe elements that constitute the collectivitys Identity;

fth, that Identity is the foundation for collectivemobilization; sixth, that such a mobilized collectivitycan be put into action for political purposes throughits peculiar form of political culture that provides the


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Ways and the Means; and nally, that the resilienceof the groups culture, grounded on the strength of a

common Identity with a shared sense of purpose andvalues, can determine how exible the collectivity is toeither resisting, succumbing or adapting to forces thatchallenge the shared purpose and values.

These points seem simple enough, but to actuallyapply them to a specic nation or a group, subnationalor transnational, requires intense study and analysisof the history of that collectivity. There will be noone right answer, but if we hope to formulate moreeffective strategies and policies then we must makethe effort to make them more answerable to culturalfactors. The very lack of a denitive cultural analysisrequires a multiplicity of efforts. Different approacheswill emphasize different factors. A historically orientedanalysis is likely to emphasize different factors than

those taking a political scientic approach, and yetother factors will be emphasized by anthropological,sociological, economic, psychological, or militaryapproaches. Their sum, however, can provide the sortof comprehensive analysis that can get us closer to thetruth even if we can never get to the nal truth. Thisis the difcult challenge for strategic leaders involvedin strategy and policy. Identity, Political Culture, andResilience provide a starting point for that culturalanalytical journey.

ENDNOTES

1. Jeffrey S. Lantis, Reection and Reappraisal: StrategicCulture and National Security Policy, International Studies Review,Vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 2002, p. 87.

2 . The cultural turn describes developments in the human-ities and the social sciences brought about by various develop-


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ments across the disciplines. Most noted amongst these was theemergence of cultural studies and the dominance of the sociologyof culture within the discipline of Sociology. . . . It describes a shiftin emphasis towards meaning and on culture rather than politicsor economics. This shift of emphasis occurred over a prolongedtime, but particularly since the 1960s. Available at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_turn.

3. From the background information on a symposium onCulture in Conict held at the Defence College of Managementand Technology, DCMT, Shrivenham, UK, on June 10-11, 2008,www.craneld.ac.uk/dcmt/symposia/cultureinconict08.jsp.

4. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Visiting Professor of National SecurityStudies at the Army War Colleges Strategic Studies Institute, 2006-08, wrote of the need for appreciating how the three different levelsof political-military operations, strategic, operational, and tactical,require different kinds of cultural knowledge. Sheila MiyoshiJager, On the Uses of Cultural Knowledge, Carlisle, PA: StrategicStudies Institute, U.S. Army War College, November 2007, www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdfles/PUB817.pdf. Although Jagers levels (strategic, operational, tactical) are different fromthe U.S. Army War Colleges consideration of three dimensionspolicy/strategy, operational, leadership/managementthe moreimportant point is that the two frameworks agree on the notionthat a differentiation must be made on how cultural factors workin different areas; that culture cannot and should not be conatedinto a one size ts all.

5. Two other features that dene the human condition aremans biology and the physical environment.

6. Culture is dened in the draft TRADOCArmy Culture andForeign Language Strategy as

the set of distinctive features of a society or group,including but not limited to values, beliefs, and norms,that ties together members of that society or group andthat drives action and behavior. Additional aspects orcharacteristics of culture are: (1) Culture is shared; thereis no culture of one; (2) Culture is patterned, meaningthat people in a group or society live and think in waysforming denitive, repeating patterns; (3) Culture is


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changeable, through social interactions between peopleand groups; (4) Culture is internalized in the sense that itis habitual, taken for granted, and perceived as naturalby people within the group or society; (5) Culture islearned; (6) The distinctive features that describe aparticular culture include its myths and legends.

Culture is expressed in the real world through symbols andsymbolic systems that represent, reect or contain the meaningsinherent in cultural features, therefore values, beliefs and norms.Learning to identify these symbols and symbolic systems andread the meanings they reect, represent or contain is thus acrucial skill to understanding a particular society and the cultureit contains.

7. Geertz is the founder of the eld of InterpretiveAnthropology, the dominant variant of cultural anthropologythat approaches culture as a symbolic system. Clifford Geertz, TheInterpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 5.

8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, rst publishedin 2 volumes in 1835 and 1840, New York: Penguin Classics,2003.

9. Protestantism and capitalisms complementarity wasexamined in detail by Max Weber in his famous 1904 treatise, TheProtestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

10. Ethnicity is a cultural construct usually based on race,religion, language, and way-of-life traditions. It may be possibleto conceive of a distinctive American ethnicity that transcends theusual determinants by embracing an ethnic identity based on theAmerican idea.

11. The beginning of the modern era is most commonlydened by the advent of the enlightenment and industrializationin the 18th century. The enlightenment created a rational secularworld where man dominated the ideational domain, whileindustrialization created a material world where man dominatedthe physical domain. Divorced from the constraining and limitingpre-modern xation on the divine, the modern era increasinglypromised a future of unlimited possibilities. See Appendix I,


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A Commentary on Modernity and Nationalism, for a fullerdiscussion on the subject. For a closer examination of the roleand place of liberty and freedom as overarching conceptions thatdene what America means, see Appendix II, A Commentaryon Liberty and Freedom as Dimensions of Modernity andNationalism. See Appendix III, A Commentary on Languageas a Dimension of Modernity and Nationalism, for a discussionof how language is an important factor of modernity, but perhapsnot a determinative factor in nationalism.

12. The most prominent example was the failure to predict thecollapse of the Soviet Union. Two important criticisms of rationalchoice theory came from the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddisand political scientist Ian Shapiro. Gaddis criticism of the socialsciences and their focus on the quest for the independent variableappeared in Chapter 3, The Interdependence of Variables,Landscapes of History, London, England: Oxford University Press,2002. Shapiro indicted the social sciences and the humanities asbeing driven more by concern over methods, most importantlyrational choice theory, than by actual real world problems inhis The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2005.

13. Thus the study of identity involves the exploration ofthe same parameters that were mentioned earlier for the studyof culture: formation, agency, process, boundary, variability,stability, coherence, and effect on thinking and decisionmaking.

14. Two important and powerful studies have had anenormous impact on how we view the formation of coherentand stable modern nation-states. Eric Hobsbawm and TerenceRangers The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, England:Cambridge University Press, 1983, provided startling studiesof how nation-states deliberately invented traditions to providelegitimacy by tying the nation-state to its long traditional past andby consolidating its power through invented symbols and rituals.Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities, London, England:Verso, 1983, examined how printed words played a key role invirtually linking all parts of the modern nation-state. Widespreadand cheap printing, print capitalism in Andersons term, is amodern phenomenon. Its ubiquity was an essential mechanismand instrument for rapidly binding citizens of a nation-stateby helping them imagine their membership in that national


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community. For example, print capitalism helped spread the sortof invented traditions that Hobsbawm and Ranger considered. Forsome nations, such as Indonesia, that had never existed as a singlecoherent community prior to its formation in modern times, theconcept of a national community in itself was an invention madepossible to imagine through print capitalism.

15. John Lewis Gaddis, perhaps the worlds foremost historianof the Cold War, wrote,

the efforts theorists have made to create a science ofpolitics that would forecast the future course of worldevents have produced strikingly unimpressive results:none of the . . . approaches to theory . . . that haveevolved since 1945 came anywhere close to anticipatinghow the Cold War would end. . . . If their forecasts failedso completely to anticipate so large an event as thatconicts termination, then one has to wonder about thetheories upon which they were based.

John Lewis Gaddis, International Relations Theory and the Endof the Cold War, International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3, Winter199293, p. 3. Quoted by Kenneth B. Pyle in Reading the NewEra in Asia: The Use of History and Culture in the Making ofForeign Policy,Asia Policy, Vol. 3, January 2007, p. 3.

16. Important works on strategic culture include Peter J.Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms andIdentity in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press,1996; Alastair Iain Johnston, Thinking about Strategic Culture,International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1995, pp. 32-64; Stephen PeterRosen, Military Effectiveness: Why Society Matters, InternationalSecurity, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1995, pp. 5-31; Elizabeth Kier, Cultureand Military Doctrine: France between the Wars, InternationalSecurity, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1995, pp. 65-93; Robert D. Putnam,MakingDemocracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1993; Judith Goldstein and RobertO. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, andPolitical Change, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993; Richard J. Ellis and Michael Thompson, eds., Culture Matters: Essays inHonor of Aaron Wildavsky, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997;


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APPENDIX I

A COMMENTARY ON MODERNITYAND NATIONALISM

In considering how culture operates in the realmof policy and strategy, we can begin with a broad andhistorical approach to understanding two deningfeatures of the modern world: modernity and nationalism(by nationalism, we are specically referring to modernpoliticized nation-state nationalism and identity).These are not simply cultural concepts. They also touchupon other broad elds of knowledge and disciplinethrough which we study man and society (philosophy,history, literature, anthropology, political science,economics, sociology, and psychology). Nevertheless,it is important to recognize that their contemporary

relevance is essentially a cultural one. Therefore, theparticular cultural direction taken by a given society ornation has determined the particular form of identity,political culture, political system, social organization,economic system, and important ideas that infuse anation-state. And these features become important andrelevant in the world of policy and strategy, becausethey are related to the formation and content of nationalvalues and national interests. Modernity is a complex concept. One way to reduceit to a manageable level is to consider it in material andnonmaterial or ideational terms. The most obviouslyrecognizable aspect of modernity is the material one.The Industrial Revolution of the West since the 18thcentury and more recently the Information Age have

changed and modernized the material landscape ofhuman society that made lives more comfortable andconvenient. It also made possible the absolute expansion


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of wealth and the creation of middle class dominantsocieties. For many societies, material modernity made

possible for its members to be able to imagine a middleclass future of security and comfort. It is often thisconception that is the source of social and economicactivity. Some postulate, and with a good number ofsupporting examples from around the world, thatsuch material improvement and the resultant socialfoundations are necessary preconditions for thesuccessful introduction of liberal democracy.

Perhaps more difcult to analyze than materialmodernity, although probably more important, isnonmaterial or ideational modernity. In other words,how modernity affects peoples thoughts, conceptions,perceptions, and imaginations. Thus, ideationalmodernity deals with political, economic, social, andideological transformations. Material modernity made

possible the imagination of a very different future, butthis is only a fragment of the impact that modernity hadon the mind. The beginning of this process coincidedwith material modernity in the late 18th century inthe Age of Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason).New meanings about the purpose of life and societywere generated that challenged old and traditionalmeanings.

The role and place of the individual and theindividuals relationship with collectivities fromneighborhood and village up to the global underwenta signicant change. For most people in pre-modern ortraditional communities, the perceived and meaningfulworld was limited to the local. Except for a relativehandful of merchants and soldiers, most people did

not travel, communicate, or interact beyond the localin pre-modern societies, because it was often neitherphysically possible nor necessary. It was modernity


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that made possible the conception of the modernnation and the world as something tangible. Modern

infrastructure made it physically possible and modernpolitical-economies made it necessary to connect withthe world in an increasingly interdependent manner;the latest version of which we now call globalization.

Modernity also introduced new ways ofconceiving how human societies could be organizedand supported, such as democracy, colonialism,capitalism, and Marxist-Leninism. It might be usefulto keep in mind that these competing ideas alsocreated competing factions within nations, therefore,competing nationalists who held different visions fortheir nation. The existence of these factions often led toviolence, civil conict and division.

At the humanistic level, the most important impactof modernity was its effect on spirituality and, in

particular, on the notions of the divine and the secular.The traditional pre-modern world was one imbued byan ever present divinity that served to explain the worldand all the wonderful and terrible things that existedwithin it, as well as being itself a force to be respectedand feared. Ultimately, however, the divine pre-modernworld was a comforting one, because everything couldbe explained and justied. The increasing emphasison empirical materialism and secularism created arational world that made possible the expansion ofmodernity. But it also led to a profound sense of lossand unsettlement, because the divine could no longerexplain everything and there remained so much beyondunderstanding. Furthermore, divinity was no longerseen as determining the natural or manmade world

and thus became separated from questions regardingwho we are, what we do, how we live, and how welook at the future. However, we should not forget that


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religion and the divine continued to be relevant inanswering the question why we exist.1

The political, economic, and social worlds wereno longer limited to the local in the modern era, butincreasingly encompassed more distant polities,economies, and people in greater and more complexand interdependent ways so that today we can easilythink and imagine in global terms. The modes ofgovernment and the basis of legitimacy and powerchanged as well. At the individual level, it was nowpossible to conceptualize and imagine a limitlessfuture of innite possibilities unconstrained by thosethings that had dened the pre-modern world such astrade, class, gender, and god. Of course the modernworld has its own constraints to include carry-oversfrom the pre-modern such as race, gender, class, andsometimes even faith. But it is the notion of equality,

another distinctly modern conception, that has madeit possible to imagine a world without such divisionsand constraints. And, it is that mode of thinking, ratherthan reality, that is a feature of modernity.

This discussion of modernity is simplied butprovides the beginnings of the basis for understandinghow a particular society entered the modern age,interpreted and adapted modernity for its own needs,and created the kind of contemporary society thatexists today.2 Modernity, however, must also be seenin tandem with the development of nationalism, inparticular activist modern political nationalism andnational identity. Nationalism in a cultural or ethnicsense had long existed in human societies, but thevisceral and emotional political nationalism that we are

more familiar with is a distinct feature of the modernage. This is true whether that nationalism is based on


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a nation-state or on a more ambiguous ethnic-religiouscommunity.3

Three important historical processes in the 20thcentury have had an overwhelming impact on the riseof modern nationalism: worldwide modernization(westernization), decolonization, and the end of theCold War. These historical processes have created aworld of over 200 nation-states, each with a distinctform of nationalism, and also opened the way forthe development of a more politically outspoken andactivist ethno-religious nationalism. The best way tostudy and understand how we arrived at where weare today in terms of modernity and nationalism isthrough history. Without an historical examinationof the contingent turns and twists of a given societyspath toward its contemporary form of modernity andnationalism, we will not gain a deep or what Geertz

called thick understanding of what has determinedcontemporary ideas and forms of identity, interests,values, and world view.4

All modern nation-states achieved, or aretrying to achieve, some acceptable balance betweenmodernization in its original western form and nativeculture, to create a new and unique combination ofmodernity and nationalism. More often than not, thecombination reects an amalgam of native spiritualitywith Western materialism. For example, during EastAsias turbulent period on the cusp of modernity in thelate 19th and early 20th centuries, we nd ideas and slo-gans such as Chinese spirit, western technology andJapanese spirit, western technology to motivate the na-tion. This process continues today as demonstrated by

such recent thoughts as how Confucianism is the sourceof East Asian economic success or Chinese notions ofChinese-style capitalism. It is these processes that


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strategic leaders should be most interested in, becausethey inuence and determine values, interests, policy,

and strategy.

ENDNOTES - APPENDIX I

1. Each reader will undoubtedly nd exceptions to thisgeneralized and simplied discussion of the relationship betweendivinity and secularism as a fundamental point of division betweenthe traditional and the modern. The intent here is to point out afundamental change in the course of human history. No study ofman and society will claim absolute universality. To understandthe continued existence of traditional modes of thought and life isalso to understand how much that particular society has embracedor rejected modernity.

2. This is not to claim that all societies have become modernor have become modern at equal rates or achieved the same levelof modernity, if such comparison was even possible. Thus, whenone encounters a society that is less modern or not modern, itnaturally leads not only to questions of why, but what it meansfor the values and interests of that society and how it might affectbehavior and action.

3. The nationalism typology of Ernest Gellner, one of the greatstudents of nationalism, included the category diaspora nation/nationalism of which the most successful example is Israel. Otherexamples include Armenia, Palestine, and the radical Salast

Islamic movement to reestablish the Caliphate. Ernest Gellner,Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1983, pp. 101-109.

4. Clifford Geertz, Chapter 1, Thick Description: Toward anInterpretive Theory of Culture, in The Interpretation of Cultures,New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 3-30.


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APPENDIX II

A COMMENTARY ON LIBERTY AND FREEDOMAS DIMENSIONS OF MODERNITYAND NATIONALISM IN AMERICA

If we accept the premise that culture can signicantlyinuence policy and strategy, the most logical place tostart our study is through self-examination. The keyquestion is this: How do American forms of modernityand nationalism inuence or determine the wayAmerica formulates policy and strategy? It is importanthere to keep in mind that, in so much as modernityand nationalism are culturally based and that culturecan change through time and space, we must considerboth the continuity and changes of these forcesthrough our history. What specic aspects of American

modernity and nationalism are relevant? Consider thecircumstances of our revolutionary national originand the role and inuence of our conceptions andexperiences of revolution, Christianity/Protestantism,freedom, liberty, Manifest Destiny, democracyand republicanism, capitalism, the Civil War, thevalorization of innovation and adaptation, and middleclass values, among other cultural factors. Americanidentity, political culture, and both fueling and copingwith globalization, are all affected by this foundation.More importantly, out of this foundation was formeda distinctive American world view, which provided abasis for understanding and sustaining its position inthat world, and a mode of thinking about policy andstrategy in attaining that position. These and other

cultural forces have inuenced policy and strategy inthe past and the present, and will do so in the future.

An important dimension of American modernityand nationalism concerns the concepts of liberty and


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freedom. Among the many studies on this subject, DavidHackett Fischers 2005 study Liberty and Freedom offers

perhaps the most accessible.1

An important insight isthat the concepts of liberty and freedom have neither acommon origin nor meaning, and that this distinctionwas meaningful in their effect on America society andhistory. And though both words originated from theWest, they did so from two very different traditions.Liberty is a term that is derived from Latin and Greek,while freedom has a Northern Europe linguisticorigin. Liberty is about earned individual privilege,while freedom is the notion that all have the right tobe accepted as members of a free community whilehaving the obligation to accept others who are different.Thus, liberty exerts afragmenting force on society withindividuals going their separate ways (i.e., centrifugal)whilefreedom is a cementing force (i.e., centripetal) that

embraces all members of a community.For Fischer, one way to analyze and understand

American history was to look at it through the lens ofhow these concepts, liberty and freedom as culturalentities, changed in meaning over time. At differingtimes and places, the boundaries and the terms of whatliberty and freedom meant converged and diverged,contracted and expanded. And yet, Fischer detecteda larger historical pattern of absolute expansion ofboth liberty and freedom in America. Compared tothe 18th century, Americans today have absolutelygreater liberty as individuals, while American societyhas become much more open to accepting diversityas evidenced by the change in status and views aboutwomen, ethnic-racial-religious minorities, voting

rights, civil rights, homosexuals, and social welfareamong other groups.


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ENDNOTES - APPENDIX II

1. David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual Historyof Americas Founding Ideas, New York and Oxford, UK: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005.


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APPENDIX III

A COMMENTARY ON LANGUAGEAS A DIMENSION OF MODERNITY

AND NATIONALISM

The examination of the conceptions of liberty andfreedom and their etymologically distinct origins andmeaning leads to considering language as an importantdimension in the cultural study of modernity andnationalism. It is easy to forget that contemporary formsof modernity and nationalism are based on Westernconceptions, inventions and creations, and that mostof the terms and concepts associated with modernityand modern nationalism did not exist in non-Westernsocieties; they had to be purposefully invented. Termsto describe modern political and economic processes

that originated in the West required either a redenitionof existing words (risking ambiguity in meaning)or the creation of entirely new words (requiring amechanism to popularize them). Modern political andeconomic concepts, some seemingly universal, such asliberty, freedom, nation-state, constitution, democracy,political party, election, citizen, national assembly,civil rights, and all the technical terms associated withthe new inventions of the Industrial Age, did not existoutside of the West. Thus, native terms for them maynot hold the same meaning and intent as they do inthe West. Contemporary meanings for these terms areoften a product of the complex historical experienceof the collective society. Therefore, what the termoriginally meant in the early period of modernization

may have changed to something different today, justas the conceptions of liberty and freedom changedthrough American history.


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A good example of the linguistic dimension ofmodernity and nationalism can be found in East Asia

among nations that use Chinese characters. Many ofthe terms of modernity and nationalism were inventedby Japan by either combining traditional Chinesecharacters in new ways or sometimes creating newcharacters. Japan did this because it was the rst EastAsian nation, indeed the rst non-Western nation, tosuccessfully embrace modernity and nationalism tobecome a powerful and rich modern industrializednation by the end of the 19th century. Japanslinguistic products remain the foundation of modernterminology throughout East Asia today, therebyproviding a conveniently common lexicon for theregional development of modernity and nationalism.

And yet, upon close examination, we can detect thatthe character-based words often did not necessarily

convey precisely the same meaning as their Englishcounterparts. A major part of the problem is thatChinese characters did not simply represent sounds,but individually contained a long cultural history ofaccumulated and modied meanings. A good exampleis the term used for democracy. The term is formedby a new combination of two old characters ().1

The rst character means people as in the masses,but historically this equated to feudal subjects and inparticular farmers or peasants. The second charactermeans lord or master and historically refers to thelandlord or feudal lord. Combined, it literally means,people as master of the land. There is here the notionthat suggests a dictatorship of the people. This israther different from the Greco-Western notion of

considering democracy as rule of the majority. TheChinese compound places greater cultural emphasison the people as a monolithic and unied entity. This


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emphasis on the unied collective is perfectly in accordwith the traditional East Asian Confucian emphasis on

the group over the individual and, one can argue, isrelated to a different notion of democracy in East Asiathan in the West.

Aside from the linguistic dimension of modernity,can we say that a language, by itself, can provide acentral basis for political nationalism? Clearly, languageis a factor in nationalism. Language is important bothas an actual source of common identity and also as aninstrument for forming a shared identity. However, therelationship between language and nationalism seemsto be complex, with many caveats, exceptions andeven contradictions. There are two ways to considerthis issue.

First, a purely linguistically based identity appearsto be quite rare, if it exists at all. The Basques, Catalans,

Bretons, Quebecois, Armenians, or the Welsh uselanguage to solidify claims to a broader set of historicalsymbols, experiences, and values that identify them asseparate. Language has also been used for nationalisticpurposes by many nations in the 19th and the 20thcenturies. Three examples of this are the role of theGerman language in the creation of Germany as a nationin the 19th century; the role of Italian to assert its uniquenational identity, also in the 19th century; and Japansattempt to replace Korean with Japanese during Koreascolonization in the 20th century. Undeniably, languageis important for national identity, but is it sufcient? Theseemingly linguistically based nationalist movements,in fact, do not necessarily have a unique language or adirect correlation between linguistic distribution and

the area of common national identity. Bretons sharea wider linguistic heritage with other Gaelic speakersof northwestern Europe. Quebecois speak French but


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do not identify as French nationals. Armenians have anation-state, and yet, Turkish-Armenians clamor for a

separate identity. The German linguistic spread seemsto have been far wider than the area incorporated intothe 19th century German nation. The common useof Chinese written language and classics for over athousand years in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, adeep source of a shared cultural tradition, have createdwidely divergent, even confrontational, forms ofnationalism in those countries today. The crucial factorseems to be history and politics of the group based onits ethnic identity and perceived injustices rather thana common unique language. In these cases, languageseems to have served merely as a cultural symbol of aunied historical experience and current status ratherthan as a fundamental source of national identity.

Second, while ethnic or religion based nationalism

has undeniable political force similar to nation-statenationalism, there appears to be no example of alinguistically based nationalism with similar politicalpotency. Language does not seem to be on the samecategorical plane as ethnicity and religion nor asnation-state. Rather, language should be seen as one ofthe supporting cultural forces behind nationalism. It isclearly one of the principal instruments for how cultureactually operates and transmits. Benedict Andersonsemphasis of the role of print capitalism in the creationof an imagined Indonesi

pub919 cultural dimensions of strategy and policy

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