The study of strategic culture to explain geopolitical behaviour has been controversial primarily because its critics argued that culture was mostly explanatory in retrospect, and in any case, less informative than calculations of realpolitik.
Yet, culture itself has enjoyed a new prominence in public discourse over the past decade, with prominent commentators saying thing such as “politics is downstream from culture.” This is palpable to ordinary people. So it cannot be that culture only influences domestic politics and somehow stops at the water’s edge.
One reason why cultural explanations get a bad rap is because some of their proponents offer them as cultural determinism: that only culture matters and explains everything.
That’s obviously not true. Political phenomena and decisions have multiple causes: in addition to culture, we can think of context, constraints, ideological preferences, electoral calculations, policy marksmanship, emergence and chance. The outcome is a complex product of a mix of many factors.
So culture plays a part, and that can change over time and circumstances. Broadly speaking, we could say that the global wave of liberal internationalism in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 suppressed the cultural factors in world politics and economics. This is no longer the case: the world’s nationalists and conservatives are announcing this from their rooftops, podcasts, conferences and high political offices.
One reason for the resurgence of culture is that people go back to ‘tried and tested truths’ during times of uncertainty. They fight globalization’s threat to their identity by reinforcing the culture they consider essential to their lives. Whatever be the reason, realists ought to pay serious attention it.
If we ignore strategic culture, we are likely to accept that Russia’s Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because he is an expansionist dictator with a big ego.
Yet a study of Russian history suggests that for nearly eight centuries, Moscow has seen its defence in pushing its frontiers as far away from its centre as possible and preferred to have buffer states between itself and its most powerful adversaries. Even the Soviet construction of the Warsaw Pact, signed by countries separating it from Western Europe, can be seen as a form of the same old strategy.
Ukraine’s attempted embrace of the European Union risked eliminating a major post-Soviet buffer. This explanation is not to condone Putin’s aggression against a sovereign state. Rather, it is to improve our understanding of world affairs so that we can make more informed choices.
Back in 2012, Yan Xuetong, one of China’s foremost strategic thinkers, told me that ancient Chinese thought plays an important role in Beijing’s decision-making.
Indeed, any analysis of Chinese policies will be incomplete unless it considers the Middle Kingdom mindset. Chinese strategic culture sees the Han emperor as the only sovereign with a mandate from heaven, ruling over a world of kow-towing tributaries of various rank.
In fact, in the 16th century, when envoys of European rulers started turning up at Chinese ports, they were put in prison if they insisted that their king was a sovereign equal of the Chinese emperor. Power is the idiom of politics between China and the world, although outright warfare itself is a least preferred option.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s plans and even the visual design of the summits Beijing hosts are imperial in style, whatever Marx, Lenin or even Mao Zedong might have to say about emperors.
Islamic strategic culture sees the world divided into a transnational community of Muslims (the Ummah) whose only sovereign is Allah. Traditional jurists see the world divided between Dar-ul Islam, the realm of Islam, and Dar-ul Harb, the realm of war. An intermediate Dar-ul Sulh is recognized by some as a place where Muslims and non-Muslims can live together in peace.
What about India? Both the Arthashastra and Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata see the subcontinent as comprising multiple sovereigns, and a king’s ambition is to master them all.
I have argued that India’s strategic culture—from the Mauryas through the Mughals and British raj to the Republic of India—has desired to unite the vast subcontinent under one rule. They could only do this by respecting diversity with pluralism; Kautilya’s Arthashastra enjoins the victorious king to worship the gods of his new subjects as his own.
The extent of unity and size of the state depend on the scope of pluralism that governs it. At the same time, Indian strategic culture was notoriously unmindful of forward defence. Khyber was mostly unwatched and invaders were met after they had crossed the Indus and reached the plains of Panipat.
Culture is socially transmitted information. It spreads geographically and changes over time, especially after encountering other cultures, technologies and ideologies. Like variants of biological species that thrive when the environment changes, some aspects of culture become more important in certain circumstances.
Cultural evolution has, er, evolved as a scientific discipline over the past two decades. Today, it offers insights for strategists and public policy analysts.
The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy