Culture and National Identity
'During the Cold War, it was possible for scholars to overlook the effects of culture and national identity on foreign policy: one could argue the constraints of the bipolar rivalry dwarfed, in large part, the domestic idiosyn-
\ crasies of nations. However, in the post-Cold War era, that luxury no
| longer exists. National identity and culture shape the domestic motivations and imperatives that now seem as or more important than international balance-of-power considerations in foreign policymaking. When we
| inquire concerning the belief systems of political leaders, as we did in chap-
;i ter 1, we simply cannot ignore the political socialization the leader received in his national culture. That socialization, filled with history and legend,
| heroes and enemies, successes and failures, God arid luck, form much of
\ the basic architecture of political belief systems.
Since we know this at an intuitive level, frameworks that explain foreign
% policy differences on the basis of differing cultures can be quite persuasive.
: A clear case in point is the work of political scientist Samuel Huntington,
i who has argued that the post-Cold War world will see a clash of civilizations (1993, 1996). More specifically, Huntington predicts that a Confudan-
: Islamic axis will oppose the West and its allies. Huntington points out that the borders of Islamic civilization are "bloody," with open conflicts from Bosnia to Bangladesh, from Nigeria to Xinjiang. China is rising as a possible
, new challenger to the might of the Western superpower. An alliance of convenience may serve the interests of both Islamic and Chinese culture, and
.. glimpses of it may be seen in China's courting of Iran, Sudan, and other Islamic nations.
In addition to this meta-game of global dominance, there are more regionally focused cultural games as well. How could one interpret contem-i  porary Asian politics without knowledge of the deep resentment held by many in Asia against Japan and Japanese culture, for example? Or the cul-
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tural antipathy between India and China, which broke out in the hostilities of 1962? Huntington would suggest that most conflicts in the world have cultural roots.
However, upon looking a bit deeper, one finds that culture turns out to be as elusive as it is intuitive. Actually using culture as part of a rigorous explanation turns out to be a much harder task than first imagined. Let us see how Foreign Polios Analysis (FPA) has struggled to incorporate national identity and culture into its explanations of foreign policy and foreign policy decisionmaking.
The research agenda of the field of Foreign Policy Analysis should be well suited to address questions of culture and identity in foreign policy, striving as it does for actor-specific theory, which combines the strengths of general theory with those of country expertise. Nevertheless, one of the least developed angles of analysis in the subfield, in my opinion, is the study of how societal culture and issues of identity affect foreign policy choice.
This is not terribly surprising, for several reasons. First, the study of how cultural differences affect behavior has been, for the most part, the domain of social sciences other than International Relations (IR). Most scholarly work on culture is to be found in the journals of anthropology, sociology, social psychology, organizational behavior, and other related disciplines. In part, the paucity of such literature in International Relations stems from the now-discredited work on national character from earlier this century. Though a few substantial works have been written since that time in International Relations and comparative politics, the trouble is, according to the author of several such works, Lucian Fye, that culture quickly becomes "the explanation of last resort" (Pye, 1991, 504). Everything that cannot be explained by existing theories in Foreign Policy Analysis is ascribed to "cultural differences." Explanations of last resort, however (e.g., "The Chinese act that way because that is the Chinese way"), are virtually never explanations at all (Pye/ 1988, 6; see also Gaenslen, 1997).
In this chapter we will overview the evolution of thinking about culture and national identity as they relate to foreign policy. First, however, we must clarify our central concepts.
CONCEPTUALIZING CULTURE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
When we speak of culture and national identity as they relate to foreign policy, we are seeking the answers that the people of a nation-state would give to the following three questions: "Who are we?", "What do 'we' do?", and "Who are they?" Though it is possible each citizen would give more or less different
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answers, still each has some conception of, say, what it means to be an American or a Turk or a Russian. And that conception is also tied to an understanding of what it is Americans or Turks or Russians would do in certain foreign policy situations. Furthermore, we have conceptualizations of other nations and their peoples. Often, these are very different from how the people of that other nation conceive of themselves. Think of how Americans view Mexico and Mexicans, or Israel and Israelis—and vice versa.
Who are "we"? There are times, particularly in the wake of great systemic or subsystems change, when a nation-state may encounter profound uncertainty on this point. When there is great uncertainty about who "we" are, various power nodes within the nation-state will begin to answer that question according to their political aims. To be successful in steering that discussion, these forces will have to tap into deep cultural beliefs actively shared or lying dormant among a large majority of the populace. In such times, the primacy of the question "who are 'we'?" may trump all other questions of success or failure or risk in foreign policy.
What is it "we" do (or should do)? Part of defining who "we" are is to define what "we" typically do or what "we" should do, given who "we" are. the noblest elements of what Breuning (1997) calls the nation's "heroic history" will be called upon during these times. Nations may choose actions more in line with their heroic history than with more dispassionate norms of strategy and rational choice. There may also be times when a nation is more confused about what "we" do than about who "we" are. Perhaps that is the lot of the United States in foreign policy now, given the polarizing debate over the invasion of Iraq. In such cases, it may not only be our heroic history that is called upon to help guide our actions, but our notable failures as well. We have already seen the invocation of lessons learned from the Vietnam War in the national debate over Iraq.
Who are "they"? Culture not only alleviates concern over our own identity, it helps alleviate concern over whom we are dealing with. In all stories, myths, and histories, there are "others" who have played important roles, good, bad, or indifferent. In understanding who a new "they" are, it is often helpful to conceive of the other as playing one of these more well-known roles. Notice how Saddam Hussein was "another Hitler," but then Slobodan Milosevic can be "another Saddam Hussein" as well as "another Hitler." Not only can "they" be external to the nation, but there may also be subnational forces that can be scripted to play certain culturally understood roles—the Quisling role, the Neville Chamberlain role, the Jimmy Carter role, the Lyndon Johnson role, and so forth.
These aspects of national identity are not carved in stone, nor do they spring from tablets of stone. Rather, national identity is political and is being shaped and reshaped every moment by society. Discourse and interaction within our society are the engines of national identity. The jokes we
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tell ourselves on late-night television, the op-ed columns in our newspapers, the blogs, the radio talk shows, the books and movies, our dinner table conversations—all of these inform and over time help change the answers to the three questions noted above. We often term the transitory results of all of this social discourse "culture." Thus we speak of "culture wars," and "culture change."
In a way, we cannot speak of issues of national identity without reference to culture as it arises from the continual process of social discourse.
Culture is simultaneously one of the most elusive and most easily understood concepts in social science. It is easily understood because all have had the experience of interacting with someone whose background led them to do and say things that seemed surprising or unpredictable. When was the last time your mother-in-law visited you and decided to clean house? Culture's consequences are very real, even to lay observers. The elusiveness of culture becomes apparent when one attempts to define it in a theoretical sense. The difficulty is not so much centered on what to include in such a definition, but rather what to exclude. For example, is the way my mother-in-law cleans house part of her personality, or a product of her culture, or both? And how would one answer the question? If she cleans house differently than I, how can it be a cultural difference if we are both white, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, American mothers of the early years of the twenty-first century? The vagueness of culture's boundaries are echoed in the all-encompassing but pithy definitions of culture to be found in the social science literature: for example, culture is the "human-made part of the environment" (Herskovits, 1955), culture is "the software of the mind" (Hofstede, 1991), culture is "a set of schedules of reinforcement" (Skinner, 1981), culture is "any interpersonally shared system of meanings, perceptions, and values" (Millennium, 1993). Things do not become any clearer as one moves to more detailed definitions of culture. The following five have been chosen not for their uniqueness as definitions of culture, but for their typicality in the theoretical literature on culture:
"I use the term culture to mean an organized body of rules concerning the ways in which individuals in a population should communicate with another, think about themselves and their environments, and behave toward one another and towards objects in their environments" (LeVine, 1973).
"Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reaction, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essentia) core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values" (Kluckhohn, 1951).
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3. "Culture is a set of human-made objective and subjective elements that in the past have increased the probability of survival and resulted in satisfaction for the participants in an ecological niche, and thus became shared among those who could communicate with each other because they had a common language and they lived in the same time and place" (Triandis, 1994).
4. "Culture [consists] of learned systems of meaning, communicated by means of natural language and other symbol systems, having representational, directive, and affective functions, and capable of creating cultural entities and particular sense of reality. Through these systems of meaning, groups of people adapt to their environment and structure interpersonal activities" (d'Andrade, 1984).
5. "[Culture is] an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life" (Geertz, 1973).
With definitions like these, it is not hard to see why culture became "the explanation of last resort" for a field such as International Relations, which was heavily influenced by behavioralism. What "crucial experiment" could be constructed capable of falsifying the hypothesis that culture affects what nations do in the international arena? Indeed, all human activity— including foreign policy—becomes both a product of and a component of culture. The seamlessness of culture rendered problematic early behavioral-ist attempts to separate and then relink in causal fashion the independent variable of culture and the dependent variable of national policy; we call these early attempts of the 1940s and 1950s the "national character studies." If the German national character could be described as "methodical," their policy would evince the same characteristic; ditto for the "stoic" Russians and the "xenophobic" Japanese.
National character studies were vulnerable to criticism on several grounds: methodological, theoretical, and moral. For example, the methodologies used predisposed one toward potentially tautological inferences: if a sample group perceived Germans as methodical, this proved significant psychological inducement to perceive whatever Germans did as methodical. Likewise, on theoretical grounds, the fact that individual variation within national groups always exceeded variation between national groups on any given characteristic was very troubling. Last, national character studies seemed a natural bedfellow of the "racial psychology" studies, whose worst excesses contributed a "scholarly" rationale for genocidal Nazi policies.
However, the twenty-first century brings with it a substantially new con-
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text than students of culture possessed in the 1940s. For one, the world after 9/11 now takes cultural differences very seriously as a potent source of foreign policy behavior. Second, the study of culture has matured substantially over the last six or seven decades. And so we begin to see a small interface between the study of culture and the study of foreign policy developing in International Relations (and specifically FPA). Let's look first at the evolution of the study of culture.
The Study of Culture
The study of culture has had a fascinating genesis, worthy of many book-length treatments in its own right. From the thought of Emile Dürkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Margaret Mead, and others through the hiatus of such thought in the 1960s to the renaissance of the study of culture in the 1980s is an intellectual journey well worth taking. Let us concentrate on the noteworthy themes of the renaissance period for their possible applicability to the development of a culture/foreign policy research agenda.
Though definitions of culture continue to be very inclusive of the human experience, there appears to be a subtle trifurcation in the conceptualization of culture in recent works. There are scholars who emphasize culture as the organization of meaning; there are others for whom culture remains primarily value preferences; and a third group of scholars conceptualizes culture as templates of human strategy. Of course, a natural reaction is to assert that culture includes all three elements, and indeed, it is futile to impose a hard-and-fast distinction between the different conceptions. However, as we have seen, the more inclusive view of culture is the least useful in a research sense. The particular emphasis of the three groups of scholars has allowed each to ask (and answer) more concrete questions about the consequences of culture than was possible in earlier periods. Indeed, a close look at the longer definitions presented earlier will reveal the following emphases:
Culture as the organization of meaning. If culture is a system of shared meaning, how is it constructed, perpetuated, and modified? Also, how does one system of shared meaning compare to another system, and what are the ramifications of interaction between two very different ontologies? Because meanings are shared through interpersonal expression, the study of such expression, whether it be art, writing, film, conversation, and so forth, is often the focus of such analysis. The classic work in this category would be Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz insisted that a structural-functional explanation of, say, a Balinese cockfight, would miss the more holistic meaning the cockfight held for the community. In what way can an outsider become privy to meaning within a society? Alluding to
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theWhorfian hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) that language itself colors thinking, many researchers look to language use as a key. One approach, for example, is to analyze public discourse on issues of high controversy. Luker (1984), for example, is able to trace the contorted evolution of public moral discourse on abortion, and discovers that the meaning of abortion has seesawed back and forth over the centuries, and depended in large part upon which authorities were accepted as having highest legitimacy in the society at the time. Others have asked how it is that scientists come to regard a finding as "important" or even "scientific" in the first place (see, for example, Root-Bernstein, 1989; Pickering, 1984). Comparisons of the meanings of certain phenomena in one culture as versus those in another have uncovered some startling differences (see Triandis, 1994, 97-99; Bleiker, 1993). Nor need we be confined to analyzing verbal communication: nonverbal messages can construct and share meaning, as well. Of course, differences in nonverbal communication can derail otherwise normal interactions: one oft-cited example is the propensity of the Japanese to smile when being reprimanded (see Argyle, 1975).
Culture as value preferences. This view of culture follows the lead of Weber, Parsons, and others in suggesting that culture tells us what to want, to prefer, to desire, and thus to value. Such motivations prompt certain predictable behaviors—-"syndromes"—in cultures. To the extent that culture has been studied in modern political science and International Relations, this is the primary approach taken (Almond and Verba's 1963 The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations would be the classic example). Geert Hofstede's seminal study (1980) dimensionalizes cultures according to their affinity for five factors; individualism/collectivism, high/ low gender differences, degree of uncertainty avoidance, power distance (low/high), and long-term/short-term orientation (Hofstede scores for about fifty countries can be found at www.geert-hofstede.com). Hofstede was able to show a nonrandom geographic pattern of cultures with respect to such values. The immense literature on organizational behavior in different cultures starts primarily from a Hofstede-type theoretical basis (see McDaniels and Gregory, 1991; Tse et al., 1988). Triandis discerns three cultural dimensions, which may interrelate to form unique cultural proclivities: cultural complexity, cultural "tightness," and individualism (1994, 156-79).
Closer to home, the work of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky can be placed in this category as well. Wildavsky, for instance (building on the work of Douglas), classifies cultures into four types: fatalist, hierarchist, egalitarian, and individualist. He is able to predict the responses of each type of culture to resource scarcity, nature, change, alliances, and other broad issues (see Wildavsky, 1987; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky, 1990).
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Other political scientists have used this approach to focus in on a particular culture {see Pye, 1968; Solomon, 1971).
There is also a growing research effort in the comparative study of ethical systems. Continuing the approach of Max Weber in his pioneering work on the ethics of Protestantism, Hinduism, and Confucianism (Weber, 1930, 1951a, 1951b, 1963), a new generation of scholars compares traditions of moral reasoning in dealing with common ethical problems (see Green, 1978; Little and Twiss, 1978; Chidester, 1987; Carman and Juergensmeyer, 1990). For example, what are the differences in the Christian just war tradition and the Islamic just war tradition? Such differences in moral reasoning based on culture may skew traditional assumptions of rational choice theory (see, for example, Sen, 1982, 1987). They may also lead to distinctive patterns of economic development, with some cultures possessing a distinct advantage simply because of their culture (see Kahn, 1993). There may even be implications for conflict: in a famous study, Nisbett and Cohen (1996) assert that white males from the American South are more likely to become physically violent when provoked because of their ancestors' deep roots in Scotland as pig farmers.
Culture as templates for human strategy. One group of scholars argues that the values espoused by members of a culture are not sufficient to explain actual behavior by those members. Often, there is great slippage between professed ends and the actual use of means. These scholars assert that the more important explanatory variable is the capability advantages bestowed by one's culture. One will play the game one's culture has conditioned one to play well. Indeed, Ann Swidler goes so far as to say: "Action is not determined by one's values. Rather, action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural competences. . . . (W)hat endures is the way action is organized, not its ends. . . . [Pjeople will come to value ends for which their cultural equipment is well suited" (1986, 275, 276, 277). What culture provides its members is a repertoire or palette of adaptive responses from which members build off-the-shelf strategies of action. What matters is not the whole of culture, but rather "chunks" of "prefabricated" cultural response. We may not be able to predict choice and construction of a particular response by a particular member of the culture, but we can know what is on the shelf ready and available to be used or not. As Linton argues, "(i)ndividuals tend to imitate the culture patterns of their society when confronted by a new situation, then to take thought as the situation is repeated and try to adjust these patterns to their individual needs" (1945, 104). A related approach is taken by the "dramaturgical school," in which culture provides scripts and personae that are reenacted and subtly modified over time within a society (see Wuthnow, 1987; Kurtz, 1986).
It is in this area of cultural research that we also find efforts linking cultural background with information-processing proclivities. Studies from
many fields have pointed out that rationality itself may mean different things in different cultures (see, for example, Motokawa, 1989). Douglas and Wildavsky, for instance (1982), discovered that fatalistic cultures do not engage in probabilistic thinking, and thus perceive risk taking (a sub-field of rational choice study) in a very different fashion from nonfatalistic cultures. Ehrenhaus (1983) argues that culture may predispose a person to certain types of explanations and certain types of attribution and inferenc-mg. This, in turn, makes certain errors in reasoning (Type I or Type II errors) more prevalent in some cultures than in others.
THE INTERFACE
As noted previously, there does exist a small interface between the study of culture and the study of foreign policy. To illuminate this interface literature, I have tried to make a distinction between foreign policy studies with little or no attention paid to cultural factors, cultural studies of particular nations ("country studies," "area studies") with no specific implications for foreign policy, and cultural studies of particular nations or regions with identifiable implications for foreign policy research. Only the last category of research is included. However, the other two categories of research are potential sources of theoretical and empirical insight that should not be overlooked.
As we review the interface literature, we will pay particular attention to the creation and modification of methodologies capable of asking and answering questions concerning the culture/foreign policy nexus.
Shared systems of meaning in foreign policy and foreign policymaking. Rather than accepting preferences and beliefs in International Relations at face value, a new generation of scholars asks how they were formed. In effect deconstructing statements of international reality, these scholars untangle the threads that culminated in the articulation of such statements. Many of the threads would fall under the first category of culture definitions: shared, evolving meanings conditioned by historical precedent and contemporary experience. We see and believe and desire what our horizons of the moment permit us to see and believe and desire—but these horizons are constantly shifting.
One lesson for the culture/foreign policy research agenda to be derived from postmodernist critique is that it may be fruitless to search for an exclusively political culture. The notion that political science studies some subset of culture called political culture is long-standing (see Almond and Verba, 1963; Inglehart, 1988). Yet, at least from a cursory reading of recent American politics, it is almost impossible not to see the political horizons shift iheir shape according to trends in broader societal culture, and vice versa.
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(How would Bill Clinton's horizons have been different if Doonesbury had chosen a box of Wheaties instead of a floating waffle as his symbol?)
Definitions of political culture are virtually indistinguishable from definitions of general culture. Here's one: political culture is all of the discourses, values, and implicit rules that express and shape political action and intentions, determine the claims groups may and may not make upon one another, and ultimately provide a logic of political action. Cross out every political: "Culture is all of the discourses, values, and implicit rules that express and shape actions and intentions." Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It sounds like our earlier all-encompassing definitions of culture. The postmodern critique suggests that things political can be deconstructed and shown to have their roots in broad systems of shared meaning. To snip the overtly political elements of culture from their roots is to cut the researcher off from the wellsprings and source of change and permutation of political horizons. After all, another definition of culture is "common ways of dealing with social problems" (Triandis, 1994, 17). Dealing with social problems (or, dressed up in political science jargon, "value allocation processes in situations of conflict over scarce resources") is the study of politics. Nor should we forget the important feminist contribution on this score: the personal is the political.
However, it is in politics that cultural conversations become most explicit: What ends should the nation pursue? Using what means? Foreign policy is arguably at the very high end on a continuum of conversational explicitness (though it may not seem so from the receiving end!). Foreign policy is first, a formal affair because second, foreign policy concerns relations with outgroups. Outgroups serve simultaneously as a source of national identity (we're not like them) and as a threat to national identity (we must resist becoming like them). Thus we are led to theorize that the relationship between a culture and the acts it performs in the international arena must be fairly strong. Vertzberger sums up the conundrum this way:
It is extremely difficult to positively prove the causal links, direct and indirect, between societal-cultural variables and foreign-policy-related information processing. The difficulty in directly observing societal-cultural effects, however, does not prove the opposite, that is, that societal-cultural influences are minor or negligible. I believe that the influences are important, even though they are not always tangible and easily observable" (1990, 261).
If one were to search for systems of shared meaning in foreign policy and foreign policymaking, how would one go about it, methodologically speaking? How would one tap into postmodernist insights to clarify the connection between culture and foreign policy? Let's examine five research efforts: Sylvan, Majeski, and Milliken (1991); Boynton (1991); Lötz (1997); Baner-
jee (1991, 1997); and Tunander (1989). All four projects seek to uncover the meaning, the basis, and the rules of political discourse in concrete circumstances (see also Chan, 1993, and Alker et a!., 1991). Sylvan, Majeski, and Milliken's, Lotz's and Boynton's are within-nation studies, and Baner-jee's and Tunander's are between-nation studies.
Sylvan and his coauthors examine the mountains of material generated by the national security establishment with reference to the conduct of the. Vietnam War. Sylvan, Majeski, and Milliken ask the origins of war policy recommendations in this material. When did a statement become a "bona fide" recommendation? How did it fit into the flow of recommendations and counter-recommendations? How did persuasion occur? On what doxa was the entire discourse based? Sylvan's group schematically maps the river of recommendations in order to answer such questions. They see their work as a cultural investigation:
our emphasis is cultural: how, within a particular foreign policy community, certain statements are fitted together into a comprehensible recommendation. . . . [Our model] must of necessity take into account the construal within a particular culture of certain statements as arguments, evidence, conclusions, and so forth.... [OJur concern is with how, for a given bureaucratic and political culture, various statements are taxonomically related to each other so as jointly to compose a bona fide policy recommendation (327-28).
Boynton uses the official record of hearings of congressional committees to investigate how committee members make sense of current events and policies. By viewing the questions and responses in the hearings as an unfolding narrative, Boynton is able to chart how "meaning" crystallizes for each committee member, and how they attempt to share that meaning with other members and with those who are testifying. Boynton posits the concept of "interpretive triple" as a way to understand how connections between facts are made through plausible interpretations. Boynton is then able to illuminate how plausibility is granted to an interpretation—in effect, ascertaining which interpretations are plausible within the cultural context created by the hearings. Boynton (1996) extends those ideas to political ad campaigns—how can we understand why some ads are successful and some are not? As Boynton puts it, "In presidential elections, citizens turn their attention to politics and candidates turn their attention to citizens. The interaction is constructing political culture; some constructions of the world of international affairs are reaffirmed and new understandings develop." Political ads, then, are a source of continuing cultural dialogue within the nation.
Hellmut Lotz is interested in how politicians make use of the heroic myths citizens hold about their countries to mobilize support or diminish
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opposition to new policy initiatives by the government. His case study concerns the controversy over the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. The public was deeply divided, and opposition was spearheaded by Ross Perot, who warned of a "giant sucking sound" if NAFTA were to be ratified—which sucking would pull jobs from the United States into Mexico. Then vice president Al Gore was tapped to debate Perot live on national television in November 1993. Before the debate, almost 30 percent of the electorate was undecided about NAFTA extension to Mexico, with the remainder almost evenly divided between supporters and opponents. In polls taken after the debate, 57 percent of the American public favored ratification. How could one debate have so moved the undecideds? Lotz analyzes the heroic myths of the United States and uncovers both well-known elements, such as the American dream and populism, as well as two variants of the myth of American exceptionalism: world leadership versus isolationism. He content analyzes the debate for the invocation of these myths. What he discovers is that the debate involving elements of populism was a wash, because both Gore and Perot were upper-class elites. Perot, as a billionaire businessman, could not speak to the issue of whether NAFTA was designed to benefit big business. However, their invocation of the other three myths differed substantially: Gore emphasized the American dream and American leadership for the world. Perot emphasized the need for America to remain isolated and protected from the rest of the world because of America's perceived vulnerability. Lotz points to Gore's summation, "This is a choice between the politics of fear and the politics of hope. It's a choice.between the past and the future. It's a choice between pessimism and optimism, . . . We're not scared." Gore tapped into what Americans want to believe about themselves (strong, leaders, optimistic), and Perot tapped into issues that Americans do not want to believe about themselves (vulnerable, scared, pessimistic). No wonder the response to the debate was so dramatic: Gore had skillfully manipulated the core self-identity myths of Americans.
Banerjee extends the notion of communication as constructing culture (or shared meaning) to interstate relations. Each state's "psychocultural structure contains a variety of action rules, encoded in the language of acts, which trigger themselves when certain acts are perceived" (1997, 319). The language of acts, or social scripts, persists because "(a) subject perceives an historical structure as a chain of recurring instances of the same script. The perceived script defines the situation for the subject. Over time, the script becomes 'the way things are', reified as a natural or traditional order" (318; this concept of "scripts" is in distinction to cultural scripts already in place; see next section for the dramaturgical approach, which utilizes historically established scripts within a society). This natural order of things can be conceptualized as intemation culture, which can be as recognizable and pre-
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dictable as national culture (see also Solomon, 1992 on this ppint). Banerjee applies his analysis to relations between India and Pakistan, as they emerged from the rhetoric of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah in the early years following independence from Great Britain. Nehru felt that the "other" facing the peoples of the Indian subcontinent was Great Britain, and that the people's greatest victory would come when sectarian divisions were overcome and the people united to overthrow their colonial masters. But for. Jinnah, the "other" being faced was Hinduism, with its emphasis on caste inequality and impurity of non-Hindus. For Jinnah, Great Britain symbolized positive attributes, such as reliance on religion and support for the abolition of social inequalities. Indeed, "Pakistan" itself means "land of the pure." Banerjee points out how these founding understandings contributed to differences in foreign policy, not only one nation toward the other, but also in their interactions with other states. For example, India was part of the nonaligned movement, opposed to the machinations of East and West. But Pakistan was only too willing to align itself with great powers in order to stand as an equal vis a vis India.
Tunander offers an innovative semiotic explanation of U.S.-Soviet naval moves in the North Atlantic as "signs" in a complex conversation taking place between the two nations (Tunander, 1989, 169-80). Taking off from Derrida's "the missile is a missive," Tunander sees these naval maneuvers as part of the body language of states. In Tunander's view, the Navy is the principal character in a hyperreal drama: the Navy "speaks about his mad brother" (cruise missiles) and "plays with the key to the lion's cage" (strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs]) (174). Epis-teme (science) and doxa (opinion) merge in a strange game of shifting perceptions.
Differences in values and preferences in foreign policy and foreign policymaking. Much of the work concerning cultural effects on international negotiation examines the effects on such negotiations of cultural differences in value preferences (see Cohen, 1991). For example, because the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) must base its legitimacy on its superior virtue and morality (in line with Confucian culture), it must explicitly pass moral judgment on the conduct of other nations. In order to assert moral claim to advantage in negotiation, a negative moral judgment must presage serious negotiation with another nation. From the Western point of view, this is the last thing a nation would do before entering into serious negotiations. It is permissible to talk about the unfairness of the status quo before negotiation, but a negative moral judgment of another nation's actions would more likely presage a Western nation's disengagement from serious negotiation (see Shih, 1993). The Western approach, too, derives from its unique Judeo-Christian values. Similar to the study of values in international negotiation is the study of values with
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reference to strategy. In the 1980s, a body of literature on "comparative strategic culture" developed to explain persistent differences between the United States and the USSR on military strategy (see Booth, 1979; Gray, 1986). Why did the Americans eschew strategic and civil defense in favor of mutually assured destruction (MAD), while the Soviets embraced defense to the point of adopting a war-fighting strategy contradictory to MAD? Scholars of strategic culture pointed to cultural and historical differences predisposing each nation to the choice it actually made, simultaneously noting the inevitable anxiety these choices would cause in the other nation.
Studies in Foreign Policy Analysis paralleling the "cultural syndrome" studies in other disciplines also exist. In its broadest sense, the idea of "national role conception" (K. J. Holsti, 1970) describes a national syndrome with respect to the nation's external relations (in its more specific application, national role conception studies resemble more the dramaturgical-style studies of the next section). A nation's leaders rise in part because they articulate a vision of the nation's role in world affairs that corresponds to deep cultural beliefs about the nation. In the rhetoric and action of these leaders, one may discern the nature of this role. Holsti's labels for such roles include "bridge," "isolate," "mediator," "bastion of the revolution," "defender of the faith," "regional leader," and so forth. Holsti and others (see Wish, 1980; Walker, 1987; Seeger, 1992; Breuning, 1992 and 1997) could then investigate the degree of concordance between expected role behavior/rhetoric and actual behavior/rhetoric. Breuning, for instance (1997), was able to trace differences in the assistance-giving behavior of Belgium and the Netherlands to differences in the two nations' national role conceptions, despite the nations' ostensible similarities in most other respects.
The next step in this line of inquiry is studies that trace in more detail how certain cultures come to conceive of their nation's roles in particular ways. Sampson (1987) and Sampson and Walker (1987) are two such attempts. Specifically, Sampson and Walker, in contrasting Japan and France, assert that cultural norms of dealing with subordinates and superor-dinates in organizational settings within the nations will be applied by those nations when dealing with subordinates and superordinates in the international arena. Sampson and Walker compare Japan and France on their reaction to and emphasis on group harmony, indebtedness, concern/ dependency on others, a superior's empathy for an inferior, collaboration and consultation, and sense of responsibility owed within an organization. They find that Japan's and France's profound differences on these values result in equally profound, but now predictable and understandable, differences in national role conceptions.
Zurovchak (1997) also investigates this issue of culture organizing the
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structure of bureaucracies. A natural historical experiment was afforded him as he studied the construction of the foreign ministries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the disintegration of Czechoslovakia. Using the Hof-stede rankings mentioned previously, he is able to show that Czech culture and Slovak culture have some important differences. His research question then became, would those differences influence the structure and function of the two newly created foreign ministries? He found that there were in fact interesting differences. The Slovak ministry was much more hierarchically organized; in contrast, the organization chart for the Czech ministry did not even indicate lines of authority! In addition, the functioning of the two ministries was also different: for example, "going over someone's head" organizationally to discuss a problem was forbidden in the Slovak ministry, but was encouraged in the Czech ministry. The gender compositions of the two -ministries were also different.
Wilkening (1999) offers a divergent approach to the above-mentioned works. His work spans conceptualization of culture as a system of meaning and a set of value preferences. He discusses the tremendous attention paid to the issue of acid rain among the Japanese, in contrast to their neighbors who also experience acid rain. Wilkening's research is a tale of how environmental activists were able to awaken the Japanese public by use of deeply held, shared meanings, and also how the resultant widespread citizen involvement in the issue of acid rain propelled Japanese government leaders to take a more aggressive stance internationally on acid rain. According to Wilkening, shared meanings about the importance of rain as a source of fresh water in Japan, as well as the importance of growing things, such as plants and forests, tap into core beliefs about national identity. Specific types of plants, particularly short-lived beautiful flowers, occupy a privileged spot in the Japanese imagination. Environmental activists used these cultural elements to construct a grassroots campaign where citizens would grow morning glories, and then observe whether the flowers changed color in response to the acidity of the rain. Housewives, schoolchildren, office workers, gardeners, and Japanese from many different walks of life planted morning glories and were sending in reports on color changes. Haiku contests on the theme of add rain were organized. News broadcasts began to feature changes in morning glory color from various parts of Japan. As the population was mobilized on the issue of acid rain as a threat to the strongly held value preference of maintaining purity of rain and plant life, this provided a basis for enterprising Japanese politicians to capitalize on public concern and move more aggressively in the international arena for agreements to limit the output of acid rain from other countries in the region.
Prefabricated templates of action in foreign policy and foreign policymaking. In Foreign Policy Analysis, the work of Leites (1951), Geori
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(1969), Walker (1977), and others on "the operational code" comes closest to this conceptualization of culture. Denning an operational code involves identifying core beliefs of a leader or group, as well as preferred means and style of pursuing goals. It is this last half of the operational code definition that assists us in determining what templates of action may exist within a nation with respect to foreign policy. For example, in elucidating the "Bolshevik" operational code, one finds some explicit maxims on political action: a) one cannot "muddle through" because in every situation there is just one correct policy, and even minor mistakes can be disastrous; b) don't calculate the probability of succeeding as a precursor to determining what your goal will be; c) maximize one's gains rather than satisfice, but avoid adventuristic actions where the outcomes are either maximum payoff or maximum loss; d) push to the limit, pursue one's opponent even if he or she lets up, but be prepared to engage in strategic retreat rather than suffer large losses in strength; e) rather than limit objectives, limit the means you use to achieve your objectives so as to prevent a strong reaction from the enemy; f) use rude and violent language to heighten your enemy's estimate of your strength and resolve (all adapted from George, 1969). George is then able to demonstrate how these maxims for action were followed by the Soviet Union in its relationship with the United States. (Social Science Automation has recently automated the Verbs in Context System [VICS], an operational code text interpreter; see Young and Schafer, 1998.)
Such "action maxims" can affect broader aspects of cognitive processing, as well. Ball (1992) asserts that Asian culture predisposes one to take a more long-term perspective than other cultures: he quotes Sukarno saying, "We, the Indonesian people, have learned not to think in centimeters or meters, not in hours or days We have learned to think in continents and decades" (5). M. G. Hermann has found evidence that certain cultures are more likely to exhibit certain aspects of decisionmaking and interpersonal style than others; for example, she found that Middle Eastern leaders were much more distrustful of others than leaders from other cultures (1979), and therefore more likely to discount discrepant information. Furthermore, certain types of leaders are predisposed toward specific styles of foreign policymaking (structure of decision groups, method of resolving disagreement, etc.), and the prevalence of certain types of leaders varies according to region and culture (see M. Hermann, 1987). Gaenslen (1989) persuasively shows that cultures reliant on consensual decisionmaking may not be as open to dissonant information—even from reliable sources—as cultures in which majority vote is sufficient for decisionmaking. Yaacov Vertzberger asserts that certain cultures may predispose one to abstractive as versus associative reasoning, and to universalistic as versus case particularistic reasoning (1990).
As noted earlier, the more specific approach to "national role concep-
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tion" provides an interesting parallel to the dramaturgical approach to culture. In Foreign Policy Analysis, the work of Chih-yu Shih (1993), Lloyd Etheredge (1992), and others falls into this category (see also Esherick and Wasserstrom, 1990; Katzenstein, 1997). Shih and Katzenstein both feel that Chinese foreign policy behavior corresponds to relatively specific scripts of action inherited from exemplary episodes in that nation's history. The reenactment of such scripts allows Chinese foreign policy to be meaningful to the Chinese themselves. According to Shih, "the Chinese style of organizing world politics is more dramatic than realist. . . . EveTy drama can and will be repeated till the demise of the moral regime" (Shih, 1993, 201 and 197). Shih then analyzes several Chinese scripts, the knowledge of which allows for the reconciliation of otherwise contradictory Chinese foreign policies.
Katzenstein argues that a Chinese script virtually unknown to Westerners, but forefront in the minds of Chinese on both sides of the strait, will be the template for eventual resolution of Taiwan's anomalous status (1997), Etheredge, in his study of American national security policy, persuasively argues that such policy is incomprehensible without an understanding of important American dramatic requirements. "(A)ll power relationships are a dramatic art, and one creates and manages power as an exercise in applied psychology, shaping a dramatic presence that, in the minds of others, becomes their experience of reality" (1992, 62), The logic of being impressive imposes theatrical requirements far different from those of strict rationality, "like a Star Wars drama of good versus evil and a battle for control of the universe" (67). To try to understand American nuclear strategy without a knowledge of the impression the United States was trying to make with its strategy would be to conclude the United States was acting irrationally. It was not acting irrationally, but it was acting—a very specific role for both internal and external audience consumption.
Hudson (1999) attempts to develop a methodology whereby action scripts for nation-states can be identified. Rather than rely on writings or speeches of elites, she develops a scenario-based survey designed to elicit whether there are shared understandings about appropriate responses to a variety of foreign policy situations in which the nation may find itself. Seven scenarios are postulated: involvement in UN peacekeeping operations in less-developed nations; threatened closure of strategically important shipping lanes by hostile powers in the region; terrorist kidnappings of one's own citizens in a foreign land with demands for ransom and policy changes as conditions for the hostages' release; the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal with IRBM capability by a hostile rogue regime; the violent disintegration of a neighboring state with significant refugee migration to one's own state; a showdown over trade issues with another nation; and a situation where military takeover of territory of one's own nation is threatened. A list of possible state responses was given and respondents were asked to
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suggest which options their nation would probably consider and which options their nation would not consider. Respondents from the United States, Russia, and Japan were involved. They were also asked which options each of the other two cultures would probably consider and which options the other cultures would not consider. In general, Russian responses were the most heterogeneous, and Japanese responses were the most homogeneous. The favored response of Japanese citizens was to not use force unilaterally and to petition for assistance from and cooperate with relevant intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). For the United States, in situations with clear ramifications for national security, the favored response was unilateral military action coupled with economic punishment. Russian responses were so heterogeneous that few generalizable patterns emerged, except for consensus that events in Ukraine were of special concern. Americans and Japanese were pretty confident what the other would probably do or not do in a situation, but neither was confident about probable Russian response in these situations. There were some noteworthy mistakes, though. Americans incorrectly perceived that Japan would never negotiate with terrorists. This is the American policy, but Japan does negotiate with terrorists. This exercise shows the prima facie validity of searching for national action templates. For some nations, such as Japan, consensus on appropriate response may be quite predictive of government behavior. For other nations, the ability to predict government response on the basis of shared action templates would be altered in greater measure by situational variables.
THOUGHTS ON MOVING AHEAD
"Cultural analysis" means different things to scholars even within the same field of IR, and even within FPA itself. However, some approaches may be less fruitful than others. For example, the understanding of cultural analysis employed currently in the security studies subfield of IR is that culture is an approach that serves as an intellectual rival to the dominant paradigm of explanation—power politics. Cultural variables are seen as useful only insofar as they explain that which cannot be explained by actor-general power calculations. Culture is seen as a synonym for continuity in nation-state foreign policy—qualities both persistent and particularistic. The broad, general direction of culture within a society is noted in this style of analysis. Culture has become, if you will, a static residual in this view.
However, from an FPA standpoint, cultural trends are useful only insofar as they can be harnessed to the task of understanding and projecting near term foreign policy choice. In this context, it may be at least as important to explore cultural change as cultural continuity. In an overarching sense,
what is paramount is an exploration of culture as a political'instrument. Explanations on the basis of power and explanations on the basis of culture are therefore not mutually exclusive. In this view, culture is not a reified concept, but a dynamic force and an element of political power competition. As Wilkening puts it, "culture in and of itself is not a cause of anything in international relations or any other area of human activity. It is in the 'who draws what ideas' and the 'how the ideas are employed' aspects [of cultural analysis] that causes of events can be found" (Wilkening, 1999, 8).
Indeed, rather than explain, say, Chinese behavior in the Spratly Islands by recourse to the thought of Hsun Tzu, perhaps we ought to ask which faction in Chinese politics is picking which elements from Chinese culture to promote their policy agenda on the Spraťiys? And then ask who opposes this agenda, using which other elements of Chinese culture. By tracking which cultural "story" becomes ascendant through the rough-and-tumble of power politics and the persuasiveness of the story to broader elements of society, we can then ask what obeisance must then be paid to the cultural elements that compose it—regardless of risk, rational choice, and power politics considerations.
In other words, the choice of cultural ideas to promote a particular political agenda entails constraint. One of the key points of usefulness about cultural analysis is its ability to tell the analyst what would be considered impossible in the FP of the country. Rational choice and Realpolitik cannot exclude options on the basis of cultural impossibility—only an understanding of the other's culture can do that. At the same time, cultural analysis should be able to tell you what types of options will be favored, ceteris paribus. Well-known and well-practiced options, preferably tied in to the nation's heroic history, will be preferred over less well-known and less familiar options or options with traumatic track records—even if an objective cost-benefit analysis of the two options would suggest otherwise.
This view of culture—as dynamic and as a political instrument—provides policy relevance. But it does more than that. It suggests that cultural analysis and power politics analysis are not mutually exclusive theoretical rivals. A culture is important because of power politics. And culture itself confers a preferred structure and process to power politics. How power is conceived of and employed 15 an element of culture. Those who concentrate on foreign policy decisionmaking (FPDM) are less likely to see these approaches as theoretical rivals, and more likely to see them as inextricably related.
This view of culture argues for certain desiderata in the analytical sphere:
1. Comparative analysis: Only comparatively do differences in culture and the effects of those differences become apparent. Such comparison can be done between cultures or between subnational interpretations of the same culture.
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2. Subnational analysis: If one is interested in FPDM, it may not be very profitable to study culture at the level of the regime (except under rare circumstances, such as a totalitarian micro culture). One must look at power nodes within the society, and ask their link to and use of culture. Without subnational analysis, one is left with culture as only a force of continuity. Culture as a force for change becomes elusive.
3. Discourse analysis: To see culture being wielded as an instrument of power in society, one must trace the discourse between power nodes. When they disagree over policy direction, to what myths, stories, heroic historical elements, contemporary cultural memes, or other elements do they refer? What are the alternative or rival stories? Which become ascendant? This is not to say that no other methodological approach may be used, but rather to admit that probably all meaningful methodologies in this area will ultimately rest on an examination of cultural understandings, which are most observable when made tangible in discourse.
4. Horizon analysis: This is an analysis of the constraints and incentives bestowed by the cultural "story" being advocated. What horizon of possibility will each competing story produce? What becomes impossible to do if this story is advocated? What becomes more likely?
5. Interaction analysis: If nation X, with story A currently ascendant, faces a conflict of interest with nation Y, wherein story ] is currently ascendant, how will they interact? What will be the points of conflict? Who can compromise on what issues? Who cannot compromise on what issues? Which strategies will be more likely to be employed on each side? Does either party have culturally permissible contingency plans in the event of failure? Or are contingency plans on some issues forbidden?
One recent piece that takes us furthest in these directions is that of Andrea Grove and Neal Carter (1999). Their article incorporates each of the five desiderata mentioned above. They compare the 1984-1986 discourse of Gerry Adams and John Hume, political rivals vying for control over the evolution of the Northern Ireland conflict, with special reference to the Catholic minority. These years were chosen for they bookend the 198S Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA). Before the agreement, Adams's political support was on the upswing; after 1985, it would be Hume who was ascendant. Grove and Carter first identify which strategy for identity formation each man used to mobilize support for his position. Hume's strategy was one of inclusion and healing of the rift among the peoples on the island of Ireland; Adams's was much more exclusive and focused on ousting the British and opposing the Protestants. This comparison allows for an analysis of the horizons of policy possibility for each man and the groups that follow
IP'
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them. Grove and Carter are able to map out the maneuveringroom Adams and Hume left themselves by adhering to their particular story of the conflict. The AIA vindicated Hume's strategy, leaving Adams in a pickle. Rather than emulating Hume's approach, however, Adams actually accentuated his preferred strategy, becoming even more exclusive and resorting to significantly more historical references in an attempt to turn the electorate by the strategy of storytelling.
Even more boldly, Grove and Carter go on to suggest how the pressure and influence of third parties, such as the United States, possessing their own story of the Northern Ireland conflict, could either succeed or fail depending on the state of the internal debate between Adams and Hume. Grove and Carter state:
If observers [i.e., third-party nations—ed.] follow leaders' portrayals of out-groups over time, they may observe changes in the degrees of threat posed by particular outgroups, or changes in the relevant outgroups altogether. In this way, foreign policy decision-makers may learn when there are crucial times in which the country can intervene, suggest negotiation, offer incentives for cooperation, or take other methods that often depend on timing (27).
Grove and Carter point out that U.S. government-directed increased investment in Ireland following the AIA was an important boost to the Hume position of negotiated settlement, and was timed very well. The European Community's encouragement of an Irish voice also helped Hume to persuade the Catholic minority that if it abstained from violence, influential third parties would eventually pressure the British to leave. Grove and Carter's work points to new horizons in the study of culture and foreign policy.
In conclusion, then, the study of how culture and identity affect foreign policy, though only in its early years, has the potential to offer much to both theorists and policymaker alike. We hope to see more scholars, and younger scholars, continuing to pursue this approach to FPA into the future.
NOTE
Portions of this essay are used by permission from previously published works, to wit, Martin Sampson and Valerie Hudson, "Editors' Introduction," Political Psychology, 20(4) (December 1999), Special Issue on Culture and Foreign Policy Analysis, 667-77; and Valerie M. Hudson, "Culture and Foreign Policy: Developing a Research Agenda," in Culture and Foreign Policy, edited by Valerie M. Hudson, Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1997, 1-26.