European Strategic Culture at a Crossroads - National Continuities or Convergence Towards the EU?

This book examines European strategic culture at both national and supranational levels. Focusing on elite perceptions extracted from official discourses, this book empirically analyses how the European Union and its member states perceive the important dimensions and their perceptual changes in the foreign security and defence realm and explores their convergence/divergence. It also discusses the prospects for the emergence of a European strategic culture in the context of the Russia–Ukraine war, concluding that, whilst the war has given a boost to Europe’s thinking and approach with respect to security and defence, which may lead to further integration, there had already been convergence in strategic culture between the member states and between them and the EU, even before the war. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European foreign, security, and defence policy, and more broadly, to those of European studies, international relations, security studies, and foreign policy.