Thinking about EU Strategic Culture: The Dilemmas of Group Decision-Making

EU integration, with its slow-but-steady steps toward establishing a new security strategy, has implicated questions regarding the possibility of strategic culture at a supranational level. Employing the definition of strategic culture as interplay of discourse and practice arrived at through an elite-negotiated reality, this paper addresses an issue that much theory and analysis have neglected, the role of political and organizational/institutional psychology factors in hindering the formation of a European strategic culture. Insofar as the EU is an elite-driven supranational entity whose running—especially in the field of foreign and security policy—is characterized by group decision-making dynamics at the top level, we hypothesize that decisions generating a European strategic culture are affected by decision-making biases. While acknowledging the significant role divergent national interests play in affecting EU foreign and security policy outcomes, we undertake research on numerous decision-making cases at the top level during the last two decades to analyze how these biases have affected the formation and development of EU strategic culture. We argue that both groupthink bias and “motivated reasoning” biases—confirmation/disconfirmation, status quo, availability, and risk (loss) aversion biases—within the information processing and decision-making apparatuses of EU institutions have shaped to a great extent the reactions to security concerns like the Balkan crises and the Iraq war. As these reactions were formative events in the problematic development of EU strategic culture, understanding the biases that partially led to them tells us something about the nature of the EU’s ongoing difficulties in solidifying its strategic culture.