Strategic culture: four national ways of war in Europe

Do all nations fight the same way? Strategic culture is the field that tries to answer that question: how a society's beliefs, history and collective mindset shape the way it wages war. In Europe, four portraits keep resurfacing in essays and staff colleges — Russian fatalism, Anglo-American pragmatism, German idealism and the Spanish sense of honour. Each has been tied, with more or less justification, to a religious tradition: Orthodoxy, Calvinist and Puritan Protestantism, Lutheranism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

This piece walks through those four national ways of war, the battles usually cited to illustrate them and — above all — what historians have objected. The idea is seductive, but it carries an obvious danger: turning millions of people into a stereotype.

What is strategic culture?

The term was popularised by Jack Snyder in a 1977 RAND report on Soviet nuclear doctrine. His warning was practical: American planners assumed Moscow would reason the way Washington did, whereas Snyder argued that Russian history, institutions and experience produced a different way of thinking about war. Assuming that an adversary thinks as you do is known as mirror imaging.

The concept has fuelled a lively academic debate ever since. Colin S. Gray argued that culture is the unavoidable context of all strategy; in 1995 Alastair Iain Johnston replied that if culture explains everything it explains nothing, and called for definitions that can actually be tested. That tension runs through everything below.

Strategic culture does not dictate what a state will do, but it shapes what that state will find reasonable to do.

Editorial summary of the Gray–Johnston debate

A health warning first

• Mindsets are not genes: they shift with regimes, technology and experience. Germany went from extreme militarism to one of Europe's most reluctant strategic cultures after 1945.
• The religious thesis is contested: Max Weber's Protestant ethic remains influential, but recent economic work — such as Davide Cantoni's study of the German lands — finds no sign of the effect he assumed.
• Examples are cherry-picked: it is easy to choose battles that fit a stereotype and forget those that don't.

Russia: fatalism, sacrifice and strategic depth

The roots it is given

So-called Russian fatalism is associated with words that resist translation: sudba (fate as a verdict beyond appeal), avos (the hope that things will turn out fine without planning) and smirenie (humility in the face of suffering). Philosophers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, in The Russian Idea (1946), linked this outlook to Orthodox spirituality — with its emphasis on redemptive suffering and collective communion (sobornost) — and to an 'all or nothing' temperament. Geography adds the rest: a vast plain with no natural frontiers, winters that bring life to a halt and a long history of invasion.

How it has been read in war

The classic examples are 1812, when Kutuzov traded space for time and let distance and winter wear Napoleon down, and the Great Patriotic War. The siege of Leningrad lasted around 872 days, and Soviet armed forces lost roughly 8.7 million personnel according to Grigori Krivosheev's official count — a figure other historians consider too low. The cultural reading holds that this endurance has deep roots.

What complicates the stereotype

Soviet resilience was not only a matter of mindset. Order No. 227 of July 1942 — 'Not one step back' — created blocking detachments and penal battalions. Historian Catherine Merridale, who interviewed veterans, describes a blend of patriotism, fear, coercion and sheer survival. Soviet military thought, moreover, was among the most systematic of the 20th century: Aleksandr Svechin theorised a strategy of attrition in 1927, and Tukhachevsky and others developed the theory of deep operations. Whatever fatalism means, it does not mean improvisation.

The Anglo-American world: utility, sea power and calculation

The roots it is given

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), Max Weber argued that ascetic Protestantism — Calvinists and Puritans — turned methodical work into a calling and success into a sign of grace. Add the empiricism of Locke and Hume, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, Britain's island position and a common law that grows case by case, and you get a mindset that prizes what works and distrusts grand systems. One clarification: the Church of England was Anglican; Puritanism was a movement within it, strongest in the 17th century and in New England.

How it has been read in war

In 1932 Basil Liddell Hart described a 'British way in warfare': naval supremacy, economic blockade, subsidies to continental allies and small armies on the Continent. In 1973 Russell Weigley wrote that the 'American way of war' sought to crush the enemy through material and logistical superiority. Second World War operational research — scientists such as Patrick Blackett applying statistics to anti-submarine warfare — is often cited as this pragmatism in action.

What complicates the stereotype

On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, about 19,240 of them killed — hard to read as cost-benefit analysis. Michael Howard rebutted Liddell Hart in The Continental Commitment (1972), pointing out that Britain had to commit mass land armies in both world wars. And the 'Anglo-Saxon' label lumps together very different worlds, from Presbyterian Scotland to 20th-century America.

Germany: idealism, duty and the system

The roots it is given

Luther separated the spiritual and temporal kingdoms and urged obedience to lawful authority; Kant placed duty at the heart of morality; Hegel saw the state as the realisation of Spirit. On that inheritance — and on a land fragmented into hundreds of principalities — rests the image of a mindset that designs the perfect system first and then expects reality to conform. Bear in mind, though, that Germany is religiously mixed: Bavaria and the Rhineland were largely Catholic.

How it has been read in war

After the defeat at Jena in 1806, Prussian reformers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau built a professional General Staff that became a model for the world. Clausewitz, shaped by that intellectual milieu, wrote On War. The ideal of the battle of annihilation (Vernichtungsschlacht) and Schlieffen's fascination with Cannae are cited as the quest for the perfect victory; the failure of the 1914 plan and of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 as proof of the dangers of rigidity.

What complicates the stereotype

The German tradition also produced the opposite of rigidity: Auftragstaktik, or mission command, which leaves subordinates free to decide how to achieve an objective. Moltke the Elder warned in 1871 that no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the enemy's main force, and Clausewitz devoted famous pages to 'friction'. Robert Citino explains Germany's preference for short wars of manoeuvre in material terms — a country surrounded by rivals and short of resources — while Isabel Hull attributes the excesses of Imperial Germany to the army's institutional dynamics rather than to philosophy. Terence Zuber has even questioned whether a 'Schlieffen Plan' as such ever existed.

Spain and the Hispanic world: honour, the individual and resistance

The roots it is given

Against Calvinist predestination, the Council of Trent reaffirmed free will and the value of good works. On that basis, and on an aristocratic culture of honour, essayists such as Salvador de Madariaga cast the Spaniard as a 'man of passion', alongside the Englishman as a man of action and the Frenchman as a man of thought (Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, 1929), while Miguel de Unamuno wrote of the 'tragic sense of life'. The military reading stresses personal courage, dignity and resistance to perceived aggression.

How it has been read in war

The tercios of the 16th and 17th centuries, the sieges of Zaragoza in 1808–09 and the Peninsular War — which gave other languages the word 'guerrilla' — are the usual examples. Numantia is often added as the archetype of resistance to the bitter end.

What complicates the stereotype

Geoffrey Parker showed that the Army of Flanders was first and foremost an administrative and logistical feat — the 'Spanish Road' — and that it suffered dozens of mutinies between 1572 and 1607 because soldiers went unpaid: honour lived alongside a very material realism. Numantia predates Christianity, and its use as a national symbol came much later. The guerrilla of 1808 also had social and economic drivers, as Ronald Fraser documented, and worked in tandem with Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army. The code of honour, besides, was shared by aristocracies across Europe.

Summary table: four mindsets and war

When mindsets collide

The comparison is most useful when you look at interaction. In 1941 German planners expected a Soviet collapse within weeks; the Red Army's resistance and the evacuation of industry beyond the Urals — an act of planning, not of fatalism — wrecked that forecast. In the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, British logistics and sea power combined with Spanish and Portuguese resistance: two different styles complementing each other against a third. In both cases the outcome depended on material factors as much as on mindsets.

What the thesis cannot explain

• Essentialism: assigning fixed traits to whole peoples ignores class, region and period — and has served nationalist propaganda.
• Change: the post-1945 Bundeswehr was built on Innere Führung, the 'citizen in uniform', as a deliberate break with the past.
• Regime and technology: the same country fights very differently under a tsar, a one-party state or a democracy, and with muskets or with drones.
• Causation: the fact that a religious confession and a military style coincide does not prove that one causes the other.

Why it is still worth using

For all these objections, strategic culture helps avoid the mistake that worried Snyder: assuming the adversary values, fears and calculates exactly as we do. Used well, it is not destiny but a question: what historical experience makes this state see as reasonable a decision another would find absurd?

Conclusion

Russian fatalism, Anglo-American pragmatism, German idealism and Spanish honour are portraits with some truth and a great deal of simplification. They are good for framing hypotheses and reading wars more deeply, as long as they are tested against logistics, geography, institutions and the concrete decisions of each moment. War, as Clausewitz reminds us, is a continuation of politics — and politics is made by people, not stereotypes.