Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review

Since 2003, with the release of the European Security Strategy, the EU’s political elites have continuously looked for ways and means to forge a common EU strategic culture. Both scholars and political elites agree that the EU’s strategic culture should be a product of a convergence of Member States’ strategic cultures. The research on the strategic culture of the EU has overlooked the theoretical advances of the fourthgeneration strategic culture theory. Instead, it has focused on the state level of analysis, as both research approaches might not be appropriate for an organisation with a supranational and intergovernmental decision-making system. This article proposes to employ a concept of strategic subcultures envisioned by the fourth-generation strategic culture theory and shift the research focus from the state level of analysis to the level of the EU. Drawing on the concept of subcultures, the institutions-based socialisation process and semi-structured interviews with the Ambassadors of the Political and Security Committee of the Council of the European Union, the article develops a model on how to define an EU-level strategic subculture and argues that the Political and Security Committee must be considered as another strategic subculture of the EU next to the Member States.