Generolo Jono Žemaičio Lietuvos karo akademija

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.

The establishment of the European Defence Fund (EDF) marks a significant shift in how EU Member States approach the integration of the defence industry as it aims to systematically promote inter-European defence-industrial cooperation across national defence sectors. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence of the actual dynamics regarding EDF implementation. While there are accounts of EU countries’ varying political positions on defence integration, including its industrial aspect, it remains unclear whether Member States’ actual participation in integration projects aligns with these positions. Are national motives consistent once effective defenceindustrial integration is underway? The findings, based on Masson’s (2024) data on by-country distribution of EDF project financing (2021–2022), present a more nuanced picture of EU countries’ effective engagement with defence-industrial integration than anticipated by the political perspective. While there is a positive relationship between participation in the EDF and defence market size, strategic culture does not influence EU members’ involvement in the Fund. Furthermore, while liberal economicindustrial governance is negatively associated with national participation in EDF projects, a country’s institutional quality has a significant positive relationship with it. This article reveals more complex dynamics of EDF implementation than suggested by the political perspective on defence-industrial integration pre-EDF.