Regaining Strategy: Small Powers, Strategic Culture, and Escalation in Afghanistan

This article was downloaded by: [109.100.203.241]On: 14 September 2014, At: 06:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

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Regaining Strategy: SmallPowers, Strategic Culture, andEscalation in AfghanistanJan Angstrom a & Jan Willem Honig ba Department of Peace and Conflict Research , UppsalaUniversity , Swedenb Department of War Studies , King's College London ,UKPublished online: 07 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Jan Angstrom & Jan Willem Honig (2012) Regaining Strategy: SmallPowers, Strategic Culture, and Escalation in Afghanistan, Journal of Strategic Studies,35:5, 663-687, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2012.706969

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Regaining Strategy: Small Powers,Strategic Culture, and Escalation

in Afghanistan

JAN ANGSTROM* AND JAN WILLEM HONIG**

*Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden,**Department of War Studies, Kings College London, UK

ABSTRACT In Western operations in Afghanistan, small European powersescalate in different ways. While Denmark and the Netherlands have contributedto Western escalation through integration with British and US forces, Norwayand Sweden have done so by creating a division of labour allowing US and Britishcombat forces to concentrate their efforts in the south. These variations instrategic behaviour suggest that the strategic choice of small powers is morediversified than usually assumed. We argue that strategic culture can explain thevariation in strategic behaviour of the small allies in Afghanistan. In particular,Dutch and Danish internationalism have reconciled the use of force in thenational and international domains, while in Sweden and Norway there is still asharp distinction between national interest and humanitarianism.

KEY WORDS: Strategy, Escalation, Afghan War, Strategic Culture, Small States

Introduction: Regaining the Lost Art of Strategy

In a seminal 1997 article, Richard Betts emphatically answered his ownrhetorical question Should Strategic Studies Survive? by arguing thatthe United States still needed to consider how the use of force istranslated into political aims even without the Soviet threat. If the1990s seemingly was a period when the United States did not face thethreat of large-scale war, Betts suggested that such wars might re-occuragain. Also the limited wars that the United States fought in places likeSomalia and Bosnia very much continued to require strategy.

Strategic studies is both necessary and contested because it focuseson the essential Clausewitzian problem: how to make force arational instrument of policy rather than mindless murder how to

The Journal of Strategic StudiesVol. 35, No. 5, 663687, October 2012

ISSN 0140-2390 Print/ISSN 1743-937X Online/12/050663-25 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.706969

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integrate politics and war. This requires the interdisciplinaryjoining of military grammar and political logic, in Clausewitzsterms, a marriage that gets lip service in principle but is oftensubverted in practice by those who identify more with one half ofthe union than the other. Soldiers often object to politicspermeating war because it gives civilians the right to meddle inoperations, while many intellectuals object to dignifying war as aninstrument of policy or an academic priority.1

In hindsight, it appears that Betts argument fell on deaf ears, at least inthe United States. A mere four years after his article was published, theBush administration as a response to the terrorist attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001 launched the war on terrorism and began thestill ongoing operations in Afghanistan. Less than two years later, itinvaded Iraq with a clear emphasis to use John Stones words on thetechnique of war rather than with a political aim in sight and as aresult the United States found itself bogged down in another long war.2

The United States was not alone in having forgotten the essentialClausewitzian lesson that politics should govern and permeate war andits conduct. Throughout the Western armed forces, the Cold War withits static war planning and fixed strategic situation increasingly led tothe belief that war had become something that could be controlled withplans and increasingly complex staff procedures. In the alleged name ofefficiency, staffs introduced standardized procedures and planningmethods. In doing so, war became bureaucratized a routine. Nowherewas this more true than for the small Western powers. The UnitedStates dominated NATO strategy and the small powers, almost whollydependent upon the United States for their defence against the threat ofthe Soviet Army, gradually came to understand war as narrowlymilitary, rather than political. As a result, strategy was taught less at themilitary academies in favour of tactical manuals and the so-calledoperational art the coordination and maneouvre of army corps.3 Thatstrategy was lost did not pass unnoticed. Keen observers such as BritishGeneral Sir Rupert Smith complained that, after the Cold War, theWest was only able to deploy forces rather than usefully employ themfor a political purpose.4

1Richard Betts, Should Strategic Studies Survive?, World Politics 50/1 (1997), 8.2John Stone, Military Strategy: The Politics and Technique of War (London:Continuum 2011).3Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy(Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute 2009).4Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London:Allen Lane 2005).

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The end of the Cold War hammered a second nail into the smallstates strategic coffin. As the perceived threat from the Soviet Uniondisappeared when the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the small Westernpowers dramatically reduced the size of their armies. Between 1989and 2010, Sweden reduced its field army from 29 brigades to a mereseven battalions. Denmark went down from three divisions and fiveauxiliary brigades to one division consisting of two brigades. Norwaymore than halved its armed forces during the 1990s from 13 brigadesin 1990, to six in 2000, and to one brigade and a number of auxiliaryunits in 2010. The Netherlands which once possessed a corps with tenbrigades now only fields three understrength brigades.5 Unfortunately,at the same time as these reductions were implemented, the threatfrom terrorism increased and the September 11 attack as well as theensuing lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put a huge strain evenon the armies of the remaining superpower, the United States, and itsclosest ally, Britain. In the capitals of the small West European statesthis presented a dilemma. For the first time since the end of WorldWar II, they were forced to conduct strategy independently andwithout a clear threat directed at them. However, as a result ofshrinking defence budgets they did not possess the traditional meanswith which to conduct large-scale fighting on a sustained basis.Strategy and, to use Rupert Smiths words, the ability to escalate tosuccess which political circumstance had made irrelevant for so longfor the small West European states, now appeared needed again. Thisleft the small European powers with a difficult dilemma. What kind ofstrategy should they pursue? How could they escalate and achievesuccess in war?The problem of escalation in modern war is seemingly straightfor-

ward. As M.L.R. Smith outlines elsewhere in this issue, the nineteenthcentury Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz deducted that theinteractive nature of war would lead the opponents to escalate asquickly as possible to subdue the opponent and make him unable tocontinue resisting (wehrlos).6 In a much-quoted passage, Clausewitzsuggested that there is no logical limit to the application of that force.

5On the transformation of European armed forces, see Anthony King, TheTransformation of Europes Armed Forces (Cambridge: CUP 2011) in general, andmore specific details about the reduction of armed forces in Scandinavia, see MagnusPetersson, En skandinavisk transformatjonsbolge, in Tormod Heier (ed.), Nyttlandskap Nytt forsvar (Oslo: Abstrakt forlag 2011), 117; and Magnus Petersson,Defence Transformation and Legitimacy in Scandinavia after the Cold War:Theoretical and Practical Implications, Armed Forces & Society 37/4 (2011), 70124.6M.L.R. Smith, Escalation in Irregular War: Using Strategic Theory to Examine fromFirst Principles, Journal of Strategic Studies 35/5 (Oct. 2012), 61337.

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Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocalaction is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.7 In reality,Clausewitz noted, this escalation did not always occur and it neveroccurred instantaneously as the theory demanded. Instead, as is nowcommonly accepted, he argued that politics had an opportunity toinfluence war and this political influence could explain why some warsescalated and others did not. Whether or not to escalate (and withwhat) is thus a political decision.8 As M.L.R. Smith points out, againfollowing Clausewitz, whether or not to escalate in any war regular orirregular is a decision that requires two components: political will andmilitary capability.It is precisely this political dimension to war that poses a dilemma in

decisions to escalate or de-escalate in current Western operations inAfghanistan. On the one hand, if the West escalates and increases theboots on the ground, it may feed the Taliban narrative of the Westbeing an occupier, thus strengthening support for the Taliban. If, on theother hand, the West de-escalates and withdraws units, it could beunderstood as defeat, thus strengthening the Taliban locally andweakening the domestic support of operations in the West. The strongactor is damned if he does, and damned if he does not. Negotiatingbetween these two extremes is the central strategic challenge in counter-insurgency warfare.9 The small Western states, however, had fewstrategic options when the invasion of Afghanistan began. They nolonger possessed any significant ability to escalate. Their forces werelargely gone and, for over 40 years, they had ignored strategy as adistinct category of knowledge. They now had to regain strategy in asituation where their political will and military capability were weak.

7Carl von Clausewitz, On War, transl. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (PrincetonUP 1976), Book I, Chapter 1, Section 3, 77.8On the rather more complicated relationship between war, escalation and politics inClausewitz which is obscured in the most popular modern translation by MichaelHoward and Peter Paret, see Jan Willem Honig, Clausewitzs On War: Problems ofText and Translation, in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (eds), Clausewitzin the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: OUP 2007), 5773 and Andreas Herberg-Rothe,Jan Willem Honig and Daniel Moran (eds), Clausewitz: The State and War (Stuttgart:Franz Steiner 2011).9See, e.g. David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Militaryfor Modern Wars (Washington DC: Georgetown UP 2009); David Kilcullen, TheAccidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (London: Hurst2009); Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Great Expectations: The Use of Armed Force to CombatTerrorism, in Jan Angstrom and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (eds), Modern War and theUtility of Force (London: Routledge 2010), 6589; John Mackinlay, The InsurgentArchipelago: From Mao to Bin Laden (London: Hurst 2009).


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Analyses of Western operations in Afghanistan are dominated by analmost exclusive focus on US and British military and politicalconcerns.10 On the one hand, this is understandable since the US andBritain contribute roughly 100,000 of International Security AssistanceForces (ISAF) combined total of 130,000 troops. Moreover, the UnitedStates also controls the key command, surveillance, and airpowerassets, thus making its contribution even more critical in practice.There simply would not be an Afghan mission without US and Britishforces bearing most of the burden. In similar fashion, most of the earlycounter-insurgency literature focused on the travails of Britain, theUnited States and France, namely the Western post-World War II greatpowers as they attempted to maintain their colonies or fend off aperceived communist threat.11 On the other hand, analyzing only themajor actors in the war in Afghanistan provides a biased andincomplete picture of the strategic situation.Focusing on the smaller powers makes it apparent that there are

several as yet unnoticed empirical puzzles. For example, Sweden,Hungary and Norway assumed responsibility for a ProvincialReconstruction Team (PRT) each in the north, thus allowing US andBritish forces to concentrate in the more troublesome south. Othersmall powers such as the Netherlands and Denmark opted for adifferent strategy using their forces in Uruzgan and Helmandrespectively in close proximity to or even fully integrated with USand British forces. Finland, meanwhile, chose to operate jointly withthe Swedes in Mazar-e-Sharif. Anthony King has suggested that the warin Afghanistan has demonstrated the importance of NATO forEuropes defence transformation in comparison to the European Union(EU). He suggested that European states have prioritized Afghanistan infavour of EU operations elsewhere in order to cement their links tothe United States.12 However, Norways and Hungarys non-participa-tion in the south rules out that NATO membership alone can explainthis variation. Why do the small European powers behave differently

10See, for example, Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster inPakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (London: Penguin 2010); Seth G. Jones, TheGraveyard of Empires: Americas War in Afghanistan (New York: Norton 2010);Robert Egnell and David Ucko, Rethinking British Counterinsurgency (New York:Columbia UP forthcoming).11See, for example, David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice(London: Pall Mall 1964); John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife:Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Univ. of Chicago Press 2005).12King, The Transformation of Europes Armed Forces, 58. On the degree ofintegration of Danish and Dutch forces in southern Afghanistan, see King, TheTransformation of Europes Armed Forces, 25660.


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strategically when given their weaknesses and apparent lack of strategicchoice one might have expected similar responses?Rationalistic explanations such as the need of the small powers to

keep the US firmly anchored in Europe to prevent French or Germandominance of European security aspirations are similar for all of thesmall states and cannot explain the variation in choice of strategy.13

Concerns about a potential resurgence of a Russian threat does notexplain the variation either as, for example, Denmark and Norway facea comparable challenge in the Arctic but are responding differently. Inthis article, we argue instead that strategic cultural factors of the smallWestern states can explain this variation. Cold War inertia remainssignificantly stronger in Sweden and Norway than in the Netherlandsand Denmark. The latter have succeeded in re-defining themselves andtheir forces. More specifically, we suggest that key strategic elites inthese states understand the Afghan war differently and this mentalframe makes a more militaristic response more likely in their case,while in Sweden and Norway a different mental frame serves topromote a more benign response.By analyzing the cases of Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and

Denmark, the article makes three contributions. First, a study of thestrategic behaviour of these small powers nuances analyses of theAfghan intervention. Second, it challenges the prevailing explanation ofsmall power strategy as instrumentally driven by concerns with NATOand the United States. Third, it adds to the literature on strategicculture that so far mostly has focused on the great powers and it avoidsthe trap of over-generalization from one case that often has plaguedthis literature by using a comparative approach.14

The article proceeds as follows. First, we review the research onstrategic culture, thus providing a theoretical point of departure for theanalysis. More specifically, we focus on identifying a strategic culture ofthe small power. Second, we conduct the comparative case analysis ofhow small European states have sought to regain strategy andescalatory military means in the Afghan War. Our analysis is structuredaccording to understanding of the mission, the perceived relationbetween means and ends, as well as the method of warfare. In the

13This latter explanation has been used to explain Dutch NATO policies. See Alfredvan Staden, Small State Strategies in Alliances: The Case of the Netherlands,Cooperation and Conflict 30/1 (1995), 3151. For a counterargument, see Jan WillemHonig, Defense Policy in the North Atlantic Alliance: The Case of the Netherlands(Westport, CT: Praeger 1993).14See, e.g. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and TheoryDevelopment in Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005).


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conclusion, we summarize the argument and make some policysuggestions on regaining strategy.

Strategic Culture and the Small Powers

Strategy is commonly understood to be rationalistic. The concept ofstrategy has three components. There is, first, a conceptual contra-diction to talk about a strategy where the distinction between ends andmeans does not exist. If you try to make military behaviour under-standable by referring to the goals of the military action, a discussion ofthe overarching political ends and the relationship with subordinatemeans is inevitable. One challenge is that it is sometimes difficult toidentify what constitutes a states political goals or interests. The searchfor more permanence when it comes to defining goals has led many, likeKenneth Waltz, to assume that states at least are driven by the interestsof survival and maintaining their position in the international system.15

Others such as HansMorgenthau and JohnMearsheimer instead arguedthat states want to maximize their power.16 These extremes aresometimes summarized as actors either having revisionist goals orseeking to maintain the status quo. If this is accepted then it follows thatstrategys second component is the need for careful management ofscarce resources.17 If an actor has unlimited resources, a discussion ofstrategy becomes pointless, because the actor would not have to worryabout which military resources to use in which way. Strategy thusinvolves the careful husbanding and instrumentalization of resources.The third component of the rationalistic approach is that strategy isnever conducted in a vacuum, but against another actor whose interestsare in conflict with your own. Because his strategic options andcalculations are never fully knowable, the other actor has significantinfluence over ones own actions. Escalation in the sense of increasingthe destruction of the enemys means of resistance thus constitutes anattractive option as it reduces an opponents strategic options and thusalso reduces strategic uncertainty. These three components makestrategy a vital, yet very challenging activity.The instrumental view of strategy and escalation is largely a product

of studies of the great powers. By virtue of their greatness they havemore abundant resources which gives them more escalatory strategic

15Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill 1979).16Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (NewYork: McGraw-Hill 1948); John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics(New York: Norton 2001).17James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes(London: Hurst 2003), 1617; Betts, Should Strategic Studies Survive?, 12.


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options than small powers. The rationalistic, realist literature has thustended to argue that, at worst, the smaller powers were on the road toextinction, or at best, they possessed little option but to bandwagonwith major powers. Apart from the general fact that small states havegrown substantially in number over the past century, the smallthemselves as this article also shows actively seek more options.More broadly, the rationalist realist approach also faces two analyticalchallenges, one of an ontological and another of a methodologicalnature. The ontological problem is that interests may not be assumed apriori, but are a malleable product of a complex web of socialinteraction.18 The methodological problem is that inferring interestsfrom military action is difficult as a specific behaviour, including whatlooks like simple escalatory behaviour, can serve several purposes. It isalso not entirely obvious that an actors declared policy expresses theinterests that underpin a specific military behaviour.Although rationalistic analyses of the use of military force are more

common than cultural analyses, there is a burgeoning literature onstrategic culture. In a relatively recent literature review, LawrenceSondhaus argued that strategic culture offers a fundamental criticism ofrationalistic interpretations of the use of military force.19 He traces thebeginnings of the strategic culture literature to the early 1980s when, forexample, Robert Art claimed that one purpose of military power is toswagger. Actors signal their identity through acquiring certain militarycapabilities, while ignoring others. Art suggested that Britains acquisi-tion of nuclear weapons falls into this category. Although the British livedunder the US nuclear umbrella, they acquired their own nuclear weapons.They did not have to do this, according to Art, for their own security, butto confirm their great power status at a time when the Empire was beingdismantled.20 This idea is similar to the then emerging literature onstrategic culture, in which the main purpose was to better understand theSoviet Unions nuclear doctrine. The advantage of the concept was that itcould be used to explain the stability of a strategic approach despite thecircumstances that gave rise to it having changed.21

In the modern understanding of strategic culture, the concept hasbeen used in three main ways. Some treat it as an independent variable,where a states strategic culture has been considered to cause a certain

18Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY: CornellUP 1996). Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest, and Action: A Cultural Explanation ofSwedens Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: CUP 1996).19Lawrence Sondhaus, Strategic Culture and Ways of War (London: Routledge 2006).20Robert J. Art, To What Ends Military Power?, International Security 4/4 (1980),1718.21Sondhaus, Strategic Culture and Ways of War, 4.


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behaviour.22 Others have used the term as an intermediate variable,namely strategic culture acts as a filter through which other factors,such as organizations, influence behaviour.23 Finally, for some the termimplies a constructivist approach in which a distinction betweendependent and independent variables is impossible to make. In theanalysis below, we will follow this understanding of the concept.Within a constructivist approach, it makes more sense to answer howrather than why.24

The analysis below highlights different patterns of norms in thestrategic discourse of the small European powers and how theseinfluence the decision-makers understanding of the world aroundthem. Following Peter Katzenstein, we distinguish between constitutivenorms that can be said to define who you are and regulatory norms thatdefine what is considered appropriate behaviour.25 Strategic culture isthus defined as a set of beliefs and norms which govern against whom,how, by what right and for what purposes the use of military force isconsidered legitimate. It is important to note that identity is notsomething that is produced solely by the actors own will, but is createdin a social context. This means that it is not only self-image, but alsoanothers image of self that shapes identity. In this context it should beclarified which actors shape and preserve the strategic culture withinthe small European powers. Following Lantis and Howlett, it is fruitfulto consider the strategic culture as a result of a negotiation andbalancing between various elites, such as armed forces leadership,government, parliament and opposition parties, but also internationalactors and the norms they spread internationally.26

How does strategic culture influence behaviour? According to some,it influences behaviour by its inherent norms limiting the optionsthe actor can imagine as solutions to a given problem.27 It is difficult toimagine that the Swedish and Norwegian troops in Kosovo, forexample, ever considered massacring the Albanians who rioted againstthem in Caglavica in March 2004, even when the situation seemed to

22Alistair Iain Johnston, Thinking About Strategic Culture, International Security 19/4 (1995), 3264.23Elisabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between theWars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1997).24Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use ofForce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2003), 15.25Peter Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Norms and Identity inWorld Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1996), 1718.26Jeffrey Lantis and Darryl Howlett, Strategic Culture, in John Baylis et al. (eds),Strategy in a Contemporary World (Oxford: OUP 2007), 94.27Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention.


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escalate out of control and they began to take casualties. But theSwedes have not always been like that. During the Thirty Years War,Swedish units systematically committed atrocities against a part of theGerman population they would now regard as innocent civilians.Norms for how military force is used change.28 Norms, however, donot only limit options, but they also indicate which options and valuesan actor should strive for. Building on this insight, some argue thatstrategic culture influences by shaping the organizations that aresupposed to deal with a specific strategic problem.29

According to a third logic, strategic culture influences more indirectlyby contributing to how a specific strategic situation is understoodby policy-makers and the concepts they then use to discuss thesituation.30 Such an understanding of strategic culture helps explaindifferences among states responses to similar events. For example, theterrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washingtonwere understood in the US as an attack against the country. Theterrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 in London, on the other hand, wereregarded as a crime in the UK.31 Martin van Creveld stresses furthermorethat conventions and norms are not only relevant to how actors usemilitary force, but also matter regarding what is considered a militaryproblem. He argues that war cannot be understood, nor can it be per-formed, without the existence of a set of norms that define what it is.32

Here, it becomes apparent that concepts such as security, war and threatsmean different things within a constructivist approach as compared to therationalist approach. Rather than considering security as part of aninterest-driven, calculated ends-means relationship, constructivists tend tothink about it as something that is constructed as a result of differentideational patterns.Interpreting strategy by taking into account culture makes it

important to avoid both ethnocentrism and cultural determinism inthe analysis. We should be careful not to assume that culture only playsa role in Afghanistan and other such areas where small European

28Jeffrey Legro, Military Culture and Inadvertent Escalation in World War II,International Security 18/4 (1994), 10842; Martin van Creveld, The Transformationof War (New York: The Free Press 1991).29Theo Farrell, Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict (Boulder, CO:Lynne Rienner 2005).30Sondhaus, Strategic Culture and Ways of War, 127; Judith Goldstein and RobertKeohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca,NY: Cornell UP 1993).31Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester UP 2005).32Martin van Creveld, The Culture of War (New York: Random House 2009), 158.


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powers operate against strangers. If culture has an impact in the East, itcertainly has also an impact in the West. One should also be careful notto exaggerate the cultural impact and equate it with national character.This mistake is easily made. For example, when the British sea powertheorist Sir Julian Corbett formulated his thoughts on a British way ofwarfare in the early 1900s, he intended not to try to identify a specific,genetically based, eternal British way of waging war, but simply thatBritain traditionally, under the influence of geographic position andeconomic interests, had to balance between a strong fleet andcontinental involvement. Variations in emphasis between these oppos-ing poles were affected by changes in technology, doctrine and policypreferences. Strategic culture is thus subject to change, albeit likeother cultural characteristics a slow continuous remodelling.33 As aresult, there are problems with explaining radical change. In the shortterm, the strategic culture is thus embedded in certain discursiveframeworks, but in the longer term, this framework changes.34

Explaining Small European Powers Strategic Choice

Why are Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands behavingstrategically differently in the Afghan War? In this section, we outlinean explanation based upon these states different strategic culture. Wewill focus on three analytical dimensions; under what conditions forceis considered legitimate, how a particular international crisis isunderstood, and the armed forces understanding of itself. If strategicculture can help us to explain the small European state strategy,we should expect Danish and Dutch strategic culture to have beenmore belligerent before Afghanistan than the Swedish and Norwegian.We should expect a lower threshold to the use of force in the formercases compared with the latter, and we should expect a differentunderstanding of how force is translated into political effect. Broadly,the expectations hold. The Danish and Dutch strategic cultures at theturn of the millennium were more activist oriented, while the Swedishand Norwegian strategic cultures still maintained a strong focus onnational, rather than international missions. Key players in Denmarkand the Netherlands, moreover, early on understood the war inAfghanistan to be a war, while Swedish and Norwegian elites

33Wilhelm Mirow, Strategic Culture Matters: A Comparison of German and BritishMilitary Interventions since 1990 (Berlin: Lit Verlag 2009).34David M. Jones and Mike L. Smith, Noise but No Signal: Strategy, Culture, and thePoverty of Constructivism, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24/6 (2001), 48595;Iver B. Neumann and Henrikki Heikka, Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, Practice,Cooperation and Conflict 40/1 (2005), 523.


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continue ten years on to refrain from using the word. Instead,governments in the latter cases chose to term it a stabilizationoperation.

Escalation by Integration: Denmark and the Netherlands

Danish and Dutch strategic culture led them to understand that strategicsuccess and escalation in Afghanistan rests with integration with theWestern great powers. While the Norwegian and Swedish cases point tohow strategic culture can be a source of inertia and continuity, theDanish and Dutch cases very much show how strategic culture discourses and practices are far from immutable. Indeed, Danish andDutch strategic culture transformed during the 1990s leading to newinterpretations of key concepts and world-views that made the countriesprone to opt for integration as a means to escalate legitimately whencore foreign policy values were perceived to be under threat.In Denmark and the Netherlands, for different reasons, similar

conclusions were drawn from the end of the Cold War and the wars inthe Balkans. Both states have long been members of both the EU andNATO. They share a strategic history in so far as both were occupiedby Nazi Germany during World War II and their economies relyheavily upon trade. Both are considered and consider themselves tobe small states. Already in 1883, the Danish MP Viggo Horuprhetorically asked about the Danish defence effort whats the use of it?in the aftermath of the defeat by Prussia in 1864.With the ever growingarmies of the great powers, the country was seen as too small to defend.The Netherlands took longer to accept its fate of small power status.After the loss of empire in 1949, the long-serving foreign minister andNATO secretary-general, Joseph Luns, still used to quip that the Nether-lands was a major power among the small powers.35 Denmark andthe Netherlands, too, shared the same geostrategic position for most ofthe twentieth century. Unable to rely confidently on French land powerfor support, they were squeezed between British maritime interests andGerman expansionism. After the two world wars, Denmark and theNetherlands joined NATO as the saying goes to keep the Americansin, the Soviets out, and the Germans down.During the Cold War, both states developed a defensively oriented

strategic culture. In the Danish case, there were still significant doubtsabout the utility of military force to reach political ends. According toMikkel Vedby Rasmussen, the central debate occurred between

35Jan Willem Honig, Myths That Keep Small Powers Going: Internationalist Idealismin the Netherlands, in Cyril Buffet and Beatrice Heuser (eds), Haunted by History:Myths in International Relations (Oxford: Berghahn 1998), 23.


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defencists and cosmopolitans, where the former position emphasizedthe need for a strong national defence and alliances since Denmark wassurrounded by potentially threatening neighbours and the latterstressed more pacifist policies such as neutrality and reliance uponinternational organizations such as the United Nations to keep stabilityin Northern Europe.36 An explicitly defensive posture with strongconnections to NATO was able to balance between these two positionsduring the Cold War. The Netherlands established a very similarstrategic culture in that military means were reserved for narrownational defence purposes. In foreign political terms, however,neutrality and neutralist tendencies were completely abandoned andforeign policy steered an increasingly uneasy, yet highly activist coursebetween Atlanticism which expressed unreserved support for the USand NATO, and internationalist idealism which aimed to further therule of international law.37

The end of the Cold War and the Balkan Wars during the 1990s hada profound effect on both Danish and Dutch strategic culture. InDenmark, the end of the Soviet threat implied that there was no longerany need to debate the utility of force to defend Denmark. Rasmussensuggests that this paved the way for mutual understanding of the twoCold War camps of defencists and cosmopolitans in a more activistdirection. Danish interests began to be understood as best servedabroad. Crucially, the rather ironic and defeatist whats the use of it?began to be reinterpreted as what should it be used for? an open-ended question that for the first time in modern history made theDanish armed forces a resource in its foreign and security policy.Hence, from being an essentially cosmopolitan argument, it began to beunderstood as a vital strategic question that deserved an answer. Theold cosmopolitan agenda of globalization as a responsibility of the richWestern world to share its riches and create a more peaceful worldprovided the answer in the Danish case. Rather than assuming thatpeace would come naturally from shared values, Danish elites duringthe 1990s gradually came to the conclusion that the use of force couldbe an option in creating those shared values.38

The turn to a more activist discourse in Denmark began in the 1990s.The basis for this significant re-orientation was the way the end of theCold War was understood. In Denmark (as opposed to Norway andSweden), the end of the Cold War was understood fundamentally toalter the conditions for Danish security. The participation of Danish

36Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, Whats the Use of It? Danish Strategic Culture and theUtility of Force, Cooperation and Conflict 40/1 (2005), 6789.37Honig, Myths.38Rasmussen, Whats the Use of It?, 81.


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combat units, including main battle tanks that saw action, in Bosniaand later in Kosovo made the use of force internationally appearfruitful and to some extent the changing discourse was helped along byNATO heading in the same direction. By 1998, the DefenceCommission declared that The task of the Danish Armed Forces haschanged in nature from being an element in a reactive, deterrence-based guarantee of security to also being an active and confidence-building instrument of security policy.39 In 2003, the Defence WhitePaper completed the change from a deterrent logic to an activist,expeditionary logic. Rasmussen suggests that the 2003 White Paperimplies that Danish ground forces should be able to participate in warfighting operations and thus their performance should be bench-markedby cutting-edge American and British forces.40 From a nationallyfocused defensive force posture, Danish strategic culture had changedto an internationally focused one just in time for the war on terrorand operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Within this changed strategicdiscourse, it was natural for the Danish decision-makers to understandoperations in Afghanistan as a war and as pressures for escalationincreased, Denmark became more prone to solve the strategic problemof lack of military capabilities through integration.A similar transformation occurred in the Netherlands though with

softer edges and more internal tensions. At first, the armed forces,Atlanticists and international idealists found themselves in unison onthe need to intervene in the Balkans. Like the Danish cosmopolitans,the Dutch idealists pushed hardest for armed intervention, whileAtlanticists and military were more hesitant about the use of force.41

The Srebrenica debacle, however, turned the tables. The armed forcesreacted by subscribing fully to the creation of professional expedi-tionary forces which could be employed anywhere, partly to extinguishthe stain of Srebrenica and partly because they saw little future inmaintaining a narrow national defence capability. The foreign policyelite turned more openly realist and favoured operating in aninternational concert with other powers to fight global instability.42

The internationalist idealists, on the other hand, became more cautious,a development reinforced by the policies of the Bush administrationand the mounting difficulties on the Iraqi and Afghan battlefields.Nonetheless, they united in supporting a re-interpretation of the

39Quoted in Rasmussen, Whats the Use of It?, p. 77.40Rasmussen, Whats the Use of It?, 80.41Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, rev. ed.(New York: Penguin 1997).42Norbert Both, From Indifference to Entrapment: The Netherlands and the YugoslavCrisis, 19901995 (Amsterdam UP 2000).


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constitution at the start of the new millennium, defining the purpose ofthe armed forces not only as providing for the nations defence and theprotection of national interest, but now interpreting the clause ofpromoting and maintaining the international legal order in a veryactivist sense.43

Unsurprisingly, therefore, thousands of Dutch troops deployed toIraq and Afghanistan. Some 1,100 served in Iraq between 2003 and2005, allegedly arriving with the longest list of caveats of anycontributing country. Billed as a stabilization force and widelyunderstood at home as a peacekeeping mission, local commandersnonetheless stretched their mandate and developed a Dutch approachthat went some considerable way towards a counter-insurgency lightoperation.44 From 2005 to 2010, another 1,600 went to Uruzgan, thebirth province of the Mullah Omar in Afghanistan. Operating with theAustralians, they were again subject to many caveats and officiallyengaged in stabilization and reconstruction, though in practice thetroops were allowed to continue the trend set in Iraq of mission creeptowards counter-insurgency.45 In contrast to the Danes, Dutch forcesoperated at arms length from the British and the US in what, especiallyin Afghanistan, was difficult, conflict-ridden territory. So, in their ownway, by a careful choice of theatre of operations and combat troops,they also sought to escalate through integrating as closely as waspossible given domestic political constraints with the US-dominatedinternational effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Escalation by Division of Labour: Sweden and Norway

Meanwhile, in Norway and Sweden, Cold War inertia lingers strongly.Again, for different reasons, but ultimately the two states drew similarconclusions from the end of the Cold War and the wars in the Balkans.Whereas the latter taught the Dutch that force under certain conditionswas a necessity and the Danes that force actually worked, it taught theSwedes and Norwegians that force is only a last resort and other waysof using the military were more efficient. To a greater extent than inDenmark and the Netherlands, their understanding led to an attempt tomaintain significant independence within ISAF operations and to

43Arie Rem Korteweg, The Superpower, The Bridge-Builder, and the Hesitant Ally:How Defence Transformation Divided NATO, 19912008 (Leiden: Leiden UniversityPress 2011), 216.44Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Arthur ten Cate, Missie in Al-Muthanna, DeNederlandse krijgsmacht in Irak, 20032005 (Amsterdam: Boom 2010).45Christ Klep, Uruzgan, Nederlandse militairen op missie, 20052010 (Amsterdam:Boom 2011).


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pursue a more development-directed strategy in which military meanswere just an enabler. A shortage of military capabilities preventedtraditional forms of escalation and so they understood their strategicrole in the Afghan War as carving out a niche in the north andcontributing to the overall Western escalation by allowing US andBritish forces to concentrate in the more turbulent south.Despite different strategic developments during the twentieth

century, Norway and Sweden share significant parts of their strategicculture. While Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany during WorldWar II and later joined NATO, Sweden managed to stay out of the warand subsequently continued its policy of neutrality as a grand strategyto avoid being caught in a potential third world war between thesuperpowers. When one probes these differences, however, it becomesclear that they were matters of degree rather than deep substance.Within NATO, Norway posed significant national caveats. Forexample, uniquely in NATO, the country refused to have nuclearweapons stationed on its national territory. On the other hand,although Sweden was not a formal member of NATO, it had significantand secret cooperation with the alliance to prepare its defences in caseof a Soviet attack. If Norway was a somewhat reluctant member,Sweden was an eager-to-please non-member.46

In particular, Norway and Sweden share two significant features intheir strategic cultures. First, the Cold War contributed to create aculture that made a sharp distinction between the national and theinternational and prioritized the former. This distinction made itpossible to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: narrow, traditionalself-interest with humanitarianism and modernity, and the use of forcewith peaceful conflict resolution. Second, this distinction alsofacilitated an internationalized identity that could accommodatechange in international normative structures. These two features arecentral to Sweden and Norway, but were much less pronounced in the

46On Swedens and Norways relations with NATO, see Magnus Petersson, TheScandinavian Triangle: Danish-Norwegian-Swedish Military Intelligence Cooperationand Swedish Security Policy During the Cold War, Journal of Strategic Studies 29/4(Aug. 2006), 60732; Magnus Petersson, NATO and the EU Neutrals: Instrumentalor Value-Oriented Utility? in Hakan Edstrom, Janne Haaland Matlary and MagnusPetersson (eds), NATO: The Power of Partnerships (London: Palgrave Macmillan2011); Kjell Engelbrekt and Jan Angstrom (eds), Svensk sakerhetspolitik i Europa ochvarlden (Stockholm: Norstedts 2010); Rolf Tamnes, The Strategic Importance of theHigh North during the Cold War, in Gustav Schmidt (ed.), A History of NATO, Vol.3: The First Fifty Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2001), 25774; Rolf Tamnes,Norsk forsvarshistorie, Allianseforsvar i endring (Bergen: Eide forlag 2004); VojtechMastny, Sven Holtsmark and Andreas Wenger (eds), War Plans and Alliances in theCold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West (London: Routledge 2006).


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Danish and Dutch cases. The sharp distinction between the national,where force is a legitimate defensive instrument, and the international,where conflicts should be solved peacefully, implies that Swedes andNorwegians in contrast to the Danes and Dutch are less prone to useforce in practice.47

The distinction between the national and international runs throughall facets of Swedish and Norwegian strategic discourse. Thedichotomy makes two separate forms of politics possible which avoidsuccumbing to obvious contradiction. Participation in internationaloperations has been voluntary for officers, while for the defence of thecountry neither officers nor soldiers were entrusted with such free will.In the chapel at Karlberg Castle in Stockholm, home of Swedish officertraining for over 200 years, there is a plaque which lists the officercadets who have fallen for the fatherland separately from those whohave fallen for peace. This division indicates that the armed forcesdistinguish sharply between service in the nations defence and servicein international peace. The distinction runs through the organization ofthe armed forces too. In Sweden, units were specially created andearmarked for international operations. Furthermore, instead oftraining these forces within the usual regimental structure (where theforces for national defence were trained), a separate training facilityand organization SWEDINT was created in 1948. Officers whoparticipated in United Nations (UN) operations during the Cold Warhad to request leave from their regular units and take up employmentwith the UN. In this way, the distinction between the national andinternational was created and maintained in daily operations. Thesituation in Norway was similar.All this illustrates that in both countries the national is prioritized

over the international. If we use Mirows and Meyers differentiationof strategic culture, we see this even more clearly.48 It is only fornational defence that the use of force is legitimate and unproblematic.In the international order, intervention for purposes of self-interest is

47The description of Swedish strategic culture differs from Gunnar Aselius interpreta-tion. Aselius focused only on national defence in his analysis and failed to recognize theimportance of international norms as critical in changing Swedish strategic culture inthe middle to late 1990s. See Gunnar Aselius, Swedish Strategic Culture After 1945,Cooperation and Conflict 40/1 (2005), 2544. Aselius did, however, recognize otherkey features of Swedish strategic culture, such as the importance of administrativestructure, social democracy and corporatism in the creation of the guiding strategicprinciple of total defence.48Mirow, Strategic Culture Matters; Christoph O. Meyer, The Quest for a EuropeanStrategic Culture: Changing Norms on Security and Defence in the European Union(London: Palgrave 2006).


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not considered legitimate. The type of military force that can belegitimately used also differs. The national imposes fewer restrictions,whereas in international operations there is a lower tolerance for lossesfor both soldiers and civilians in the area of operations. Maintaining asharp distinction between the national and international spheres freesthe Swedish and Norwegian strategic cultures from contradiction. TheCold War implied that the threat of invasion required priority, Theclarity of us and them made the use of force in self-defenceunproblematic and gave it high moral and political legitimacy. In theinternational sphere, solidarity, humanity and non-violence were thekey standards. In this way, a narrative was created that could reconcilewhy the countries possessed armed forces and why they must be used inspecific and different ways. Through this dichotomy, officers were alsoable to define themselves in line with the dominant norm in Westernmilitary hierarchies, that is the interstate conventional war.49 The sharpdivision between the national and international not only gave theimpression that these involved fundamentally different activities butthey also meant that experiences from officers and soldiers returningfrom international operations could safely be ignored. As Nina Graegerand Halvard Leira explain regarding Norway:

Since the main task of the military was national defence, it wasassumed that international experience had little to offer withregard to relevant skills and scenarios. This was reflected in careerpatterns. Service in Northern Norway was a prerequisite if onewanted to rise to the highest positions, whereas internationalexperience was neither necessary nor advantageous for a career inthe armed forces and could even spoil future promotions.50

The primacy of the national over the international is also clearly visiblein the tasks given to the armed forces by their governments. It was notuntil the defence reform of 2000 that Norway accorded internationaloperations a higher priority. Prior to this, international peace supportoperations were only a supplementary task for the armed forces. InSweden, it took seven years after the Wall came down to officiallyrecognize new tasks. In the defence bill A Renewed Total Defence(1996), international operations for the first time became one of themain tasks of the armed forces even though the whole remained

49Eyal Ben-Ari, Changing Models of Military Violence? The Swedish Armed Forcessince the End of the Cold War, Paper presented at the ERGOMAS conference inStockholm, June 2009.50Nina Graeger and Halvard Leira, Norwegian Strategic Culture after World War II:From a Local to a Global Perspective, Cooperation and Conflict 40/1 (2005), 50.


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subsumed under total defence. Until the mid-1990s, internationaloperations were not officially a part of security policy in Sweden, butforeign policy, which can be seen as a sign that it was not consideredimportant to the armed forces. One analyst even claims that they wereseen in a negative light as they took away resources from the main taskof defending Sweden.51 In the 2001 defence reform, the governmentfinally made international operations the main task for the armedforces. As in Norway, officers careers, however, did not necessarilybenefit from the participation in international operations. Even lessonslearned from the Congo in the 1960s, where Swedish soldiersexperienced combat for the first time since the Napoleonic wars, didnot filter through to the Swedish infantry manuals. Firefights inthe Congo were clearly understood to be different from combat inSweden.Ten years after operations in Afghanistan began, there are still signs of

Cold War inertia. Both Sweden and Norway are struggling withimplementing reforms that make international operations mandatoryfor officers and soldiers. Many continue to regard internationaloperations as optional and only national defence as mandatory. Yetanother sign that the national is associated with self-interest and theinternational with humanitarianism is that it is relatively difficult to findexplicit interest-driven motives why Sweden should carry out interna-tional operations. This shows how deep the norm of humanity aboveself-interest is in the international context. And it shows how intimatelyconnected it is with Swedish strategic identity. There almost seems torest a taboo on saying that Norway or Sweden have national interestsbeyond the narrow national territorial sphere. If one compares thispolitical discourse with Denmark, where the utility of the use of forceand its connection to specified national interests are a necessity to justifymajor national commitments, the differences in strategic culture areclear.52

The second major feature of Swedish and Norwegian strategicculture is the high degree of susceptibility to the spread of internationalnorms. Martha Finnemore is among a growing number of researcherswho emphasize that the modern state is socialized into a system of

51Mattias Viktorin, Exercising Peace: Conflict Preventionism, Neoliberalism and theNew Military, dissertation, Stockholm Univ. 2008. See also Peter Viggo Jakobsen,Nordic Approaches to Peace Operations: A New Model in the Making? (London:Frank Cass 2006), 187 and Karl Yden, Kriget och karriarsystemet: Forsvarsmaktensorganiserande i fred (Gothenburg: Bokforlaget BAS 2008).52Magnus Christiansson, Far Away, So Close: Comparing Danish and SwedishDefence and Security Policies, Militaert tidsskrift 138/3 (2009), 118.


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states and that norms tend to spread among them.53 There are severalkey internationalized norms that matter in this context. One concernsthe accepted position and role of armed forces. Western armed forceshave over the past few centuries come to understand their identity asmanagers of violence. The gradual professionalization of the officercorps came to be understood as requiring increasingly complexplanning methods and staff procedures designed to lead large-scalearmies in conventional military campaigns. The Norwegian andSwedish armed forces were not immune to this process by whichinternational relations not only create constitutive norms, but alsoregulative norms about what kind of force can be legitimately used forwhat purposes. During the 1990s, these traditional norms began to beovershadowed by a new set when the international communitygradually attributed more importance to individual security, ratherthan interstate security. Through the UN Secretary-Generals reportAn Agenda for Peace in 1992 and The Responsibility to Protect adecade later, state sovereignty came close to being trumped byindividual security. It is clearly possible to interpret the increasednumber of international interventions in civil wars from thisperspective. Norway and Sweden have been far more prone toparticipate in interventions after these norms started to be sharedwidely among the international community.Critically, there are differences in the spread of international norms

in Norway and Sweden, as well as in Denmark and the Netherlands.Since the distinction between the national and international is farstronger in the first two states strategic culture, it is possible to discerndifferences in the receptivity to certain international norms and alsodifferences in the ways the same norm is interpreted. For example,when then British Minister of Defence (and subsequent NATOSecretary-General) Lord Robertson expressed his ambition in 1998that the British armed forces were to be a force for good in the world,the phrase resonated strongly with how Oslo and Stockholm under-stood their own international political role, including that of theirarmed forces. The view that Norway and Sweden do good in worldpolitics is central to the self-perception of Norwegian and Swedishdecision-makers. They tend to think of themselves as conductinginternational interventions not because it is in their interest to do so,but because they are driven by altruism and compassion. Thisunderstanding of self existed before 1989, but it was stronglyreinforced by the development of norms promoting humanitarian

53Finnemore, National Interests in International Society; John Gerard Ruggie,Constructing the World Polity (London: Routledge 1998); Alexander Wendt, SocialTheory of International Politics (Cambridge: CUP 1999).


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operations during the 1990s. The increased number of armed conflictsglobally after the Cold War implied that there were more places in needof good. The effects of this need to do good, though, are different. InBritain, and as we saw in the cases of Denmark and the Netherlands, ithas led to an increasing use of force. Sweden and Norway have chosento focus on PRTs in more peaceful regions of Afghanistan. Theirhumanitarian efforts in support of peace seem to derive part of theirstrategic validity from their contribution to creating and maintaining adivision of labour among Western powers in so far as it allowed Britainand the US to concentrate their units in the south. At the same time,governments and PRTs can maintain that reconstruction and develop-ment are the main focus and therefore in line with the assignedinternational role of the armed forces. This strategic idea thus fitsperfectly with Norwegian and Swedish self-perception as do-goodersinternationally. Without the means to support conventional ideas ofescalating to strategic success in military missions, both Norway andSweden can successfully maintain that peace enforcement is not theirmain strategic priority in international missions.

Conclusions

Why are the small European states pursuing different strategies inAfghanistan? In this article, we have argued that rationalist realistcalculations such as maintaining strong ties with the United States failto explain variation in strategic behaviour. Instead, we suggest thatstrategic culture can explain this variation. Small states are particularlyinteresting as cases for understanding escalation in modern war. Theend of Cold War resulted in dramatic cuts in armed forces size andescalation in traditional ways suddenly became close to impossible.This presented a key strategic challenge for the small states as they nolonger possessed the necessary forces to conduct and sustain large-scaleoperations. To address the challenge they were suddenly required toreengage with regaining strategy which during the long years of theCold War they had not needed to. The Danes and the Dutch opted toescalate through integration with the Western great powers, whileSwedes and Norwegians opted to contribute to escalation throughcreating and re-creating a division of labour that allowed British andUS forces to be centred in southern Afghanistan. The menu of strategicchoice thus proved richer than traditional rationalist realist theoryposits. Instead of putting up and wholly subsuming their militaryefforts under the umbrella of the major powers, or shutting up bystaying away, these four small powers all strategized differently. Theirestimations of ends and means and their interaction with allies andopponents differed substantially. Despite their limited means and


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despite their inability to engage in traditional patterns of militaryescalation, they nonetheless sought to exercise effective strategic choice.The key difference that can explain this variation can be found in

strategic culture. On the one hand, the Danes and the Dutch werefound to share significant traits in their strategic culture. In these smallstates, their internationalist strategic culture, for slightly differentreasons, permitted them to understand the end of the Cold War asfundamentally changing the conditions for their security, making themmore susceptible to activist and militarist policies. These policiesdissolved the distinction between the national and international and ledto abandoning of the Cold War primacy of national defence. On theother hand, in Sweden and Norway sharing a small state northernnationalist strategic culture the distinction between national andinternational remained strong. This made it possible to maintain twoseparate policy domains, which the Dutch and Danish internationalismhad reconciled. In the northern version of small state strategic culture,the lingering distinction between the national and international spherescreated and re-created a sharp distinction between interest andhumanitarianism, which permeated the decision-making, as well asthe planning, training and conduct of military operations and led to adifferent understanding of the strategic situation, the problem, and theutility of force.As noted in the introduction, traditional notions of escalation which

centre on overwhelming force and destroying an opponents means ofresistance are of limited utility in counter-insurgency. Both over-escalation and under-escalation come with serious political price-tags.The limited utility of the overt and crushing use of force means thatsmaller powers with limited military capabilities have an opportunityto play a role of strategic significance which they, paradoxically, withfar larger armed forces could not achieve during the Cold War. In thisarticle, we have attempted to show that, in very varying ways, smallEuropean states are seizing this newly discovered opportunity.

Note on Contributors

Jan Angstrom is an associate professor at the Department of Peace andConflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. He holds a PhD fromDepartment of War Studies, Kings College, London. His researchinterests include the nature and conduct of modern war. He haspublished articles in several journals, among them, InternationalRelations, Security Studies, Civil Wars, Small Wars and Insurgenciesas well as Comparative Strategy. He has co-edited several books withIsabelle Duyvesteyn, the latest being Modern War and the Utility ofForce (Routledge 2010).


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Jan Willem Honig is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at Kings College,London, as well as Visiting Professor in Military Strategy at theSwedish National Defence College in Stockholm and a Senior VisitingResearch Fellow at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research atUppsala University. He writes extensively on strategy and recently co-edited, with Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Daniel Moran, a volumetitled Clausewitz: The State and War (Franz Steiner 2011).

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Regaining Strategy: Small Powers, Strategic Culture, and Escalation in Afghanistan

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