Security Culture in Times of War: How Did the Balkan War Affect the Security Cultures in Germany and United States.

摘要

This thesis uses a comparative case study approach to examine how security cultures change under the impact of political shocks, and how that change affects political behavior and policy options. The thesis analyzes the security cultures of Germany and the United States as they evolved under the impact of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. Using paired observations for controlled comparison, the author employs process tracing to examine the nature and quantity of change. The case studies demonstrate that security cultures influence the assessment of political situations, restrain policy objectives, and condition the range of issues to which political attention is devoted. Both cases reveal that security cultures affect the evaluation of policy options and the choices that are made. The German case study suggests that the option to use military force during the first years of the Bosnian war was simply rejected by leading elites as inappropriate, even taboo. The prevailing security culture in Germany derived from the experience of World War II and Federal Republic of Germany's political culture in the Cold War. The horrendous war atrocities in Bosnia after 1992 triggered a substantial change in German views on the use of force among both political elites and society as a whole. For the United States, on the other hand, the option of forceful and effective intervention in European affairs was at the outset simply not imagined by the George H. W. Bush administration, which adhered to the political status quo of an intact Yugoslavia and had strategic concerns about the dissolving Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf. This policy changed with the presidency of Bill Clinton. The security culture of the United States began to shift from abstention in the early 1990s to a more effective and intensive intervention in European affairs. Variables that affected perceptions of the war included personal visits to the war zone, refugees' testimonies, and the mass media.