高雄公佳當舖

          國家類型與戰略研究 National Style and Strategic Studies Introduction After years of ignorance during the cold war, the study of national style has advanced to the forefront of recent strategic agenda. This shift in attention, notably inspired by Samuel Huntington’s Clashes of Civilisation theory, is partially a reaction to changes of external world; the collapse of the USSR and a rigidly bipolar international system and the resurgence of national identities and ethnic conflicts.[1] Unlike days of bipolar confrontation, many strategists were growing dissatisfied with the relative incompetence of rational choice theories or formal modeling to account adequately for a wide range of new strategic phenomena. When there are more and more wars breaking out of religious, cultural and ethnical reasons, generalizing phenomena to cross-national and cross-cultural regularities is no longer taken as a persuasive approach to solve strategic problems.[2] Cohabitation of new questions and unsatisfactory old answers has led many strategists and political scientists much more seriously consider national style analysis as a research approach to analyze and understand war and peace in this n 賣屋ew world. Despite the rise in interest, however, national style approach still meets with skepticism inside and outside the strategic circles. This is mostly because scholars working on national style have not sufficiently engaged over basic issues such as terminology and methodology, and in addition have unintentionally entrapped into some fallacies. As a result, there has not yet been a remarkable and systematic accumulation, nor evolution of knowledge for national style approach in strategic studies.[3] In this article, the author will re-examine the nature of national style approach, which reflects the strategic culture of different countries, and try to offer effective arguments on how useful the idea of national style is in strategic studies. Do security communities have distinctive national style in strategy? Do security communities have distinctive national style in strategy? Before moving to this question, it is helpful to first discuss the nature of national style itself. Ken Booth perhaps provides the most detailed definition of the concept of national style. Emphasizing in his Strategy and Ethnoce 膠原蛋白ntrism, he noted that national style, or he called “strategic culture” in other places, refers to a nation’s traditions, values, attitudes, patterns of behavior, habits, symbols, achievements and particular ways of adapting to the environment and solving problems with respect to threats or use of force.[4] Another national style investigator, Alastair Iain Johnston believes that national style is an integrated system of symbols, i.e., causal axioms, languages, analogies, metaphors, etc., that act to establish pervasive and long-standing strategic preferences by formulating concepts of roles and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs.[5] In other words, national styles, as a set of patterns of and for a nation’s behavior on issues of war and peace that are institutionalized, persist over time, are derived from a nation’s history, geography, and political culture, and represent the aggregate of attitudes and patterns of behavior and differentiate them from other groups. Since national style is a direct descendent of culture and that one can gain insight into strategy by understanding the nature of internal and exte 禮服rnal influences on national security and the historical precedents shaping policy, it provides a distinctive framework which significantly influences the analytical context and strategic options provided by national strategists.[6] In addition, because national style includes basic assumptions about the orderliness of strategic environment and decision-makers’ understanding of international conflicts and their solutions, analysis of national style accordingly would be required to focus on differentiation of each country’s national strategy. Although there is no doubt that distinctive national styles exist among different countries, the examination of national style of a particular nation as a security community for its strategy is arduously complicated. As Colin Gray argued, to understand strategy, there is no alternative but to take seriously historical experiences of particular nation and the interpretation national style places on those experiences.[7] For doing so, except for those detailed, multilayered intellectual efforts, analysis of national style involves three central empirical tasks, according to Thomas Berger, if the fallacy of simpliza 酒店經紀tion and generalization in strategic studies is to be avoided. Firstly, it is necessary to investigate the original set of cultural elements that define how a country views the military, national security, and the use of force, paying careful attention to the interpretation of these events among different groups in the state. Secondly, one needs to examine political process through which actual security policy has been made and how particular decisions have subsequently been legitimated. In this context, it is important to define essential features of both political-military culture and security policy associated with it at a particular point of time. Thirdly, it is necessary to analyze progression of both the political-military context and security policies over time, monitoring how they evolve in response to historical events.[8] How useful is national style approach? To agree an argument that security communities have distinctive styles in their strategic performance may not encounter too much difficulty, but not everyone can entirely approve national style as a useful approach for analyzing national strategy. For example, Marxists and other materiali 澎湖民宿sts see national style as primarily epiphenomenal. For structualists, structure can cover differences in strategic behaviours across nations. For realists, the impact of national style may not vary much across large groups of states. National style is at best derivative of the distribution of capabilities and has no independent explanatory power. For rational choice scholars, actors deploy national style strategically, like other resources, simply to further their own self-interests without any other significant considerations. Those schools intentionally unidentifying or ignoring national style in their research investigations, however, were found lack of explanatory power for many strategic issues in the post cold war period.[9] For example, Western countries have long reckoned military power a center of national strategy and international relations, perhaps as a byproduct of their Clauzwitzian heritage. For other third world countries with inferior military capacities, the concept and utility of military power are often mixed up with integration of cultural, religious or personal influences, which Westerners could barely conceptualize.[10] More scholars have thus abstained from pa 關鍵字排名radigm researching or grand-theory building, and concentrated on cultural-area level analyses.[11] In that case, without in-depth consideration on national style, strategists can hardly find reasonable explanations. National style approach, however, is not without weakness, even with growing recognition of its intellectual and practical contributions. In the following paragraphs, the author will discuss the weakness and further refinement of national style approach so that hopefully it can be improved to be a more useful instrument for strategic studies. Further Refinement of National Style Approach Scientific methods All knowledge that fits under the heading of science is relative to methods and fields of study from which it comes. In fact, as a systematic and neutral attempt to satisfy knowledge enquiries, scientific methods, which are instruments used to deal with research material, and to offer “modes of conceptualization for describing and explaining,[12] may be the only possible way to gain objective knowledge of various subject matters, including strategic studies.[13] Accordingly, there are two implications of scientific methods in strategic studies. On 太平洋房屋 one hand, strategic methodology must be consistent, but there is no fixed approach that strategists have to choose and there is no theory that they need to accept as permanently true.[14] The usefulness of methods must be discreetly judged case by case, and knowledge formed by each given case should be inferred independently.[15] On the other hand, strategic methods on national style should be able to produce a clear and valid arrangement of propositions expressing various kinds of claims on individual countries being studied so that they could be verified or falsified by other researchers.[16] In order to strengthen the methodological vigour of national style approach, there are three requirements to follow: (1) Proper techniques Attempts to close the disparity between strategic theory and realities must principally rely on the employment of proper research techniques, which include measurement and operation that could systematically conceptualize strategic phenomena. By means of proper techniques, which should be valid and reliable, one can assess national style scientifically and free strategic studies from pure assumptions.[17] Meanwhile, proper techniques could also serve as o 襯衫bjective checks and standards to assure adherence of national style approach in strategic studies to academic requirements.[18] By well-designed techniques, for example, statistics, survey, fieldwork, participant observation, etc., strategists may have more confidence to say that their studies through national style approach are scientifically qualified to produce appropriate strategy. (2) Sufficient information Sufficient information in either quantitative or qualitative form can facilitate strategic studies on different nations being theoretically extracted and comparatively analyzed. Every descriptive or explanatory inference on national style must assure acquisition of sufficient information, which should be as precise, adequate, and unbiased as required by the methods or theories being used. The better information could logically lead to clarification of national differentiation, the more reasons that the strategist could use and accept the explanation and conclusion of his or her studies.[19] Therefore, strategists’ accessibility to information, which demonstrates how well their propositions can fit and work, crucially decides their research qualities. (3) Non-exclusiveness National style itself, thoug 代償h useful and important, should not be judgmentally considered as a deterministic or exclusive analysis for strategic studies since there is no single approach that could permanently provide complete descriptions or full explanations on strategic phenomenon. National style approach is simply a tool that may be of assistance in analyzing national strategy, which still essentially requires other examinations from multiple, diverse perspectives if one hopes to achieve a comprehensive understanding. Unfortunately, when national style is discussed in the strategic context, most studies have seldom done enough to detect a correlation between national style and other influential factors or deduce a theoretical linkage between them. Some of traditional national style researchers are even inappropriately inclined to reject ahostorical or non-cultural factors found in strategic phenomena. To avoid this, strategists should accommodate as many variables as possible to strengthen the validity of their researches,[20] and require prudent use of the concept of national style in conjunction with other means of analysis, such as organizational, rational, role or international system analysis if this approach is to remain viable and credible. Qualitative analys 票貼is  .