It's not really a strike culture. To describe the system in Norway: We have a three party model: employers (represented through their association), employees (represented through their unions) and the government (mediating, and regulating). Strike is one tool that might be used. If you cannot strike, then you miss a tool in the negotiations. It is a tool even if you don't use it: you might use it, just as the employers have (and use) their equivalent: lock-out. There are some professions that legally cannot strike (military, police). For those, other professions in the same unions negotiate, and they get the same raise as their brethren. The pilots would not necessarily be in the same situation if they gave up their right to strike.
The three-party model has national negotiations, and a joint goal is stability and equality. Everyone gets more or less the same raise, working conditions are more or less similar etc. Industries (i.e. factories) negotiate first, then other private, then government/ public sector (including education and health care), following the example of the industries and getting more or less the same raise in percent. This usually is a smooth process. There might be a strike to make a point, but the government often stops the strike quickly by introducing enforced arbitration.
The problems come when someone tries to introduce elements from different ways of organizing the workplace: more individualistic, less secure and mot combatitive. That is not necessarily a worse way of organizing the workplace, but it is different, and it is problematic to attempt to use two different models, either in the same company or in a company operating in a local environment using a different model.
I am Danish, I understand the model. We run with it as well.
What I could associate with was if the pilots said "We don't want this 8 year agreement as we can't see that it can reflect 8 years of macroeconomic risk sufficiently, and does not leave room to adjust for big changes in these conditions. So we need a better or shorter agreement" but I balk at the "We can't have an 8 year agreement, because we loose the right to strike" I understand the fact that any negotiation would open the possibility of a strike, but by focusing not on the ability to adjust conditions, but on the ability to strike there is to me a clear indication of mindset and culture. You might argue that it is semantics, but I think that it is very revealing semantics.