The Erosion of German Elite Trust in the United States of America

Abstract

In this article, I address two salient issues in IR trust research: first, I introduce a longitudinal, content analysis to measure foreign policy trust. Second, I provide an in-depth analysis of how recent crises affected German political elites’ trust of the United States. I begin with a brief conceptual sketch of foreign policy trust and argue that treating it as a trusting discourse is a useful way to bridge the micro–macro gap. Next, I introduce a content analysis to measure trust, present coding rules and discuss advantages and problems of the approach. The empirical section consists of data generated from coding German Bundestag speeches and newspaper op-eds from 2000 through 2014. By disaggregating the data to specify who trusts whom and regarding which issues, I propose the following: First, there is a significant decline in trust among the traditionally pro-American German center-right politicians. Second, there is a steady decline in trust in the United States as a state entity, as opposed to strongly fluctuating trust in different U.S. presidents. Third, the NSA crisis directly affected German elites’ trust in the bilateral security partnership, an area where trust was stable even during the Bush presidency.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website, doi:10.1080/09644008.2019.1594785.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Philipp Brugger is a doctoral candidate at the Peace Research and International Politics chair of the Institute for Political Science and a member of the DFG-funded project ‘Trust, don’t verify’ – Towards a theory of strong trust in International Relations.

Notes

1 Prima facie, we might expect public opinion surveys to provide a good operationalisation of trust. Unfortunately, available surveys are only conducted irregularly (e.g. surveys by the German opinion research firm Infratest Dimap) or the wording of questions have changed over time (as is unfortunately the case with the annual German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends survey). Conceptually, asking individual citizens whether they trust the United States is problematic. First, it is unclear how the respondents parse such questions. Second, as this article argues, individual trust is not the same as foreign policy trust and the latter is much more relevant for policy making processes (see Currall and Inkpen 2002, 481).

2 It is important to distinguish trust from related concepts such as friendship. The ABC model is essential in this context, as it defines trust as a relationship with a specific subject (who trusts whom to do what?), which is an important distinction from the more general – and more practice-centered – concept of friendship (see Oelsner and Koschut 2014)

3 For an overview of current approaches to trust measurement in the field of international relations see Keating and Ruzicka (2014) and Brugger (2015).

4 This method is necessarily a measurement of ascriptions of trustworthiness, not of the act / process of trusting itself in the sense in which Luhmann (2000), Möllering (2006), and other scholars of suspension use it. Hence, the analysis can capture whether a specific foreign policy discourse represents the other state as a trustworthy actor (in which trust would be appropriate), but not whether trust is executed in suspension-based forms of risk taking in actual foreign policy.

5 A related issue that is not discussed here is the intensity of trust and mistrust. A further development of my method might account for it as a separate dimension: the more frequent trusting or mistrusting statements are in the discourse under investigation, the more intense is the trusting or mistrusting discourse. This step would allow accounting for disinterest or disregard without adding complexity to the coding scheme for trust and mistrust, which benefits from its relative symmetry and simplicity.

6 The year 2011 presents somewhat of an outlier due to the paucity of codable statements. In effect, some statements by the German Left party (whose members often add a kind of ceterum censeo about the U.S.’s untrustworthiness to their foreign policy speeches) have an unduly strong effect on the data. Hence, the 50:50 split on the motivational dimension should be read with this qualification in mind.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.