International Theory and German Foreign Policy: Introduction to a Special Issue

Abstract

This paper introduces the special issue on ‘International Theory and German Foreign Policy’, the central aim of which is to foster connections between scholarly discussions of German foreign policy and broader theoretical debates in IR and beyond. While there has been a lively discussion about ‘new German foreign policy’, we argue that it has not engaged substantially with international and foreign policy theory, especially with respect to its more recent developments. Reviewing the literature written roughly in the last decade, we argue that the most discussed works are still largely provided by the ‘Altmeister’ (Maull, Szabo, Bulmer and Paterson) who were already dominating the field a quarter of a century ago. While there is a general decline in the academic study of German foreign policy, we show that a range of novel, theoretically sophisticated but often disconnected scholarship has appeared on the margins. This special issue contributes to this emerging work by providing (1) conceptual interrogations, which question the existing research and provide theoretically-grounded alternatives, (2) critical discussions and evaluations of the nature of Germany’s actorness and the environment in which it operates, and (3) applications of less familiar perspectives on German foreign policy.

In the last few years, Germany’s foreign policy has once again become the subject of often hotly contested debates. The Munich Security Conference of 2014 is now conventionally considered as a landmark in this process, as it saw coordinated speeches by the then German President Joachim Gauck, as well as Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defence, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Ursula von der Leyen. Using carefully crafted language, they all painted a picture of a Germany that is much more proactive and engaged in solving global crises and propping up the liberal world order. Challenging the deeply engrained ‘culture of restraint’ (Baumann and Hellmann 2001; Williams 2019 in this issue), Gauck argued that ‘Germany should make a more substantial contribution, and it should make it earlier and more decisively if it is to be a good partner. […] Sometimes it can even be necessary to send in the troops’ (Gauck 2014). Steinmeier and von der Leyen followed suit by initiating strategic debates, which culminated in the publication of the Foreign Ministry’s review document Krise – Ordnung – Europa (Auswärtiges Amt 2015) and the Defence Ministry’s White Book (Die Bundesregierung 2016).

Parallel to these developments, observers from within politics, academia, think-tanks and newspapers started to talk about a ‘new German foreign policy’ (e.g. Hellmann, Jacobi, and Urrestarrazu 2015). Germany’s power was seen as growing, bringing with itself new opportunities as well as expectations from others (Stelzenmüller 2016, 53; Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and German Marshall Fund 2013, 30). New concepts have been devised to capture this transformation, labelling Germany as Europe’s ‘reluctant hegemon’ (Paterson 2011; Bulmer and Paterson 2013, 2019), a ‘geo-economic power’ (Kundnani 2011; 2014; Szabo 2015), ‘central power’ (Münkler 2015), ‘servant leader’ (Mangasarian and Techau 2017) or ‘shaping power’ (Sandschneider 2012; Hellmann 2016; for reviews of these debates see Maull 2018; Berenskötter and Stritzel 2019 in this issue). Others, in the meantime, have argued that German foreign policy can still be best captured by the old concepts of a ‘civilian power’ (Maull 2011; 2018) or a ‘normative power’ (Crawford and Olsen 2017). As this multiplicity testifies, keeping up with the discussions on the course German foreign policy has been an exciting and often exhausting task.

However, has this debate been similarly rich also in its theoretical and conceptual underpinnings? It is true that in the past German foreign policy often served as a testing ground for battles between different IR theories, which had a detrimental effect on the empirical knowledge that was produced (Hellmann 2009). Arguably, the current literature seems to suffer from the opposite problem, especially in its mainstream form of debating different kinds of Germany as a ‘power’ (civilian, shaping, geo-economic, hegemonic etc.). There appears be too little engagement with international and foreign policy theory, especially with respect to its dynamic developments over the last two decades. This leads to a certain self-encapsulation of the debate. More importantly, it limits the range of possible interpretations of German foreign policy (as new angles are not explored sufficiently), as well as foreign policy and international politics in general (as insights from Germany are all too often not being generalised or linked to broader literatures).

The central aspiration of this special issue is to foster two-way connections between scholarly discussions of German foreign policy and broader theoretical debates in IR and beyond.¹ We wish to contribute to the advancement of a theoretically-grounded analysis of German foreign policy by reaching towards recent developments in IR and related cross-disciplinary inspirations in order to look at Germany afresh. By bringing together a group of scholars working in different perspectives and located in different institutions in Europe and North America we hope it provides greater theoretical depth, breadth and innovation than is currently the case. We aim to open the field of German Studies to new audiences by staging an encounter between empirical interest in the recent developments in German foreign policy and up-to-date theoretical developments in International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis (and, by extensions, also Politics, Sociology, Communication Studies or Organisation Studies). Through this, we aim to generate new insights on German foreign policy across a range of different fields. Finally, we hope this special issue aids reflection on generalising these insights, thereby potentially enriching the knowledge in the broader field of IR.

We use the remainder of this introductory contribution for two purposes. First, we review the state of the literature on German foreign policy that emerged roughly in the last decade. We do not aim for an exhaustive or comprehensive analysis of everything that has been written, but rather establish what we consider to be the main trends and discuss their relationship to broader developments in IR. Second, we define the purpose and ground covered by this special issue, present its main contributions and outline the structure and key arguments.

A FIELD IN CRISIS? THEORY IN THE MOST RECENT DEBATE ON GERMANY’S ‘NEW’ FOREIGN POLICY

Let us start by taking a step back. What we have been witnessing recently is by no means the first debate about a supposedly ‘new’ course in Germany’s foreign policy. In fact, as a number of review articles written over the last quarter of century testify, there is hardly anything new in seeing Germany’s policies as ‘new’ in one way or another (Peters 1997; Risse 2004; Enskat 2015; Hellmann 2016). Intriguingly, the patterns identified in earlier overviews are strikingly similar to those characterising the current debates. In a review essay written more than twenty years ago, Ingo Peters summarised that the core argument of the literature is that ‘the changed international conditions present Germany with a grown potential for action’, but also with ‘new expectations’ with respect to addressing ‘new challenges’ (Peters 1997, 363). While referring to the situation after reunification, this phrase could be taken straight from the 2010s debates on Germany’s role in the crisis-ridden EU (Bulmer and Paterson 2013, 2019) or its supposed emergence as a global ‘shaping power’ (Sandschneider 2012; Stelzenmüller 2016). Peters also shows that there is nothing new about the proliferation of ‘power’ as a key concept that is supposed to describe Germany’s international role (see Maull 2018; Berenskötter and Stritzel 2019 this issue). In fact, three of the five books he discusses in depth have the term already in their titles, seeing Germany as a ‘world power’ (Hacke 1993), ‘European power’ (Rühl 1996) or ‘Europe’s central power’ (Schwarz 1994).

What does this say about the state of the academic debate? Back in the day, Peters was rather sceptical about the literature on ‘new German foreign policy’ (Peters 1997, 362, inverted commas in original). His recommendations for future research were clear: scholars of German foreign policy could do with a more thorough engagement with theory (and methodology), where theory is understood ‘not as a declaration of faith, but as a systematic cognitive tool’ for generating and organising knowledge (Peters 1997, 383). For the future, he argued, there should be more emphasis on ‘systematically conceptualised, theory-driven works on German foreign policy as a contribution to foreign policy analysis in general’ (Peters 1997, 384). In other words, in capturing the specificity of Germany as a research subject, the scholars should reach for clearly developed, transparent and generalisable concepts and methodologies. In this way, we could gain both more clarity with respect to how our claims regarding German foreign policy are constructed and backed up, as well as be able to distil some additional knowledge useful for analysing foreign policies of other states.

Indeed, Peters’ prescriptions are very close to our own approach in this special issue. How has the literature produced over the last few years fared in this respect? Based on literature reviews in this special issue (namely by Berenskötter and Stritzel 2019; and Eberle 2019) and elsewhere (Enskat 2015; Hellmann 2016; Maull 2018), a survey of approximately thirty explicitly theoretically grounded articles on Germany’s foreign policy published in this journal in 2010–2019 and a sociological survey of German IR community (Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Risse 2018), the picture is mixed at best. While much interesting and important work has been done, the theoretical underpinnings of the mainstream have not changed very much since the time of Peters’ writing. While we would not go as far as to pronounce a ‘crisis of German foreign policy research’ (Enskat 2015, 604, fn. 19), there is certainly much left to be desired in terms of theoretical sophistication and plurality.

Above all, the mainstream of the debate lacks theoretical impulses in line with recent developments in IR and related disciplines. Arguably the most discussed concepts with academic ambition or at least some grounding in theoretical literature are provided by the ‘Altmeister’.² It is still Hanns Maull and his ‘civilian power’, Simon Bulmer and William Paterson with their ‘reluctant hegemon’, and Stephen Szabo (and Hans Kundnani as the rare newcomer) with ‘geo-economic power’ that shape the debates. Of these three, civilian power arguments are most directly grounded within IR debates, but their basis very much remains the 1990s merger of constructivism and liberal institutionalism (but see Berenskoetter and Giegerich 2010 for a reformulation). Bulmer and Paterson’s theorising of hegemony offers an eclectic synthesis of various sources from both IR and comparative politics, but the most important aspect is arguably hegemonic stability theory, which dates back to the 1970s (Kindleberger 1973). Most isolated from IR theorising is then the geo-economic power argument, which is based chiefly on a brief essay – a commentary rather than conceptual elaboration – by Edward Luttwak (1998 [1990]), published back in 1990. A sizeable chunk of publications, including on the pages of this journal, then operate largely with one or more of these concepts; applying them, testing or comparing them, proving their worth or rejecting them, as well as developing them further (Wolff 2013; Platte and Leuffen 2016; Matthijs 2016; Otero-Iglesias 2017; Crawford and Olsen 2017; Daehnhardt 2018; Wright 2018; Koenig 2018).

This is not so much a critique of these respective authors, as ‘new’ does not necessarily mean better. But looking at the debate as a whole, surely there is a need for new, theoretically elaborate and fresh impulses to complement and perhaps challenge the works of the Altmeister and contribute also to the broader debates within and beyond IR.

What remains mostly unreflected upon in the mainstream debates on German foreign policy is that the study of International Relations has undergone a profound change. Whilst in 2001 it still made sense to frame the debate on German foreign policy as a contest of realism, liberalism and constructivism (Rittberger 2001), the IR landscape is much richer and more diverse today (even though this may be less the case in Germany, where especially constructivism is overrepresented and remains a major point of reference, Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Risse 2018). Some ‘isms’ have remained in place as important referents (in particular realism), but underwent a transformation or at least a shift in emphasis (a good example is Tom Dyson’s neoclassical realist approach, see Dyson 2014; 2016 and 2019 in this issue). Previously marginalised or non-existent approaches, such as those gathered under the label of ‘International Political Sociology’, have become commonplace, if still outside the mainstream. An increasing number of scholars frame their study around concepts, rather than schools of thought, which enables them to travel across ontological and epistemological disagreements (e.g. study of practices, narratives, identities). This variety of approaches has already made an important mark on international studies. However, with a few exceptions, it yet waits to bring new empirical insights and theoretical generalisations to the study of German foreign policy.

The current situation may be a reflection of underlying sociological and institutional issues. As Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Risse’s (2018) sociological snapshot shows, IR scholars in Germany may be young and internationalised, but they are not interested in the study of German foreign policy too much. In fact, only 2 per cent of their respondents list German foreign policy as a main area of interest, which is about four times fewer (!) than the average percentage of scholars researching their respective country’s foreign policy across other surveyed states (Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Risse 2018, 95–96). Interestingly, the authors interpret this also as a generational shift. ‘Scholars such as Hanns Maull or Helga Haftendorn who kept German foreign policy as an active field of study have long since retired and their successors have engaged in other IR issues.’ (Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Risse 2018, 96) While it is difficult to get data on scholars from outside Germany, anecdotal evidence in the form of conference attendances or a list of publications in this journal and key book series suggests a similar trend. With the downsizing of previous bastions of German foreign policy research, such as the Institute for German Studies in Birmingham, it appears that the institutional basis is eroding also outside Germany.

On the other hand, not everything has been that murky over the last decade or so. While not always engaged in the mainstream debate on Germany as some kind of ‘power’, a range of novel, theoretically sophisticated scholarship has emerged on the margins. The picture here is one of a plurality of often disparate contributions inspired by various theories and grounded in different research communities. One prominent strand is the distinct German brand of ‘reconstructive’ research inspired by the philosophy of American pragmatism, which can be seen as consisting a distinct programme or even ‘school’ around Gunther Hellmann (Hellmann, Weber, and Sauer 2008; Hellmann 2009; Roos 2010; 2017; Franke 2019 in this issue). A similar yet distinct branch of the literature builds upon different versions of discourse studies within and beyond IR (Nonhoff and Stengel 2014; Stritzel 2014; Galpin 2017; Wendler 2019; Stengel 2020). A range of authors analyse German foreign policy through insights grounded in political science and policy studies, including cognitive and psychological approaches (Heiduk 2014; Mader and Pötzschke 2014), the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Schröer 2014), or theories of opportunity structures and non-state actors (Wochnik 2014). Yet others bring in rich insights based on conceptual interrogations of identity (Urrestarazu 2015), intersectionality (Yoder 2011), power (Fix 2018), trust (Brugger 2019), leadership (Siddi 2018), ontological security (Berenskoetter and Giegerich 2010; Karp 2018; Oppermann and Hansel 2019) or uneven and combined development (Germann 2018).

In this special issue, we want to take these disparate theoretical developments as our starting point, build upon their conceptual richness as well as diversity and stage a conversation. Our hope is that this will foster new connections that will lead to more mutual engagement between these voices, sparking new debates and even repositioning the field as a whole.

PURPOSE AND OUTLINE OF THIS SPECIAL Issue

Whilst we cannot hope to cover all emerging theoretical insights that have been advanced in recent decades, the Special Issue will foreground recent theoretical and methodological developments from IR together with the empirical interest in new directions in German foreign policy. By contextualising the analysis of Germany’s foreign policies in broader disciplinary trends, the contributors will illuminate aspects that are omitted in existing scholarship. By critically adopting and further elaborating these approaches, the Special Issue generates insights for comparing Germany with other states and provide spaces for new theoretical and empirical conversations. The Special Issue does not stake out a preference for a particular school or ‘ism’ and does not aspire to prove a particular theory through a mechanical application to empirical data. Instead, it provides novel and original contributions through a pragmatic and open-minded interweaving of IR/FPA perspectives, classical concepts in German foreign policy and empirical research.

The contributions contained within this Special Issue are organised around three overarching themes

1. conceptual interrogations, which question some of the basic theoretical assumptions of existing research and provide theoretically-grounded alternatives (Jakub Eberle, Felix Berenskötter and Holger Stritzel)

2. critical discussions and evaluations of the nature of Germany’s actorness and the environment in which it operates (Ulrich Franke, Stephanie Hofmann, Michael J. Williams)

3. applications of less familiar frameworks and perspectives on German foreign policy (Klaus Brummer and Kai Oppermann, and Tom Dyson)

The opening contributions to the Special Issue examine some of the underlying theoretical assumptions shaping the analysis of German foreign policy. Jakub Eberle introduces a ‘dividual actor’ approach to the study of German foreign policy, which aims to challenge understandings of German foreign policy which present German largely as a consistent actor in international affairs. Countering this, drawing on concepts of social logics, Eberle seeks to explain inconsistency in German foreign policy in a more expansive framework to incorporate multiple identities in an open-ended and shifting international context.

Felix Berenskötter and Holger Stritzel hone in on a central concept in International Relations – power – to understand how it is articulated in German foreign policy discourse. The authors chart the evolution of articulations of Germany as a power in the literature and the assumptions underlying debates on Germany’s emerging role in international affairs. They highlight how these conceptions of German power serve largely normative and political functions, sketching out acceptable parameters for German foreign policy. This, however, limits our ability to capture how we understand Germany’s exercise of power, thus inhibiting how we understand German power in a relational sense.

The Special Issue then moves to examine Germany’s actorness and the environment in which it operates. Stephanie Hofmann’s article develops Berenskötter and Stritzel’s argument further to unpick much of the literature’s treatment of the stability of German foreign policy preferences. Through an analysis of political parties and party leaderships, Hofmann contends that understanding the variety of positions within parties on foreign policy is important in charting foreign policy continuity and change. Hofmann argues that scholars need to examine more complex value structures, which often get aggregated in much of the literature, to get to the core of foreign and security policy in Germany and beyond.

Ulrich Franke examines how others view Germany through an analysis of newspapers in the USA, the United Kingdom and Israel. Using a pragmatist approach, the study assumes that external attributions contribute to and form part of the rules for action guiding German foreign policymakers. Franke’s news media analysis uncovers three dimensions in coverage of Germany which focus on Germany in relations to its Nazi past; Germany’s position toward the EU and European integration in general; and finally assessments of the country, its people, its political cultures and its government style. Franke reflects on his findings to articulate a set of principles for action for German foreign policymakers to engage with the external attributions of Germany to pursue a more effective foreign policy.

Michael John Williams’s article is inspired by the histoire des mentalités approach to the study of history, which is part of the larger Annales school of historical inquiry. Williams’s study focuses on how the use of military force is portrayed on German television as a means to understand public discourse on German foreign policy. Williams argues that the mentalités of the German public remains hesitant to consider the use of military force, whilst acknowledging Germany’s responsibility to play an active role in international affairs. Williams also finds that public discourse is increasingly framed in terms of German and European interests, rather than driven by transatlantic and U.S. considerations. He concludes that whilst elite discourse has evolved in recent years to open up greater scope for greater military involvement of the German armed forces, public discourse support for such a stance has not followed.

Klaus Brummer and Kai Oppermann use a poliheuristic theory of decision making to analyse German decisions to participate in, or abstain from, multinational military operations. Taking three empirical examples of deployment decisions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon and Libya, Brummer and Oppermann outline how a poliheuristic theory of decision making can help bridge the cognitive-rationalist divide in foreign policy analysis. They do this through an analysis of the interplay between domestic conditions and decisions on foreign military deployments. They suggest that for political systems based on coalition governments, policy options that have the potential not to find a majority in parliament are rejected in order to preserve the survival of a governing coalition.

In the last article, Tom Dyson analyses the development of the German army to understand the challenges it has faced to adapt to its new post-Cold War role. A part of a major study on understanding adaptation in the German armed forces in which he draws on insights from the literature on organisational learning, Dyson makes a compelling case for understanding military change that goes beyond top-down arguments which focus on the environment shaping military adaptation and decision-making hierarchies, and foregrounds institutional analysis. The article outlines variables that facilitate and impede the establishment and development of effective military learning processes.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jakub Eberle is Head of the Centre for European Politics at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. His research interests include international relations theory, international political sociology and German foreign policy. His work has appeared in Political Psychology, International Political Sociology, Foreign Policy Analysis and Journal of International Relations & Development. His monograph on German foreign policy, Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War, was published by Routledge in 2019.

Alister Miskimmon is Head of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens University, Belfast. His research interests are primarily in the areas of strategic narratives, German, European and global security issues and European integration. He has published a number of books including, Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order, New York: Routledge, 2013 (with Ben O'Loughlin and Laura Roselle) which was awarded the 2016 Best Book Award on International Communication by the International Studies Association. He also co-edited a volume with Ben O'Loughlin and Laura Roselle entitled Forging the World: Strategic Narratives in International Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

Jakub Eberle's work on this article was supported by funding from the Charles University Research Centre program UNCE/ HUM/028 (Peace Research Center Prague/Faculty of Social Sciences).

Notes

1 We understand IR sociologically, that is as a plural field held together by both social and intellectual structures. The former include professional institutions such as departments, journals, associations, habits of peer-reviewing etc., while the latter consist of paradigms, theories and methodological approaches (Wæver 2007). We do not want to discriminate or erect any borders here. Consequently, our understanding of international theory (or IR theory, we use the two as synonyms) is broad and pragmatic: anything that provides a systematic and transparent account of the international (or transnational, global, world, planetary) dimension of social relations and is explicitly grounded in concepts or paradigms.

2 We take the term Altmeister from a recent review article by Hanns Maull (2019), where he used it for Simon Bulmer and William Paterson.