Conclusion: German Foreign Policy in the (post-)Corona World

Abstract

This concluding piece summarises the key advances made by the contributions to this special issue by way of discussing how German foreign policy is adapting to the (post-)Corona world. While the world seemed ‘out of joint’ to German policymakers back in 2015, the developments related to the spread of Covid-19 suggest that the tumultuous period of international politics will continue well into the 2020s. Therefore, given the intertwined nature of Germany’s relationship with the European and global orders, analysing Germany’s foreign policy should remain extremely interesting in the years to come. We outline the key avenues for future studies of German foreign policy (individual level, parties, institutions, external environment, domestic consensus building), show how they are developed in this special issue, and sketch pathways for their further advancement. Thereby, we wish to extend an open invitation to an inclusive, theoretically well-informed debate on German foreign policy, to which this special issue hopes to contribute.

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 Professor of International Relations and Head of the School of History. Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Recent books include Forging the World: Strategic Narratives in International Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2017) with Ben O’Loughlin and Laura Roselle, and One Belt, One Road, One Story? Towards an EU–China Strategic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), with Ben O’Loughlin and Jinghan Zeng. He edits the Palgrave Series in International Political Communication.

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).