In the early 1990s, Germany went through a difficult debate about changes in its generous asylum laws. Much more dramatic, however, were the increases in the number of violent attacks against foreigners (and also some Germans), mainly by alienated young males. The paper discusses both, the asylum migration and the ethnocentric violence, and also possible connections between the two. In the first part, we present a typology of the perpetrators and various theories which try to explain the new violence, such as: Nazi revival, modernization theory, a theory of civilizational crisis, political culture and dominance culture, and hegemonic masculinity/masculinity crisis. In the second part, we discuss the problems of mass migration and asylum applications, and in particular the debate about it. This debate has contributed indirectly to the violence, although it is not its root cause: through open racism, through scapegoating, and also through a polarization between the two major political camps. In this polarization, different ideological traditions have led to the denial of new dimensions of social reality: the reality of multiculturalism as well as the necessity of limiting and regulating migration. In the final section, we offer a number of suggestions as how to deal with both immigration and violence against foreigners.

Three possible economic explanations of U.S. military spending are examined: 1) the MIC explanation, 2) the economic stabilization and electoral defense cycle explanation, 3) the capitalist growth imperative explanation. Conditions for these explanations to be valid are formulated and tested with data about the development of defense spending, the U.S. economy, the business cycle, and fiscal policy, as well as an analysis of the Economic Reports and of secondary sources about U.S. defense and economic policies. All three economic explanations are considered inadequate. It is true that defense cuts have sometimes aggravated a recession, and that on other occasions defense has served as a cushion, or even worked more strongly anticyclically, when foreign policy crises occurred at the time of economic downturns. It is also true that military expenditures have played a role in fiscal policy. However, there have been economic reasons for increases and for cuts in the defense budget, and the amounts involved are rather small in absolute or relative terms. Defense is an important, but not the decisive factor in the U.S. business cycle; its weight has decreased substantially. There has been even no absolute growth in U.S. defense spending since the early fifties (in constant prices), and some absolute indicators have declined. Mostly, changes in U.S. military expenditures can and can only be explained by international and foreign/defense policy developments and considerations. These factors should be taken much more seriously.

The specific problems of West German Ostpolitik during the Cold War and the period of detente have acquired new interest under the current conditions of radical systemic change. The various options pursued by the Federal Republic and their development provide criteria for an evaluation of the future course of the united Germany's foreign policy. The article starts with laying out the basic conditions of the FRG's Ostpolitik and their inherent contradictions: revisionism versus reconciliation, revisionism and the Cold War, the moral problems of the status quo. It then discusses four major variants: (1) military revisionism, which was never seriously considered; voluntary constraints form an important contrast to the foreign policy planning of the Weimar Republic; (2) revisionism from strength, the major strategy of the conservative governments in the 1950s and 1960s; (3) revisionism based on calculated weakness, the strategy followed by the SPD opposition; (4) the redefinition of the national question in the 1970s which prepared the ground for a new consensus in the 1980s about West integration and detente with the East. The development of West German Ostpolitik is characterized by the renunciation of force, the differentiation of revisionist aspirations, and the shift from classical power politics (policy of strength) to a policy of compromise and understanding. Thus the foundations for a new tradition of democratic foreign policy have been laid which the united Germany can build upon.

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