Goodbye Bismarck? The Foreign Policy of Contemporary Germany

Abstract

This essay examines the foreign policy discourse in contemporary Germany. In reviewing a growing body of publications by German academics and foreign policy analysts, it identifies five schools of thought based on different worldviews, assumptions about international politics, and policy recommendations. These schools of thought are then related to, first, actual preferences held by German policymakers and the public more generally and, second, to a small set of grand strategies that Germany could pursue in the future. It argues that the spectrum of likely choices is narrow, with the two most probable-the strategies of "Wider West" and "Carolingian Europe"---continuing the multilateral and integrationist orientation of the old Federal Republic. These findings are contrasted with diverging assessments in the non-German professional literature. Finally, the essay sketches avenues for future research by suggesting ways for broadening the study of country-specific grand strategies, developing and testing inclusive typologies of more abstract foreign policy strategies, and refining the analytical tools in examining foreign policy discourses in general.

Flight from Risk: Unified Germany and the Role of Beliefs in the European Response to the Financial Crisis

“…1 Many concluded that this sacrifice resulted from a deeply ingrained political identity that stressed international cooperation and shunned parochial national politics. 2 Since the end of the Cold War, however, German leadership has suggested a willingness to weaken its role as global altruist and reassert its interests in Europe and abroad.…”

Germany's world: power and followership in a crisis-ridden Europe

“…Yet in a longer perspective the still more interesting discursive changes have taken place inside Germany itself. Whereas mainstream narrative constructions of a German "Self" in foreign policy discourse had, during the first decade after unification (Hellmann, 1996), concentrated mostly on the continuity of the "success story" of westernization, European integration and multilateralism in the era of the "Bonn Republic", Gerhard Schröder's chancellorship after 1998 set clear markers early on from the very top that Germany should finally act like a "normal" and "selfconfident" power (Hellmann, 2011a). 7 More recently the "hegemony" (or "halfhegemony") 8 vocabulary has also reached the mainstream of foreign policy discourse within Germany.…”

Discursively (de-)constructing European foreign policy: Theoretical and methodological challenges

“…Research on foreign policy and discourse has frequently focused on national discourses and their impact on political approaches to European foreign policy (Hellmann, 1996;Larsen, 1997;Aggestam, 2004; see also Larsen's contribution to this special issue). This literature can be seen as a discursive variant of research on the interplay between national and European foreign policy (Hill, 1983;Wong and Hill, 2011;Manners and Whitman, 2000;, i.e., research emphasizing the significance of national foreign policy for the genesis and dynamics of European foreign policy.…”