The “sleep-walking giant” awakes: resetting German foreign and security policy

Welche Macht darf es denn sein? Tracing ‘Power’ in German Foreign Policy Discourse

“…Yet, while Germany is seen as structurally resembling a hegemon, it fails to embrace that role and is thus depicted as a 'reluctant hegemon' (Paterson 2011;Sikorski, 2011;Economist, 2013;Bulmer and Paterson, 2013;2019) unwilling to practice leadership (Kornelius 2010(Kornelius , 2015Schönberger 2012Schönberger , 2013. Voices within this camp, which tend to be based in Britain and the United States, see the main problem in Germany's lack of will and/or strategic reflection and debate (see Economist, 2013;Hyde-Price, 2015). For historical reasons, so the argument, Germans shy away from leadership and prefer to see their country as a bigger version of Switzerland instead of exercising the power needed for stability in Europe and in the international system.…”

The Slow Path Towards ‘Normality’: German Strategic Culture and the Holocaust

“…Then CDU leader Angela Merkel argued that in the case of Libya -in contrast to Afghanistan -there was no direct threat against Europe and Germany (Merkel, 2011), and several lawmakers expressed scepticism over the prospects of a stable solution in Libya after the fighting stopped. The decision to abstain was deemed a 'low point', ' a disaster' and a return to the old Bonn Republic's mentality of caution and restraint which would lead Germany towards 'isolation' and 'going-it-alone' (Alleingang) (Müller, 2011) (Hyde-Price, 2015. Essentially, the arguments invoked the Sonderweg discourse (turned upside down) so that it was not German military activism, but the lack thereof that would lead Germany towards the abyss, referring to the conservative side of the 'normal state' debate.…”