Germany: Domestic Constraint and the Temporal Management of Reform

Abstract

Cultural accounts of policy change dominate the literature on German defence reform. Longhurst (2003, 2004: 150) emphasises the role of ‘path-dependency’ and strategic culture in explaining German commitment to Cold War policy instruments (notably conscription), determining the sequencing of German reform (reform to the policy objectives followed by only partial reform to the policy instrument). Maull (2000) and Berger (1998) point to ‘the German ‘culture of anti-militarism’ in informing the objectives of defence policy and temporal location of the shift towards expeditionary crisis-management (Dalgaard-Nielsen, 2006: 12; Katzenstein, 1996; Longhurst, 2003). For cultural accounts of German defence policy, as Howorth (2004: 219) states: ‘The role of ideas, values and norms is paramount’. These ideas, it is argued, have formed a powerful normative structural constraint on the willingness and ability of political figures to enact policy change, disincentivising the ‘securitisation’ of new issues and the development of new defence policy objectives (Stritzel, 2007: 365). Entrepreneurial action by political leaders on behalf of a ‘crisis consciousness’ or ‘norm entrepreneurship’ on behalf of a more ‘interventionist’ role for the armed forces, force projection and a professional military, is associated with great political risk (Dalgaard-Nielsen, 2006: 144; Howorth, 2004: 219–20; Hyde-Price and Jeffrey, 2001: 704–7; Longhurst, 2004: 147).¹