Abstract
This chapter reappraises German foreign policy since unification. A reexamination of the catalysts that helped produce German unity illuminates new opportunities and challenges that have arisen in the intervening twenty years. Exploring the salience of three identity complexes, trans-Atlantia, Euroland, and Abendland, highlights important opportunities and challenges to German foreign policy. These identity complexes have played a central role in the shaping and maintaining of German foreign policy from unification to the present, but their salience has shifted over time. Trans-Atlantia and Euroland have been maturing since the end of the Second World War and served as the main catalysts for change in the 1989–1991 period, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl emphasized their compatibility. To a great extent, the deeply cultural issues embedded in Abendland, such as the relationship of Germany to Turkey and the Muslim world, played virtually no role at all. Today, all three identity complexes are in play, but their interrelationship has changed drastically. Germany remains anchored in the interstate and transnational relationships that enabled unification, but the balance has shifted: trans-Atlantia remains intact but has been weakened. Euroland has become more prominent, and the impulse to propel the European integration movement continues to thrive, despite setbacks such as the crisis over Greece.
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Notes
Mary Hampton, “NATO, Germany, and the United States: Creating Positive Identity in Trans-Atlantia,” Security Studies 8, no. 2/3 (Winter 1998).
Elizabeth Pond, The Rebirth of Europe (Washington: Brookings Institute, 1999).
Helmut Kohl, Der Euro und die Zukunft Europas, Center for European Integration Studies, University of Bonn, ZEI: Europa Forums (2002), 3–4.
Dominique Moisi, quoted in “In the World of Good and Evil,” The Economist, September 14, 2006.
See discussion in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also my discussion of the various European unity models in Righteous Fury, Guarded Hope.
Egon Bahr, “Das Thema: Europa muss erwachsen werden,” Die Welt online, April 6, 2002; http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article382638/Das_Thema_Europa_muss_erwachsen_werden.html, accessed on May 10, 2011.
Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
European Council, A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy (Brussels, 2003), 7.
European Council, Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy—Providing Security in a Changing World (Brussels, 2008), 2.
See Mary N. Hampton, “NATO at the Creation: U.S. Foreign Policy, West Germany and the Wilsonian Impulse,” Security Studies 4 (1995), 610–56. On the U.S. and postwar order, see especially G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
John Foster Dulles, quoted in Mary N. Hampton, The Wilsonian Impulse: U.S. Foreign Policy, the Alliance, and German Unification (Westport: Praeger, 1995), 21.
James Baker, quoted in New York Times, “Upheaval in the East; Excerpts from Baker’s Speech on Berlin and U.S. Role in Europe’s Future,” December 13, 1989.
Michael Ruehle, “Preface: Manfred Wörner’s Legacy and NATO,” in Civil-Military Relations in Post-Communist States: Central and Eastern Europe in Transition, ed. Anton A. Bebler (Westport: Praeger, 1997), iv-xvi; quotation on p. xiv, and quoted in Mary N. Hampton, “‘Borne Ceaselessly into the Past?’ Poland, Germany, and NATO Enlargement Policy,” German Comments (January 1998), 85–94.
Manfred Wörner, “Wir handeln ‘Out of Area’ und sind sehr wohl ‘in business,’” in Für Frieden in Freiheit: Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Manfred Wörner (Berlin: edition q, 1995), 280–92; quotation on p. 289.
Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister, referred to German intervention in the Balkans as Germany’s Rubicon. See Mary N. Hampton, “Fischer and Wilsonianism,” in Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die europäische Einigung, ed. Mareika Koenig and Matthias Schulz (Munich: Fritz Steiner, 2004).
Collective security is basically defined as the multilateral pursuit of security objectives that include community interests and values, as opposed to national security, where traditional narrow national interests are pursued. Today’s usage of collective security largely reflects its Wilsonian heritage in combination with the regional security dynamics that have emerged in Europe, especially since the end of the Cold War. For a discussion of current uses of the term, see David S. Yost, NATO Transformed: The Alliance’s New Role in International Security (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1998), especially chaps. 1, 2 and 5. For an in-depth discussion of traditional understandings of collective security, see the classic by Inis Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), especially chap. 4.
Stein, “Germany’s Constitution,” 37. See also Ralph Thiele, “Winning War and Peace,” in Cooperation or Conflict? American, European Union and German Policies in the Balkans, ed. Lily Gardner Feldman (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2001), 238–73.
Wolfgang Ischinger, “Kosovo: Germany Considers the Past and Looks to the Future,” in The Legacy of Kosovo: German Politics and Policies in the Balkans, German Issues 22, ed. Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2000), 27–50; quotation on p. 27.
For a discussion of this episode, see Mary N. Hampton and Douglas Peifer, “Reordering German Identity: Memory Sites and German Foreign Policy,” German Studies Review XXX, no. 2 (May 2007), 371ff.
Nicholas Kulish, “Merkel Warns of ‘Premature Judgments’ of Afghan Raid,” New York Times, September 9, 2009.
Stefan Pauley, “German Limits on War Are Facing Reality in Afghanistan,” New York Times, October 26, 2009.
See my discussion in Righteous Fury, Guarded Hope. Also see Peter Berger’s persuasive argument that it is actually Europe that is exceptional in its secularism. Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Marc Morje Howard, “The Causes and Consequences of Germany’s New Citizenship Law,” German Politics, 17, no. 1 (March 2008), 41–62; quotation on p. 42.
Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab (Munich: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 2010). Sarrazin was a noted expert on financial matters for the social democrats and played a central role in the Finance Ministry under Theo Waigel when it planned and implemented the German currency union in 1990. He would later become finance minister for Berlin, and he made the comments mostly as a criticism of the left and left-of-center politics influential in Berlin.
The words in quotations, “the revolution in Europe,” refers to a new book by Christopher Caldwell on the topic, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009). In the book, Caldwell takes a pessimist view, shared by many, concerning the demographic trend in Europe, where European birthrates are collapsing while those of Muslim immigrant groups are slightly increasing and immigrants continue to arrive.
See Samir Amghar Arnel Boubekour, and Michael Emerson, eds., Islam in Europe: Challenges for Society and Public Policy (Brussels: Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), 2007).
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© 2011 Peter C. Caldwell and Robert R. Shandley
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Hampton, M.N. (2011). Between Euroland and Abendland? Opportunities and Challenges for German Foreign Policy Since Unification. In: Caldwell, P.C., Shandley, R.R. (eds) German Unification. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337954_3
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