The Kosovo War: A Strategy of Transformative Realism by Heiko Karl Ital

Author:Heiko Karl Ital [Ital, Heiko Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783347313323
Google: IR1pzgEACAAJ
Publisher: tredition
Published: 2021-04-27T10:32:34+00:00

2.11.2 United Germany’s Foreign Policy: Looking forward while Coping with the Past

Germany is the special focus of this work, which analyzes European foreign policy. It is one of the indispensable countries of the EU, meaning that the Union could not function and would lose its very meaning should Germany break away from it. Only France’s withdrawal would even bring about comparable devastating consequences. Realists and their critics would certainly unanimously agree that Germany is the Union's pivotal country in both literal and metaphorical respect; it occupies the geographic center, it has by far the strongest economy, and it exerts leadership, often and especially since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 more than any other of the big players in the Union. In 2015 it appeared that Germany had overstretched its influence. The government’s position in the refugee crisis caused external and internal trouble. Its roles as paymaster and (of recent) crisis manager were overshadowed by perceptions among its European partners of an erratic and selfish giant. Germany appears to be in need of restoring its somewhat tarnished reputation.

In Germany, a range of foreign policy concepts were debated after reunification. According to Hellmann (1996), these concepts can be summed up as Carolingian Europe, Wider West and Multilateralism or Multinationalism (Hellmann, 1996, pp. 1-2). This foreign policy discourse in Germany was largely detached from outside discourses on Germany. Not misunderstanding, but simply the language barrier caused this detachment, as the discourse inside Germany is usually published in German only, so there is scant reception outside Germany. Only a few German scientists, experts or professionals publish on German security and defense matters in renowned English-language magazines (Hellmann, 1996, p. 3). As a result, outside observers misunderstood Germany’s foreign policy actions insofar as they concluded from them that the Federal Republic had never clearly specified its foreign policy goals. This view overlooked Germany’s course to have it both ways, in German a “Sowohl-als-auch-Politik” (“either-and-or-policy”), which was broadly discussed and accepted as consensus inside Western Germany. Those two ways were the Federal Republic’s institutional attachment to the West (“Westbindung”) and gradually intensifying relations with Moscow, its Warsaw Pact allies, and eventually with the GDR. Dialogue with the GDR had been hampered for about a decade after it fortified its Western, i.e. inner-German border, completed by building the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The U.S. Administration watched the reinvigorated dialogue from 1970 onwards with suspicion, fearing that West Germany could be overwhelmed by East Berlin’s and Moscow’s siren songs. While Moscow’s sirens no longer offered reunification as in the early 1950s, it could offer alleviations of the hardships separation brought with it, including East Berlin’s “export business” of having prisoners redeemed by Bonn. The Federal Government paid an average of 100,000 Deutsche Mark per prisoner released during the 1970s, totaling 3.5 billion DM until the GDR’s break-up.18

These circumstances also amount to Germany’s particular “national baggage” (Hoffmann, 1966, p. 866), to a large extent filled by its recent past. Apart from coming to terms with unprecedented guilt, Germany looks back on 45 years of being widely powerless.

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