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The central aim of this book is to foster connections between scholarly discussions of German foreign policy and broader theoretical debates in International Relations and beyond. While there has been a lively discussion about 'new German foreign policy', this book argues that it has not engaged substantially with international and foreign policy theory, especially with respect to its more recent developments.
Reviewing the recent literature on German foreign policy, this book posits that the most discussed works are still largely provided by the 'Altmeister' (Maull, Szabo, Bulmer and Paterson) who were already dominating the field a quarter of a century ago. While there is a general decline in the academic study of German foreign policy, the chapters in this edited volume show that a range of novel, theoretically sophisticated but often disconnected scholarship has appeared on the margins. This book contributes to this emerging work by providing conceptual interrogations, which question the existing research and provide theoretically-grounded alternatives; initiating critical discussions and evaluations of the nature of Germany's actorness and the environment in which it operates and proposing applications of less familiar perspectives on German foreign policy.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of German Politics.
List of contents
Introduction: International Theory and German Foreign Policy 1. Germany as a Dividual Actor: Competing Social Logics and their Political Articulations 2. Welche Macht darf es denn sein? Tracing 'Power' in German Foreign Policy Discourse 3. Beyond Culture and Power: The Role of Party Ideologies in German Foreign and Security Policy 4. Leader of the 'Free World'? Studying German Foreign Policy by Means of External Attributions 5. The Enduring Culture of Restraint in Modern Germany: German Mentalités on the Use of Force as Portrayed in Contemporary Television Narratives 6. Poliheuristic Theory and Germany's (Non-)Participation in Multinational Military Interventions. The Non-compensatory Principle, Coalition Politics and Political Survival 7. The Challenge of Creating an Adaptive Bundeswehr Conclusion: German Foreign Policy in the (post-)Corona World
About the author
Jakub Eberle is Research Director at the Institute of International Relations Prague and Lecturer at Prague University of Economics and Business. He works on the role of language, emotions and identity in foreign and security policy. He is the author of
Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War (Routledge, 2019), as well as a dozen of articles published in
International Political Sociology,
Political Geography, Political Psychology, Cooperation and Conflict and elsewhere. The work on this volume was conducted during his stay at Charles University.
Alister Miskimmon is Professor of International Relations and Head of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His most recent books include, with Ben O'Loughlin and Jinghan Zeng, One Belt, One Road,
One Story? Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative (2021), and with Ben O'Loughlin and Laura Roselle,
Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations (2017).
Summary
The central aim of this book is to foster connections between scholarly discussions of German foreign policy and broader theoretical debates in International Relations and beyond.
