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Abstract
Power, culture or role, preceded by adjectives such as civilian, tamed, reflexive, hegemonic, commercial realpolitik or shaping, are commonly used to portray German foreign and security policy. When scholars and pundits aggregate explanatory factors on the national level, even in democracies, they assume that a significant degree of agreement exists among domestic actors at any point in time. Assuming that actors within national conceptual boundaries share similar values and preferences can create a blind spot for important subnational variation. To capture political cleavages and ultimately provide a picture of when to expect policy change and in what form, this paper asks: what is the role of parties and party leadership in formulating German foreign and security policy? I argue that we need to look at political parties’ sub-national and intersubjective constructions of purpose to understand the variegated expressions of what could and should be the ‘national’ norm at any point in time (and what is contested). Ultimately, this helps explaining how stable so-called national preferences are.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephanie C. Hofmann is Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her current research centres on global and regional security issues, international organisations as well as the interlinkages between global and regional understandings of order. Her first book European Security in NATO’s Shadow. Party Ideologies and Institution Building appeared with Cambridge University Press (2013). Other research has been published or is forthcoming for example in European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, and West European Politics.
Notes
1 Interview with Robert Hutchings in Princeton (21 Feb. 2007).
2 Interestingly Longhurst (Citation2004) and Leithner (Citation2009) focus on national changes triggered mainly by external events over time, although they refer to political parties and how they have varied in their preferences for military operations.
3 International constraints were lifted with the ‘2+4’ Treaty in 1991 (until then German military forces were directly responsive to NATO command in case of military operations) and national constraints with constitutional changes in 1994 (until then German forces could not be sent abroad).
4 Risse-Kappen (Citation1991, 505–507) mentions party difference in passing but does not draw analytically on them.
5 National trauma or ‘miracle’ can influence political actors such that they interpret values the same way. However, these events are rare and their impact is most likely not sustainable over generations.
6 While the CDU/CSU has factions such as Christlich-Demokratische Arbeitnehmerschaft/Christlich Soziale Arbeitnehmerschaft and Mittelstandsvereiningung, these are primarily organised on economic values.
7 Kohl (Citation2007, 658–664) illustrates how different factions and working groups inside the CDU/CSU debated over different policy priorities and how the 1994 programme reflects a compromise that was negotiated under Kohl’s leadership.
8 The CSU is not a faction and its independent organisational structure forces the CDU to consider its value interpretations. These are often more nationalist, i.e. emphasising national sovereignty over all other values, than the CDU ideological position – also in foreign affairs (Falkenhagen Citation2013).
9 Their manifestoes avoid the usage of the term ‘national interest.’
10 Obviously, Not all German foreign and security policy can be explained though ideological positions. Westerwelle’s decision, for example, not to join NATO’s Libya operation was based more on individual idiosyncratic factors than ideological ones (Oppermann and Brummer 2014, 562–563). Westerwelle’s ‘domain’ was much more domestic than foreign affairs.