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Email this citationDiscourse Analysis as Foreign Policy Theory: The case of Germany and Europe *
Center for German and European Studies, University of California at Berkeley
November, 1996
But an exact balance is impossible (..) because while powers may appear to outsiders as factors in a security arrangement, they appear domestically as expressions of a historical existence. No power will submit to a settlement, however well-balanced and however 'secure,' which seems totally to deny its vision of itself.
Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored, 1957, p.146.
Where is Germany heading? So we have been asking ourselves since the wall fell. We had been reasonably calmed down: they were apparently not out for new adventures of their own. No Eastward going it alone -- neither in Eastern Europe, nor with the Russians. Nor any autonomous power politics. On the contrary, Germany has primarily made it self noticed in global politics through its continued restraint, from half-hearted support in the Gulf War to qualms over participation in UN operations.
And yet: After the crisis of Maastricht ratification and the ensuing surrender of the European Monetary System, the question was suddenly back. If we do not get an Economic and Monetary Union with the EURO, will we simply have D-Mark dominance instead? If the process of European integration is running out of steam, will Germany after all end up standing alone with its power -- not because they wanted it so, but because we did not help them get wrapped in European integration? Or was it really the Germans that brought down the monetary system, the EMS -- the German Bundesbank who would not save other currencies, as it was probably obliged to? Is it then all indications still of a German wish for a more German Europe and not a European Germany? There was also the Croatia recognition, and repeated hesitation on the EMU, and Opinion polls in Germany show less and less enthusiasm for Europe ...
It is so easy to see ghosts in international relations, especially when talking about Germany. So before reaching too fast and too ominous Conclusions, we should try to capture the larger pattern of German policy, what Germany intends with Europe and with itself.
This entails to see the consequences for Europe policy and foreign policy of Competing German self perceptions, but also to show the importance of European developments for the choices made in Germany. Focus is on the interplay of internal and external circumstances, how the European is present in the German, and the German in the European. The couple between Europe and Germany is not only that Germany conducts foreign policy (that Germany is in Europe), but also that Germany is dependent on international -- and especially European --developments. This dependence is not only external -- 'the environment of the actor' -- but internal in the sense that an idea of Europe is an essential part of what Germany means today.
With this internal/external German/European approach, the article points to the place from which the current stability is suspended -- and some of the cracks around it. In its role as policy paper, the article will point to real possibilities for a quite different development than the one that at first seems the most likely. Most articles about Germany take the form of contemplating various possible, unpleasant German developments, after which strong elements of German stability are pointed out (reinforced by the seemingly permanent chancellorship of Kohl), and it is concluded that after all Germany is a stable society; there will be challenges, and there will be more noisy voices on the political wings, but Germany is stable. And yet: Germany is stable as long as crucial external conditions remain Stable. Germany's stability might ultimately not be decided by itself.
This article will therefore argue the possibility -- far from the necessity -- of a major shift in German policy. It will be argued that
- important changes have taken place internally in the German political landscape, whereby previously marginalized positions have gained a foothold [section 5],
- that the stability of Germany's course is deeply entangled with some specific international conditions [sections 1 and 6] and
- how easily central conditions can drop out [section 7].
Although the author is acting the devil's advocate in this, it is not done by collecting all kinds of possible arguments for pessimism and piling them up in competition with the undeniably tall pile of stability arguments, but instead through concentrating on one specific way of understanding German policy, and showing that if this perspective seems enlightening, then it also has the unpleasant message that everything can turn out much less nicely than we usually think. German and European stability is not to be taken for granted.
Basis for this analysis is a theoretical suggestion: that discourse analysis can serve as a structured form of foreign policy analysis which delivers a layered structure for the 'unit level' not without similarities to Waltzian international structure at the systemic level.
1. Discourse Analysis as Foreign Policy Theory
Structures of meaning can explain and elucidate foreign policies. Finding and presenting in a systematic way patterns of thought in a specific country will always be helpful in making the debates and actions of this country more intelligible to other observers. This endeavor discourse analysis shares with many writers coming our of the humanities or traditional(ist) International Relations. To explain how political thought makes sense in France and Germany, hopefully makes it easier for especially foreign observers to understand these two countries. However, in the book on France and Germany which echoes in the present paper, I try to go one step further: foreign policy can be partially explained (how partial and why only partially will be explained below) by a structural model of national discourses.
Discourse analysis works on public texts. It does not try to get to the thoughts or motives of the actors, hidden intentions or secret plans. Especially for the study of foreign policy where much is hidden, it becomes a huge methodological advantage, that it is inherent in the approach that one stays at the level of discourse. A central feature of our theory is to be conscious about this, and not slide between talking discourse and perceptions, speech and thought. If one stretches discourse analysis to telling us what people think, and why they do what they do, at first one gains a lot in explanatory reach, but then numerous problems and unjustified inferences emerge. What is often presented as a weakness of discourse analysis -- 'how do you find out if they really mean it?', 'what if it is only rhetoric?' -- can be turned into a methodological strength, as soon as one is conscientious in sticking to discourse as discourse. This question or critique derives from a confusion of discourse analysis with psychological or cognitive approaches, or it just assumes commonsensically that the 'real' motives must be what we are all interested in, and texts can only be a means to get to this. Not so! Structures within discourse condition possible policies. In particular overall policy must hold a definite relationship to discursive structures, because it is always necessary for policy makers to be able to argue where "this takes us". (Who they have to argue this to depends on the political system, but they are never free of this obligation.) What happens to us. We therefore build our models of the political structures from concepts of state and nation, because an overall foreign policy line has to be able to articulate the state's 'vision of itself'. Thereby, we are able to bracket 'interests'. Structure is induced at another step in the analysis: the discursive one.
All this is not to deny that there is more to foreign policy than discourse. The approach is consciously 'minimalist' in a way not unlike Kenneth Waltz's neorealism: we want to say a few important things from a limited, maybe even elegant, set of premises, from a structure.
It is a not overly well guarded secret that the discipline of International Relations is disappointed with its sub-discipline Foreign Policy Analysis. And the grand theorists have not been very good at integrating domestic and international explanations. While domestic factors are usually involved in empirical studies as part of the explanation, most IR-theorists have found it very difficult to see how the two sides can be linked in a coherent way. Stanley Hoffmann as someone who has actually done both -- written about IR theory as well as (French and American) foreign policy -- frankly admits that he been unable to bring the two together and has rather become a dual personality doing sometimes the one, sometimes the other. 1 Often, IR theorists send off 'domestic' explanations to be dealt with separately, allegedly by the sub-discipline FPA, Foreign Policy Analysis (previously CFP, Comparative Foreign Policy). This is done with a certain ambivalence. It is widely felt that CFPIFPA has not only been unable to deliver what they promised, but also that they are unlikely to do so in the future. For instance Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argued in 1987, that they felt it unsatisfactory that they had concentrated their theoretical work at the level of the international system; it was necessary to include the domestic arena. And on the other hand, they added, they were afraid that opening up for the domestic arena, would make the theory forfeit its cogency. This they believed was the experience from earlier attempts to integrate a theory of domestic politics into an international relations theory. 2
The intention here is to suggest a structured analysis of the domestic arena. 3 For as Robert Keohane has argued, "the next major step forward in understanding international cooperation will have to incorporate domestic politics fully into the analysis - not on a merely ad hoc basis, but systematically" 4 . 5
Minimalism has its price: we could often 'explain' more easily some specific policy change by taking in specific domestic politics factors, but this would take structure out of the study and reduce it to ad hoc explanations. Traditional FPA usually falls in one of two categories: a set of causal explanatory factors (the tradition from Rosenau's pre-theory) or a decisioumaking model (the model of Snyder et al) 6 . For such theory to be structured or even elegant, the first type needs to specify a hierarchic set of domestic 'factors' and the second needs a formalized decision making model. This has usually not materialized. The minimalist, structured approach is very clear about how it produces its explanations (by the clarity about variables and their relationship), and therefore has the potential for producing more clear-cut conclusions and thereby knowledge also about general patterns. 7 Thereby, it aspires to make something close to predictions (to be specified and qualified in the pages following).
We want to show that the longer lines of German and French policy can actually be explained without making use of the incoherent pool of ad-hoc-like domestic 'causes'. The basic thesis is that although not every single decision fits the pattern to be expected from the structures used in the analysis, there is sufficient pressure from the structures that policies do adapt and turn with a certain, specified margin onto the tracks to be expected. At some junctures, the situation will be very open, but discourse analysis can then specify what are the options -- even if it can't say which is the more likely -- and it can make sense of each of them in the light of the general structure.
To moderate the theoretical claims made here: this is not a general theory of foreign policy. It will not be able to deal with every and all foreign policy issues. Narrow, compartmentalized issues will often be better explained by more classical decision making theories. Discourse analysis will have its value first of all for 'over all' policies. We are interested in French and German foreign policy, in particular their policies regarding Europe and their security policy in the general sense. These are the issues that nowadays make up much of 'high politics' for European actors, and thus we analyze issues that are widely perceived as 'over-all policies'. This is essential to the approach. It is unlikely to work on very specialized issues. These are more easily shaped by the relative power of competing interest groups. The issues that are seen as 'overall policy' will be reflected upon and have to be argued in terms of "where we are going".
We venture that on a theme like this, the concepts of state and nation should be placed at the centre of analysis. They are involved in imagining 'us' in the future. What are the possible forms to imagine 'France' in a future Europe? Which Europes Can make Sense as the home for 'France'? Overall policies involve the question how communities project themselves into the future. Therefore our key categories are the collectives, the we's: state/nation but also Europe which has to be thought as another 'we'. (In the case of 'smaller' countries like the Nordics, a sub-regional Category like Scandinavia/Norden enters in-between state/nation and Europe 8 ; and for a global power like the United States, the collective above state/nation will not be regional but either global or quasi-global like 'the West'.) Europe can be simply a context shaped so that it is hospitable to 'us' -- community being only our own nation/state conceived in narrow terms -- or parts of our identity can be projected on to 'Europe' as such. In either case, Europe has to be conceived as a political construction and this will draw on the national traditions for how to think politics, ie. how to think state and nation. We therefore expect that Europe is not an external 'issue' but holds an internal relationship to state/nation, and therefore a basic grasp of national modes of thinking state/nation can be extended to understanding the way Europe gets articulated into this language. 9
An identity has to be seen in relation to other identities. By emphasizing this, the current approach offers an alternative also to the usual form of the discussion about 'European identity', which usually turns into a discussion of the relative power of loyalty to Europe versus that to nation/state (where the latter is still likely to win out and thus make 'Europe' seem irrelevant 10 ). More interestingly, one can ask how this concept is stabilized by its inner connections to other -- maybe more powerful we's. Thus we avoid a return to old discussions like: are cosmopolitan loyalties really stronger than (or strong enough to withstand) nation/state identity in case of crisis (probably not). This simply is not the question, because what the nation/state identity is has been transformed.
For some reason, a large part of post-structuralist work on 'identity' has concentrated on self/other relations. Although it is undoubtedly true that identities are often involved in such contrasting games, it definitely does not follow from a post-structuralist starting point, that antagonisms should be the main source of meaning. Quite the contrary -- pure dichotomies are not very information rich in contrast to differentiated systems of difference. From a differential approach to meaning follows that most identity will need complex, multidimensional systems to make sense, and difference only collapses into opposition in special situations. Then the pure contrast of self/other has a strong energizing and entrenching capacity, but due to its circular nature (the Other is the opposite of us; we are the opposite of Him), the meaning of 'us' will usually involve other distinctions as well. 11 The tendency for post-structuralist identity writings to focus on self/other often brings it depressingly close to traditional peace research writings on 'enemy images' . 12 With an interest in non-antagonistic systems of differences, the problem is the opposite: of delimiting a core constellation and avoiding that the whole network has to be reproduced as 'the meaning'. Our task is therefore to find small constellations of concepts that produce a nucleus of meaning from which much of a national discourse can be generated.
For most major states a policy is not stable if it is not able to answer questions about, so to say, the meaning of life: who are we (we Germans, e.g.), where are we going (building Europe/becoming the most powerful nation state in Europe/winning economically instead of old fashioned state politics/...). Several very different answers are possible, but some answers are almost totally excluded since they go against the whole national repertoire of political key terms and connotations. And a non-answer is unlikely too. This is the cause of proactive policy, or nonlinear reactions. If one line breaks down, at least for a medium or major power it is likely that one will not just live with the ensuing vacuum, but the question about the meaning of and future for the nation/state will generate a new concept that can lead to discontinuous developments in foreign policy. For instance, the alternative to what has become known as "Mitterrand's Europe policy" -- ie. the project of 'lifting' France to the European level -- is not necessarily something a bit different (which one would expect with the usual input-output models; factor x causes increase pressure in some direction) but could very likely be something radically different. If this general line breaks down (which it has not done after the first part of the Chirac period), French politicians would have to so to say "go one level down" and pick up the French concept of state-nation and give it a different articulation, which could easily mean very different policies. The new policy lines would be difficult to explain on the basis of contemporary 'input'. It will be a creative act from a French foreign policy leadership trying to shape a world, internally and externally, that is France-compatible. With increasing tensions both on the internal side -- making the new Europeanized France compatible with basic traditions of French statehood (discussions on banalization, regionalization etc) -- and on the external side (are we binding Germany or rather binding ourself?), there are increasing room for alternative stories. If implemented they would demand radical change on either side - in France, in Europe or both. It is increasingly questioned whether the existing France and the evolving Europe are immediately compatible, or whether a new compatibility must be created by statesmanship on either the internal or external arena.
The basic idea is to let discourse analysis deliver the coherent, well structured constraints on foreign policy that have been missing in FPA, by zooming in on discourse and the structures that organize it. The first precondition for doing this is to clarify one's basic assumptions about language. To see structures in language is not easy as long as one works from a traditional (referential) understanding of language, where words and concepts are names used in order to make reference to objects out there in reality and where therefore the structure and logic of language is to be captured by studying these relationships between words and things. In this case, an attempt to use language as a level of analysis will not have much more to work with than the degrees of deviation from the ideal of language as a transparent medium. Therefore, such work often draws on psychological explanations of how words get stuck in specific meanings and certain images or perceptions get used as filters for future impressions. Here language does not really become a separate object of analysis, and focus typically moves on to the psychological level, and leads to questions like whose perception, and how do we know what people really think? (More on this below.)
If, however in contrast, we work from a differential concept of language, meaning is located in the differences among concepts - we know how to use the term horse by the distinctions differentiating it from other animals as well as other means of transportation as well as other sets of distinctions. 13 Then language is a system, and we can study its structure as an separate stratum of reality. It is not everything -- the world is more than language and other meaning systems -- but it is hard to do much of what we as scholars are interested in without drawing on this layer. Everything which includes statements about meaning have to involve an understanding of these systems, and thus there is a discursive element to more or less all we could find interesting. It is not the only element, but it is possible to focus on this.
Discourses organize knowledge systematically, and thus delimit what can be said and what not. Subjects, objects and concepts can not be seen as existing independent of discourse. Instead of starting the referential way by taking the link between subjects and objects through language as starting point, discourse analysis is about easing those ties and treating language as an independent system, and study its connection to what is 'outside' it as contingent on the Operations internal to language as discourse. A discourse is a system for the formation of statements. 14
One looks for the rules governing what can be Said and what not. Discourse moves one away from a focus on 'things' as well as from one on 'words' (or on their relationship) towards an interest in "a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects" 15 . Foucault' 5 interest, for instance, is not linguistic, not an analysis of the meaning given to this or that word but how for instance 'criminality' or 'sexual deviation' appear as objects for specific medical or psychiatric discourses. 16
Discourse is the dimension of society where meaning is structured. It forms a system regulating what can be meaningfully said. The discursive space is the field in time and space sharing a discursive system. The system is a layered set of key concepts and constellations of concepts. At each layer, a particularly dense and powerful constellation is defined which we call a structure. Discursive practice has a duality of depending on/using (and thereby actualizing) as well as reproducing/reformulating the various levels of the discursive system, i.e. the structures.
When do we then say that we confront 'a discourse', a particular discourse? And when is one discourse different from another? A discourse is defined by its structure. A discourse is the set of variations, it is possible to generate from a given structure. The structure is our construction, and thus the question of what discourses there are, and how to systematize them follows from the models we invent in our attempt to come up with models that are able to generate compelling stories that help in making sense of France, Germany and Europe.
As it will be seen from figures 1, 3 and 4, our structures are layered. These depth levels are a central feature of the current approach. An external reason for this is the aspiration for a parallel to Waltz's structure which is one of successive depth-levels. 17 A reason internal to discourse analysis is the problem of change:
A main problem with much structuralism and to a large extent also with Foucault's concept of discourse is that change appears in the form of incomprehensible jumps between synchronic and structural orders. From one order (episteme/discourse/...), everything is suddenly different and we are in another constellation of mutual conditioning. This is to some extent a necessary price to be paid for upgrading synchronic analysis. Foucauldian discourse analysis studies logical spaces; how meaning is governed by specific rules, and thus how a number of seemingly contradictory and opposed enunciations can be seen as regulated by some system defining possible, meaningful speech. One of the advantages of the concept of a layered structure is that it can specify change within continuity. Change is not an either-or question, because we are not operating at one level only. As it is quite trivial in other theories, we can also in this context think of change within continuity. This further has the effect, that the question of what is the 'dominant' discourse in a sense becomes tricky, in a sense less controversial. That something is 'opposition' or even 'marginalized', means only that it is 'outside' and 'different' at the level of manifest politics, most likely it is sharing (essential) codes at the next (deeper) level of abstraction - the 'dominant' political line and the main opposition most often share a lot (except the question on the agenda), and the more marginalized opposition shares less, but still some basic codes, etc. This follows from the fact that political opponents relate to each other, and therefore almost always deal with some of the same issues and use some of the same concepts and images while struggling to reformulate and conquer other key terms. 18
This is no complete solution. Since we don't make the Levi-Strauss assumption of an over-arching structural logic, our systems are all contingent, and it is -- and should be -- possible to imagine a change beyond the System. In that case, we can Say very little of how things would look. Within the given structure for say France, we can talk of very superficial changes (third tier), deeper and more dramatic changes (second tier), but the possibility complete revolution of a first tier change has to be kept open, although such a change beyond our root concepts would leave us speechless. We have not solved the logical problem that Structural analysis of logical spaces inevitably orders its material into a synchronic pattern. We have only placed a set of Foucauldian boxes within each other which enables us to perform a dynamic analysis up to a certain limit.
The depth-levels are not to imply that the deeper is truer or the surface eternally caught by the depth structure of which it can only continue to speak confirmation. Rather it refers to degrees of sedimentation: the deeper structures are more solidly sedimented and more difficult to politicize and change, but this is always in principle possible since all these structures are socially constituted. 19
This approach has advantages and disadvantages in terms of the assumpotions necessary to make. This is most clearly seen by stressing that it stays at the level of discourse: what is read is text, and what is constructed from it is a model of a structure in discourse, and explanation works if discourse is important. This is most clearly seen by contrasting it to psychological explanations that try to use texts to get to what people really thought, and then explain from perceptions. This implies assumptions of truthfulness and rationality that are deeply problematic. They are avoided in discourse analysis. In turn it needs some other. The approach searches for structure and meaning exactly at the level where meaning is in reality generated in the process:
In the discursive universe. In a specific political culture there are certain basic concepts, figures, narratives and codes. Oniy on the basis of these codes, interests are transformed into policies. Basing a study on this level rests on 3 assumptions: 1) these codes puts relatively narrow limits on possible policies; 2) the codes are sufficiently inert that they can be seen as 'causal' factors in relation to policies (together with other causes), and so that one can study the way they are transformed as an effect of changing political constellations; 3) it is possible to locate the most important discursive space in which the actor in case is operating. These three points are going to be argued in this section. Regarding the third question, it is here claimed that the codes, cultures and concepts are still primarily following national lines. Therefore, we are studying the political thought dominant in the two nations in case.
Studies of 'perceptions' or 'belief Systems' or 'images' in Foreign Policy Analysis have a basically referential concept of language. Therefore, their various insights become disjoined instances of how a subject relates to the world out there; there is no place in these theories for overarching codes that regulate what is meaningful at a given place and time. Furthermore, it is difficult to avoid a hierarchy of importance where the view held by the actors is somehow more important than what they say. As soon as one opens up for an interest in what people really think (which we consciously bracket completely), this becomes the criteria to judge all texts on: do they really believe what they say? As argued by Nancy S. Streuver, Anglo-American discursive research generally suffers from "strong inconsistencies" deriving from "an oscillation between the temptation (..) to regard a private realm of meanings as primary and a devotion to the Wittgensteinian concern with public usage". The later work of Wittgenstein involves a rejection "of separation between concepts and language, mental activity and discursive activity, and thus eschews the depiction of a private mental realm for the study of public, accessible discursive activity". The Anglo-American research is marked by a "resistance to the promise of the systematicity of discourse and its lack of commitment to the usefulness of purely formal analysis". And in the end "it denies discourse as having its own empirical systematicity and thus reduces discourse analysis to an act of translating from one realm of mental entities to another, realms which are opaque and private". 20 It sounds so innocent and common sensical to say that the 'real' issue must be what people think. We want, however, to insist that as soon as one lets this question slip in, the whole investigation gets derailed and one gets into asking questions that are possibly impossible (how do we ever get into the head of somebody else? are we able to know even our own motives and drives?), or at least completely different from discourse analysis. If it is subjective motives and perceptions one is interested in, discourses will always only be a problematic approximation. If one sticks rigorously to the level of discourse, the logic of the argument remains much more clear -- one works on public, open sources and use them for what they are, not as indicators of something else.
As in the 'cognitive school' in Foreign Policy Analysis we focus on ideational factors, but we want to emphasize how these are neither individual nor collective, but inter-subjective. What interest us is neither what individual decision makers really believe, nor what is shared beliefs among a population (although the latter comes closer), but what are the codes used when actors relate to each other. Thus, the German discursive structures are in the last instance properties neither of the German people, nor of German politicians but of the German political arena. Therefore, the selection of sources (to which we return below) is only partly 'democratic'. On some instances, one might fmd that public opinion is for instance Europe-skeptical while we stress how political life is dominated by a pro-European discourse. Public opinion is relevant, but it is not our object of study. It has a limiting function on those who act politically, but even for 'ordinary people' there can often be a distinction between 'opinions' and one's valorizations for politics in the sense that one might personally have one opinion but partake in a political culture where the opposite opinion is part of the posture of a responsible politician. One is as French citizen skeptical to the EU, but finds it hard to see a politician as a serious candidate for Presidency unless that person appear as a great European. This is an indication of the existence in France of a relationship of concepts and values that make up for a discursive logic in politics which is a level separate from that held by the citizens individually.
Public, discursive activity constitutes a realm with its own coherence, logic and meaningful tensions and by studying this, one can capture strong structuring logics at play in foreign policy. Foreign policy discourse - 'public logic' - is limiting for future moves, and it has deep connections to conceptual constellations in other arenas involving the same core concepts, such as state and nation. Thus, in Stead of the customary image of political speech as haphazard and offhand, we substitute an idea of politics as a constant and relative tight loop, where the political argumentation on a specific issue is on the one hand strongly dependent on the basic conceptual logic which is available in a society, and at the same time reproducing or modifying this conceptual code, thereby setting the conditions for the next political struggle3 etc.
The structures dealt with are to be seen as layered structures; they contain different depth levels. When a pressure is building up in a system - when the discourse does not easily handle a problem anymore - it is possible at first to make 'surface changes' which keeps all the deeper levels intact, but this might be more and more uncomfortable, more and more unstable; and therefore at some point there might be a deeper change (carried out by the same actor or through the replacement of the actor with someone holding another set of 'beliefs' 21 ). If this happened it would be costly to the original actor, and it would mean that a number of other issues - beyond the one causing change - would suddenly be cast in a new light.
Discussing 'change' we are therefore not into the question, is it possible or not possible to change something. It is only a question of how much pressure is necessary, how heavy (political) costs can be tolerated for breaking a certain code. In the last instance anything is possible. Some changes are just very unlikely, or would if they happened imply very dramatic changes of many other issues. [Often the cost materialize at a completely different level; as e.g. when France is 'lifted' to a European level, this leads to an identity crisis not directly in relation to Europe, but indirectly by opening up inconvenient questions about regionalization, and by making the closely knit constellation of Nation-patrie-state-republic fall apart.]
Understanding discursive systems makes it possible to predict in the following way:
- if the dominant system seems to be well functioning, if no major pressures or anomalies are present, one can take this system as basis and make rather precise and strong predictions.
- if the system is under pressure, one can not take the specific system as such as premise but only move one level down and say: what other combinations are possible on the basis of the deeper elements. And if the crisis is tough, then move down one more level, etc.
In the first case the theory puts itself at a risk by suggesting rather far reaching predictions (deductions), and thereby making some kind of soft 'test' possible. In the second case the theory does not make the same kind of specific predictions about future policy; but it does make two other kinds of predictions, first that there will be more dramatic change, and secondly that there are certain possible directions this can take (but not which one is most likely). In the second case it can therefore happen that several possible policies are presented as possible although they are at the surface level (concrete issues) extremely far from each other; what they share is the trait of being logically possible constructions on the basis of the available basic discourse elements. The model basically makes 'negative predictions', it tells what is impossible given a certam structure (and would therefore only become possible with how deep a structural change).
This concept of structure is almost completely parallel to the nature of international political structure in (modified) neo-realism. According to John G. Ruggie, the 3 tiers (or levels) of the international political structure are to be seen as successive depth levels, and the concept of structure is generative, meaning that "They are not visible directly, only through their hypothesized effects. [The 2nd tier] mediates the social effects of the deep structure [1St tier], but within a context that has already been circumscribed by the deep structure. (...) [The 3rd tier] comes closest to the surface level of visible phenomena, but its impact on outcomes is simply to magnify or modify the opportunities and constraints generated by the other (two) structural 1ev-el(s)." 22 Every new layer adds specifications and variations on the deeper one, but one can not take a gradual change at for instance the third layer and say now it starts to weigh heavier than the second; either one is still inside the frame set by the prior 'choice' at the 1St and 2nd level, and then the changes at level 3 are variations on this basic premise, or pressure becomes sufficiently great to generate a change at the first or second level, and then the change will be to a radically new agenda, where several basic premises have changed and one will not be able to see this new situation as an extrapolation of the change happening with the factor at level 3. The system makes a 'jump' when there is a change at a deeper level. (In the case of a shift of system, the whole hierarchy is remodelled, and a new hierarchy established.)
What are then more concretely the layers in the domestic discursive structure? For instance France 23 : The first layer consists of the basic state-nation idea, i.e. the fusion of state and nation, not a specific concept of state or a specific nation but the very fact that the two have to stand in a mutually constitutive relationship. Two more elements are present in this very general 'French' model of the state-nation: the necessity of some external - preferably European -role (attached to the state), and the necessity of a foundation for the nation in patrie.
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External Patrie
Say we are at the position here called 'Mitterrand 1' (all the positions are explained below in the main text), then the smallest change - the one closest to the surface - would be to 'Mitterrand 2', since here both levels 1 and 2 are kept constant. A more radical change would be to change to one of the other main options at level 2. And the most radical would be a change away from the basic French concept of the fused state-nation. This could most obviously happen towards its opposite, which happens to be also its past: a regionalization 25 , but logically one must also keep the option that one could transcend this opposition of contrary options towards something third which was neither the state-nation, nor its opposite, therefore the position '?', which is left unspecified, since we could not know how a transcendence of the state-nation/regionalization dichotomy would look like.
Since the meaning of these concepts is discursively constructed as part of each individual, national history, it is not possibly to make an overall typology of possible state-nation concepts. On the basis of each unique country's unique constellation, one has to find by concrete empirical work on texts a possible state-nation core concept (1st layer), the most principled specifications of this (when Europe is the issue, first the purely relational question) make up the 2nd layer and at the third we come closer to specific policies (at a still very general level). The second layer is made up of the relational position vis-a-vis Europe, and in the case of France this is the only specification introduced at level 2. This is for not the case with Germany, where - as it will be shown in chapters II and III, the twin concepts of power state and romantic nation are constituti-ve, but not fused (as in the French concept) and therefore the second level also includes the combination of yes/no in relation to the two concepts. Still, as with France, at the second level Europe is only relationally constituted: does it have an internal, external or no relationship to which ideas of state and nation? At the third layer we find the content of Europe: what kind of Europe is promoted? Confederation or federation, Western Europe or All-europe?
The reason for selecting state and nation (and Europe) as central categories is, that these are the forms the 'we' take. Thus, the claim for preeminence of state/nation over say conceptions of international relations or concepts of security is that the most important categories are the identity related ones. Not simply 'who' we are, but the way(s) one thinks the we. We (French) as nation and as state, but also Europe is emerging as a we category and therefore the relationship between state/nation and Europe is one of different layers of identity being in complex constellations of competition and mutual definition. 26
The German model will be presented later in the paper after arguing which concepts to put at its basis and how to fill out the layers. France has been used in the theoretical introduction because France as usual is more logical and clear, while Germany is a complicated case. The one to be explored in this paper.
2. A European solution. And temptations? Puzzles for Theory.
The question that emerged in 1989-90 about the future policy orientation of Germany has found its temporary resolution in Germany continuing the very Europe oriented line, which the FRG followed since its birth in 1949. A number of formal and informal agreements culminating so far in the Maastricht agreements consolidate the political, economic and cultural position of the Federal Republic in the West and especially in (Western) Europe.
German decision makers basically feel good in the Europe that emerged after the fall of the wall and the iron curtain. Germany is geopolitically central in Europe with conctact to all major parts of Europe. Germany paied a certain price to France especially for unification by accelerating European integration in forms wanted. In turn Germany got the access to East and Central Europe that was barred during the cold war. Also Germany has maintained ties to the US through NATO, while attempting through the OSCE to keep Russia from 'falling out of Europe'.
German Europe policy at first seems paradoxical. It is against standard logic that Germany as Europe's strongest power should be willing to offer other powers co-decision power over German power resources. But for Germans a different logic counts in foreign policy. For leading Germans, the challenge is to make sure 'Germany' or 'the German state' is not visible to the surroundings and for the Germans themselves. To Germans and Europeans alike, 'the German state' denotes 'the power state' that called down disasters on Europe and the Germans since the middle of the previous century and burned Auschwitz into the awareness of world society and the consciousness of the Germans. If the German state becomes visible, it will become a source for instability and insecurity for the surroundings. It will cause them to balance against Germany. This does not mean that Germany does not pursue its national interests or strives for welfare and influence. But the Germans know their limits and have leamed to use instruments in foreign policy that allow the most space of manoeuver without upsetting other European actors. This is not a purely instrumental choice of strategies. Even if it for some might have started like this, it eventually implied a transformation of the meaning of state and nation and thereby of what the aim of the strategy is. 27
If a new theory should prove its worth in explaining German foreign policy, it would be nice to be able to line up the existing theories and their explanations and predictions. However, there are numerous possible theories having views on the matter, and most of them are sufficiently indeterminate that different writers apply them differently to the case. [Maybe I should insert afier all a paragraph summarizing realist predictions for Germany (Waltz, Mearsheimer), liberal institutionalists (Keohane & Nye, Anderson & Goodman) and constructivists (Katzenstein, Berger).] Another angle could be to look at what non-Germans have been asking of Germany, and thus see what appears as 'normal' behavior if you do not think it through Germany's own categories. 28
Surprisingly, the loudest Voices advocating a stronger German profile, even a military one, have come from abroad. The pressure comes either in the form of evens that the Germans believe call for action, or in the form of other countries mixing self-fulfilling expectations of German great power behavior with frustration about shouldering larger military burdens because of German abstention. These situations have placed Germans in a dilemma. On the one hand, there is a demand for action. Non-action triggers international scorn. On the other, German decisiveness and drive triggers inevitably accusations about great power ambitions. This was most clearly visible in the Summer and Fall of 1991 where Germany took strong positions on the emerging conflict in Yugoslavia. 29 Germany supported the demands of Croats and Slovenes for independence, while France supported the Serbs and thereby keeping the Yugoslav federation intact. The German attitude was heavily criticized, especially in France (and Serbia!), with parallels drawn to previous German power politics in the Balkans. Reversely, the German lack of decisiveness during the Gulf crisis and war in 1990-91 causes heavy critique among her alliance partners.
The pressure on Germany in the direction of 'normal' behavior is strongest from the outside. It is sometimes surprising to see how forces abroad shove Germany in the directions of 'normality' without thought for the long term consequences. Take Michael Lind's 1992 suggestion in The National Interest of a 'historic deal' where Washington supports the Germans in their demand(?) for a permanent seat on the UN security council, against the Germans skipping their 'doubtful argument' about the constitution preventing the use of German forces outside the NATO area. 30
If we briefly recapitulate the crises of recent years and the moral that Germans should be expected to draw, it is surprising that Germany has not long ago stepped forward as a military or at least political great power. This seems to indicate that there are solid, internal bases on which the low profile orientation rests.
The Gulf war triggered strong critique of Germany. First for being ambivalent in its political support for the American-led coalition, which among other things were caused by Genscher in typical German post-war ways having an 'idealistic' expectation that the crisis should be resolvable in a peaceful manner, and therefore the government in Bonn -- in the middle of unification politics -- not preparing itself for the possibility of actual war. The German -- partly constitutional -- blocking against sending troops outside NATO areas meant that Germany did not participate militarily, but only thought to pay its way out. The critique of this was confusing to many Germans who had hardly forgotten the speculations from abroad during unification days about the coming 'fourth Reich'. Many Germans thought the surrounding world appreciated that Germany exhibited military abstinence. 31 Finally, the Germans hesitated about sending planes to defend the NATO member Turkey in case of Iraqi attack and thus enabled speculation about being an unreliable ally.
Yugoslavia was even more complex. Most remarkable was here that Germany threw her weight heavily into the political process in the EU in order to achieve recognition of Croatia and Slovenia and later Bosnia-Herzegovina. There are many different interpretations of this policy, 32 but it should probably be noticed that the very activist recognition policy did not spring from a master plan by the government but was rather 'forced' upon it by arguments of the previous policy being 'immoral', and not standing up to that principle of national self-determination which Germany in its re-unification had benefitted from its allies upholding through the whole post-war period (see the campaign especially in FAZ, June-July 1991). The turning point is a meeting in the foreign committee of the Bundestag on July 1, where Genscher allegedly found himself 'besieged', and ttaccording to eye witnesses entered the meeting as a careful diplomat and came out dancing to the recognition tune" 33 . Then this policy was pushed through without mercy against the other Western powers -- contrary to German tradition. Eventually, German experienced problems when the discussion turned towards military solution, and Germany had to pass.
Both the Gulf and Yugoslavia seemed to offer the moral that Germany would have less trouble if we had more military stature, more normal room of manoeuvre including military so, and less self-imposed limitations. In the Yugoslavia case, it was experienced that one could when so wished have one's way even in high politics and 'lead' EU policy. 34 The possibility of this turned into embarrassment when the process reached a discussion on military options, and the Germans suddenly could only have strong opinions on what others should do. A slightly worrying dual moral: we can lead the EU, and we are hindered in the last instance by our self-imposed military restraints.
The third international challenge, which so to say offered the Germans an occasion to shirk its anti-power role, was the Maastricht crisis. Also here, a situation occurred where the Germans - if they so wished - easily could have changed to a more nationalist track without anybody really having a chance to say that it was Germany who pushed for this.
In the context of Maastricht ratification, one first witnessed growing opposition especially against the economic side (surrender of the D-Mark), but the Danish referendum triggered also the political where it was already felt that Germany had gotten too little in Maastricht, since the political union fell short on true democracy (ie. European Parliament and Länder in contrast to the Commission and Council). The Danish revolt against the bureaucratic, far-away EU was therefore ofien in German debates taken as support for German views that Maastricht should be dropped and something whole-hearted implemented (which in practice meant something close to a Federation afier German model). Probably, this was not exactly what the Danish voters intended, but this was how it was heard in Germany.
However, a change seemed to happen around themu time of the French referendum 35 , probably to be explained by a possible French 'no' reminding the Germans what it would mean if the Union collapsed. Staring down the abyss, one decided that implementation of Maastricht had first priority. Despite public scepsis, the political elite turned even more keen on securing Maastricht (this was clear for instance in the reactions towards Denmark, Germany's policy on the Edinburgh summit and the blunt messages from Germany to Denmark after it). Kohl wanted the Union safely carried through. Special German interests like Eastern enlargement were for a while pushed in the background in order to concentrate on deepening. Priority was given to the project for a Union as such and keeping up speed. The logic of the CDU/CSU Schauble/Lammers paper (as well as Baladur's simultaneous speech) was clearly: 1) enlargement will come, 2) this ought to lead to deepening and institutional reforms, in order to continue with the preferred model where all countries participate equally in everything, 3) this is hardly realistic given the economic situation in Eastern Europe and scepsis in some West European member states plus the problems of EMU, 4) therefore, a smaller group has to drive faster. In all this it is assumed: it is completely unacceptable and very risky if the process begins to lose speed. 36 To avoid balance of power is a more decisive aim than preferences regarding the shape of European integration, because it determines the general nature of European politics and thereby the nature of Germany.
The combined result of these debates is that the 'normality' line has gain more support especially on the military issue about sending troops to international operations also outside the NATO area. Not to be able to has a too high price. On top of the formalistic arguments for normality, more concrete advantages begin to arrive. The advantages rarely are about direct pursuit of German aims with military means, but rather that in that multilateral cooperation which Germany so greatly values, it will be an advantage for Germany to be able to do her part; an advantage for Germany (strengthening her overall position) and an advantage for European and Atlantic operations (where other countries feel 'exploited' if a big country like Germany can opt out). The struggle over German out of area operations was resolved so that Germany now can send her soldiers on peace-keeping operations, which does not mean this will automatically happen every time, only that the arguments against will be put more directly and not cloaked as constitutional arguments. Also before the verdict by the Constitutional Court, it was a political interpretation of the constitution that prevented German participation. Such a choice of interpretation can easily in the future be replaced by other arguments for the same position. It should any way be noticed that the most effective argument in Germany for sending troops has been the relationship to one's allies, that is not anything about Germany obtaining a freedom to go one's own ways. Quite the contrary: to be freed to go the same way as the others. Simultaneously, the issue became established as a symbolic concentrate of a discussion over what kind of state Germany should become: a normal great power (or even power state?) or a special kind of civilian, historically educated peace state. This second - symbolic - layer has undoubtedly played on both sides: as a pro argument on the right and especially as contre argument in center-left circles. On the far left both arguments point in the same direction: we neither want to help the West in its interventions or a power definition of Germany); on the far right the two align with opposite sign. A large part of the German political centre, however, has been caught in a dilemma: one would be happy to see Germany as smoothly as possible participate in Western structures, but does not want to see Germany make a symbolic choice for 'normality' over 'postwar-abstention'. The fact that one question is concrete (are there German soldiers on the operation) and the other symbolic (what does Germany's relationship to military activities say about what kind of Germany it will be) could possibly mean this is not an absolute dilemma, that there is a way out, which respects both concerns. If Germany changed abruptly towards a more power political line, this would this in Germany be perceived as and thus be a choice in favor of normalization. If, in contrast, Germany slowly enters military operations more and more, this is not in itself a problem -- as long as too strong symbolic decisions are avoided. It is therefore a little less inconsistent as it may sound to be for Germany in due time entering military arenas (because this makes West EUropean defence more realistic and therefore integration easier), at the same time as one opposes heavy-handed attempts to decide it now and here under great fanfare.
A pattern emerges where Germany avoids clear power politics, of course pursues own interests, but gives priority to international cooperation and especially the EU. Even on the occasion of quite strong 'invitations' from her allies to chose a more 'normal state' and military concludingly line, the German inner blocking has been strong enough to allow only quite limited steps in this direction: unilateralism in Yugoslavia, the legal freeing to participate out of area (without a promise to show up). All in all a surprising degree of continuity under radically changed conditions.
One task of the paper is thus to explain this continuity which is at least to some theoretical perspectives (and on the background of the pressure, demands and suggestions applied to Germany from the outside) counter-intuitive. Actually, for both Germany and France, questions appeared in the post-1989 period of the "why didn't they simply" type, where views from the inside find it quite a lot more obvious why they didn't: Why could France not simply adopt a more pragmatic, less heroic Europe policy, one that corresponds better to France's resources? Why take serious that the alternative to the policy of the 1980s could be a more nationalist one -- it 'obviously' has no chance of bringing France what it promises? And why does Germany continue this odd line when it does not even seem to be what its allies asks of it -- why not take the easy route and become more normal'? This is what others ask of it, and it must naturally be what any state wants itself? A second task after explaining these surprising continuities is to map the relevant alternatives. A third is the interaction, how the competition for defining identity policy in one country, Germany, is influenced by the parallel struggle in another, France. Some of this, especially the first task, can be handled by different kinds of constructivism. Not the Wendt type which concentrates on international norms and identities and thus points to one dominant form of unit-ness (only one that is socially constituted in contrast to realist material necessity), which does not help much here where the issue is the variation between different states who construct identity and rationality differently. The Katzenstein type is able to explain the continuity, but only that. It is not structural and therefore it can only show how the dominant construction works, not the logic of how different competing self-constructions branch out from one shared basis and thereby which competing lines would be most likely to replace the dominant one.
There has been some gradual movement on various concrete questions -- like troops 'out of area' -- and a general growth in rhetoric about Germany's increased 'responsibility' (read: power), but the puzzle remains that Germany seems consistently to pull towards the low profile end of the possible options and in particular the absolute priority it gives to European integration.
3. Basic German Concepts of State and Nation
Basis for this stability is the way the Germans in recent decades have constructed political key terms like state, nation and society, and how these have been connected to specific images of Europe.
Since German unification in 1989 returned to the European agenda, we have witnessed a continuous but often hushed debate on 'the Germans'. On the one side appear people -- eg. quite a lot of British -- who claim that Germans are Germans (are Prussians), and the only reason they have behaved for 40 years is that they had to. Now when they get their own nation state, it is only a question of time before we see the 'usual behavior'. On the other side stands 'the new Europeans' who say that since 1945, the Germans have become like us. At last they assumed the Western model of democracy, and therefore there is no longer any difference between German and other Western political culture.
None of these are correct. The Germans are not as they were in 1870 or 1939; but nor are they identical to Frenchinen (who in turn are not like the English) etc. There are markedly different traditions in the major countries regarding conceptions of politics, state, nation and power. The conception that developed in West Germany after the war can only be understood on the basis of the German tradition. This tradition is not repeated. On the contrary it is turned on its head. But that after all is a quite clear relation. This German thinking is more easily understood through understanding what it is that is stood on its head, rather than knowing that it is somewhat like some other country's. The German post-war conception of state and nation was shaped as a reaction against the 'typical German' idea of the 'power state' that had characterized German politics the 100 years preceding World War II. Political thinking in the post-war period is defined by attempts to avoid power concentration and avoid the connection of the state to emotional impulses of the population. On this basis a Europe policy was conducted that sought a place for the economic, cultural and regional expression of Germans/the German nation, but not a (power) politics of the state for Germany as such. No German power state.
In German political thinking, the state is still at the centre - as in the traditional conception. But the state is now at the centre in the form of the guiding problem, where previously it was the meaning and energy of everything. In post-war FRG's thinking the task has been to control the state and stabilize the political order. If one reads the German constitution carefully, it is striking how its authors sought to prevent concentration of power in any instance: parliament, president, people, any. Therefore Germany has no reference, certain element of the constitution are not allowed to be changed even with the largest majority in the Bundestag, etc. Political participation is feared rather than encouraged, and it is clearly secondary to the detailed arrangement of the state as a self-stabilizing system. It should be noted that this is not similar to American control of power, because the state in Germany as an abstract idea is much more central 37 adn for instance leads to quie different ideas about democracy. 38 The idea of a powerful state still structure German thinking -- now as a nightmare. The international role sought ('the German Europe') naturally is an extenstion of this concept of the state.
Since the 1980s it has been combined with a certain revival of another German thread: the romantic nation. This means to rediscover cultural communities that exist independently of political structures. This re-discovery was seen in the 1980s both as an increased interest in Germany and as an interest in Mitteleuropa as a community re-emerging across nation state structures.
The central positions in German debates about themselves can -- a little mechanically -- be defined from two core ideas of German political thinking: the power state and the romantic nation.
This is not the place to survey German history 39 , but in a few words we could recall that the formative phase for modern Germany was the 18th and 19th Centuries: the experience of not being unified as a state at a time when important neighbors formed centralized territorial states, and not approximating a state-nation when nationalism arrived and attempted to create nation states was decisive. The German concept of the state was shaped by the simple fact that its object did not exist; the German state was something to be created, not refined and reshaped with new ideas of nation and modernity.
One important approach was to attempt to 'live with' conditions and emphasize the nation as directly dependent on community, language, and culture - without a German state. In connection with the German development from the mid 18th Century where the inner development of the individual is emphasized, the collective is also made inward. The Nation exists deep in the German soul, not on the map. Therefore, it is important to recall that the 'inventor' of the modern nation, Johann Gottfried von Herder, definitely was not a supporter of the state, of a nation's expression in a nation-state. He was interested in culture and people. 40
Especially in the years after 1789, 'the nationalists' cultivated a program for national development despite, or even due to, the impossibility of political unification of the German people. Implied in this is the whole romantic thought that culture/people/nation rests in itself, not in the political structure. Cultures are closed meaning systems, defined by their unique traits, exhibiting an organic inner coherence, and only possible to understand from within through living it. Not from the abstract, universal principles of enlightenment. Here are the roots to the familiar dichotomy between a Western and a German/Eastern concept of nation, between the English/French concept of the nation as a political community within a state, and that of romantic nationalism, which according to Thomas Nipperdey can be summarized in two claims: all culture is national, and a nation is defined by its cultural community. 41
In the wake of the Napoleonic wars (which taught the Qermans about the vulnerability of statelessness and stimulated a general European nationalism) this thinking received a twist whereby the state came to the centre, the power state.
The first wave of state thinking was with names like Fichte and Hegel associated with the development of German idealism. The development of a strong concept of the state happened together with a general formation of a philosophy of strong concepts. According to Friedrich Meinecke, the political interpretation (the need for a state) and idealistic philosophy were mutually reinforcing and converged in an interpretation of the German situation in terms of the importance of a strong state as the incamation of the people/nation. 42 Historian Heinrich von Treitschke gave offered the famous definition according to which "the nature of the state is first power, then secondly power, and thirdly again power". International politics had for some centuries increasingly been about states, but this was in a much more concrete manner where ruler, state and interests were connected in confusing ways. Only with German idealism (which the discipline of International Relations therefore owes much more than it likes to think 43 ) did international politics become steered by an abstract state, by the idea of the state as absolute notion. The state ranks above the individual, and history is ultimately a struggle for power and self-expression. State, power, meaning and history are tied together in intense logical connections. The power state is created as idea, and it is created in Germany.
From here follows of course the important story about the way German unification actually came to take shape, the relationship between German and Prussian and between the national and the democratic. It can, however, be left out here, where the task was only to introduce two key concepts: romantic nation and power state.
The inference is thus that German post-war thinking about state, nation and Europe is not as often claimed 'normal Western' and democratic, but should be understood as a negation of a specific German tradition of political thinking. The state is still at the center, and it is still about power. But no longer is it the aim, measure and meaning of everything, but still the big, structuring problem.
The German system is built like a security system -- as a barrier against compiling power. 44 The state is something to be handled, not a means for self realization. The individual no longer is assumed to achieve her identity or meaning through the international success or greatness of the state. The state is a risk, a danger. But it is not a problem to be solved -- in contrast to (much) American thinking, there is no idea the state can be removed, 45 or even reduced to only what the individuals at any given time find to be in their interest. The state is very meaningful, and it has a nature or essence of itself.
The foreign policy extension of this was the formula of slowly regaining sovereignty and equality through cooperation. By binding itself in almost any imaginable international organization, one sought first to reassure the West (Adenauer), and then the East (Brandt), but not least oneself. The transformation of the state from being an independent nation state to becoming partly dismantled in order to reappear in internationalized shape, was definitely not only a necessary price to pay in order to be admitted to the good international company again, it was a welcome international counterpart to the internal dispersion and binding of the state.
After 1945, not only the state was a problematic concept; also the nation was useless. The nation as a positive value existing in and by itself, was impossible. A Herderian nation was even less attractive than a German state, since the picture of German values, culture and soul was darkened by the shadow from Auschwitz. Of course there was much talk of reunification, but more as a Realpolitik reflex, a self-evident demand, rather than a place to display a deeper national reference.
The sociologist Bernhard Giesen has suggested this interpretation of German national identity after 1945: On the one hand, intellectuals crated a kind of paradoxal German identity by placing Nazi-Germany's unspeakable cruelty at the centre as that which must be acknowledged and reflected on. In this 'Holocaust Nation', one had to confess the crime and by doing this one could join a community based on the fight against political nationalism. This was a truly German community, because it was in the last instance based on a unique event, which could not be communicated, compared or in any other way relativized. The misdeeds of the Nazi period are the definite argument. All discussions are in the last instance settled in one point> Auschwitz. The only way to relate responsibly to being German is by figthing nationalism, war and power politcs, and especially in preventing the reemergence of a strong and heroised German state. 46 In this way, an important version of national identity has come to support the dominant conception of the state, the idea of the anti-power-state.
Secondly, the 'official' national (quasi) identity was formed in another area: economy:"with reference to the 'unquestionable' economic miracle of the Federal Republic, a national identity was based on old values such as diligence, reliability and discipline." 47
The two projects for the nation were strict opponents. The dominant elite, however, could not create a strong intellectual programme for 'their' nation. They rather avoided the question of the national, and concentrated on economy (and Europe). The nation was thereby left floating between negated (the old German nation is a problem, a danger not a hope) and ignored (now we are Western, and anyway economy is more important); and also it was partly revived in the paradoxical form of a German reflection on prior German misdeeds.
Germany is famous for soul searching debates on the character and state of the nation, and of course there has been a series of such in the whole post-war period. 48 Often they were connected one way or the other to the problem of divided Germany. In the 1980s, however, a new type of interest for German identity and history emerged which was less about division than about connecting to German traditions. The height of intensity was reached in 1986 with the socalled Historikerstreit, roughly about whether Germany should seek out of the shadow from Auschwitz and act more freely, or whether the Holocaust nation was and remained the right way to aproach German identity, ie. to keep viewing it in relation to one pivotal point: the war and holocaust. Especially from the right wing, attempts were made to revive German self-assurance (here the actions among historians strengthened tendencies started by the arrival of the Kohl government), while the left (and centre left, mostly represented by the sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas) insisted that Germany's great triumph was the new democracy built after the war. Therefore, one should appreciate what was founded in the break with German traditions and not flatten this break in order to reach back to German pre-45 traditions. It was a widespread perception at the time that the left in some sense 'won' the Historikerstreit (but as we will see below, the right has taken its revenge in recent years).
4. Europa
What Europes has this been tied to? In the earliest, the Adenauer period, it was a very West European one, and clearly federalist aimed at replacing the nation state and thereby solve German problems while in the short run it contributed to regaining equality for Germany. Brandt continued the strategy of building international trust, but as part of the Eastern policy and detente his Europe became oriented towards looser pan-European structures and thereby often implied a less ambitious federalism in relation to Western Europe. More nation state also followed from the increase in 'Germany policy'. The extension of Europe is more Gaullist Atlantic to Urals -- or even CSCE Europe including both superpowers. The Brandt era brought forward elements of romantic nation in the arguments for Germany policy in terms of obligations to Germans on both sides. Schmidt tended to focus on the EC and France in particular and rely less on arguments about the nation. Kohl attempted to 'rehabilitate' Germany but while he had vague hints at doing more in Germany policy, it was actually the opposition who went the furthest in recreating the romantic nation as resting in itself independently of political structures by way of its vision for non-state unification of Germany and a Mitteleuropa across System boundaries. Most remarkable about this pattern is that all four (and with SPD under Kohl: five) have the anti-power-state as constant while they change back and forth on the romantic nation and on Europe as Western Europe or Pan-Europe. 49 When Germany began to unify, many expected that we would now have a 'German Europe', a Europe shaped according to German wishes and models. This did not happen. A paradoxical effect of unification was that political developments were rather channeled into other, not least French, forms. Since Germany had its central aims fulfilled -- reunification, full sovereignty, and space to display activities in Eastern Europe -- it was necessary for Germany to secure room for those (medium to great) powers most hardly hit by unification: France and the Soviet Union, to assure that they also achieved a place in Europe, that they each had their 'Europe' fulfilled.
Since February 1990 where it became clear that German unification would come -- and come fast -- it was German policy to help France and Soviet/Russia achieve sufficient success with their compensatory developments. In relation to Western Europe, Germany has been thinking in French, in relation to pan-Europe in Russian - and towards Mitteleuropa in German.
We do not get 'a German Europe' in the sense of a Europe dominated by Germany, but we get a Europe consisting of a complicated mix of French, Russian and German thinking about Europe. The specifically German element -- 'The German Europe' -- is to lower the importance of borders, lessen their dividing force, and create dynamic non-state processes across formal borders (formal borders between states and before 1989 between different political systems). To let 'natural spaces' reappear -- such as Mitteleuropa -- without challenging the status or borders of the nation states. Mitteleuropa should not be a formal (con)federation, neither a new quasi-state to replace the states nor build on the states. It should unfold below or around the states. The nation and nation-like communities are given higher priority than political structures -- all in the tradition of the romantic nation.
Germany's Europe is not about erecting institutions or powerful political units. Quite the contrary. German Europe tries to be invisible. It appears when borders fade in the centre of Europe. Mitteleuropa is currently tied together through German capital, German historical connections, German tourists and the regionalist policies of the Ldnder in cultivating border-areas. The German state certainly has no wish to declare any projects here -- no names, no official Mitteleuropa. It can only scare.
Since there is a German economic and historical 'over pressure' combined with a shrinking of historical borders, this expansion is clearly the least problematic form. Germans attempt to downplay political/state action by 'Germany'. This makes the unfolding of the German Europe compatible with the French and the Russian ones. They are competing Europes, but they do not collide frontally since they are about different things. 50 Each attempts to project important self-reflections on to Europe, and a certain degree of success hereof is necesssary for Europe to be attractive to each. It is possible to have more of all three at the same time. Exactly by this, European developments achieve a certain stability, and avoids falling back immediately in power balancing among nation states. Compared to the original 1990 bargain, the Russian element has been marginalized, Germany and France are still kept in a joint order not by similarity but by complementarity and a simultaneous projection of different visions on to 'Europe'. A precondition for the simultaneous emergence of al-European security structures and West-European integration is therefore, that the Germans have chosen not to realize themselves or their Central European dominance in traditional terms, not to flex state muscles.
In Germany the initial federal government response to the breaching of the wall was guided by fear of provoking reactions from the four Allied powers, Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. It was feared that German time would run ahead of European time, and so Kohl actually tried in November and December 1989 to slow down developments so as to stave off four-power intervention. In this first stage, the Kohl government tried to keep the speed of German development down so that Europe could catch up. The Bonn government could not opt directly for its real aim, state unity. In November 1989 an overt policy of unification could well have triggered four-power meetings against Germany. (A hint of this came with a meeting of the Four in December called by the Soviet Union in the old 'control council' building in Berlin). At this Stage a four-power meeting would probably have resulted in a confirmation of the divided status quo. Symbolically, a reversion to four-power responsibility for Germany would have been a dramatic Setback to German sovereignty; it would have actually erased thirty-five years of patient foreign policy designed to build up sovereignty, thus returning Germany to the immediate post-war situation of Allied supervision.
While speculation ran wild in London, Paris and Washington, and redrawn maps of Europe with a united Germany appeared in the newspapers, the political establishment in West Germany tried to define the situation in terms of stabilization and democratization in the GDR. Reading contemporary newspapers, one often got the impression that the German press was two weeks behind the others, especially in their terminology (which avoided terms such as 'unification' and especially 'Reunification').
From February 1990, however, it became clear that West Germany could not control developments. The East Germans decided -- partly with their feet, partly by clear signals given by the election -- to join with the West Germans. But this 'loss of control' for Bonn was actually a diplomatic victory. In this way all potential four-power vetoes were circumvented. How do you veto a collapse? East Germany seemed to cave in and stream under the door to the Federal Republic. This was not Bonn's policy of reunification. Bonn, seemingly, could not be blamed, for it did what Paris and Moscow asked for. Or, rather, Bonn did very little. It did not stabilize the GDR - this was more than could be expected. Nor did it clearly destabilize it. It did nothing.
That unification would come, and rather sooner than expected, became clear with the Kohl/Genscher visit to Moscow in early February 1990, when Soviet endorsement of unification was attained. From now on German policy became much more focused on European developments. The dilemma of German and European time remained, but German developments could not be slowed down. European developments had to take on German speed. This did not mean a Europe on German terms; quite the contrary, it meant German speed and Franco-Russian form. Germany started to approach the EC much more along French lines, and it was the German foreign ministry that came up with the bulk of the ideas for all-European security structures. The Soviets were in fact rather slow to formulate those demands that should logically have been theirs, and the plans were worked out in the foreign ministry - in Bonn! (see Der Spiegel, 12 February 1990, p.23). These plans were not especially in the German interest, but they made a lot of sense in the Soviet Union. It was the Soviet Union (later Russia) that had to fear dropping out of Europe. The Russians needed reassurance as to their future links to Europe. Some even hoped for the channelling of resources and support from the West. In other words, in the terminology of the three Competing Europes, from February 1990 German diplomacy became very active in building the French and the Russian Europe. Why? Because the Germans were getting their own Europe - one with room for national unity and economic expansion in central Europe, though the high cost of German unification had yet to be realized. But in order to keep the overall process stable it is necessary to keep a balance between all three major Europes.
France and Russia have been accommodated largely because they could most easily impede the German process of unification. This is not because they hold the strongest cards, but on the contrary because they hold the weakest. They are the two powers that have been most deeply hurt by these developments. German unity affects them directly, and their status has in fact been defined in relation to, or by contrast with Germany. French identity in the post-war world rested largely on its difference from Germany, France being fully sovereign and independent, one of the four occupying powers, and possessing nuclear weapons. Now that Germany is becoming a 'normal' state -- a triumph for Bonn's post-war foreign policy -- France is thereby reduced in stature. Furthermore, nuclear weapons seem of decreasing symbolic value, while the economic imbalance works in the opposite direction. As Dominique Moïsi has put it: 'the balance between the Mark and the Bomb is sliding to the advantage of the former' (Die Zeit, 9 December 1988). Furthermore, the French mission involved in 'transcending Yalta' is lost when Yalta is actually overcome.
For many Russians, the occupation and possession of eastern Germany was the ultimate symbol of victory in the Second World War and the guarantee against its repetition. Letting go the main prize of victory was seen by many as an offence to millions of dead Russians. In the words of Alexander Prokhanov, writing in the January 1990 issue of Literaturnaya Rossiva: "As the colours and contours of Europe's political map are changing, the bones of Russian infantrymen stir in their unknown graves." West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher seemed to be conscious about the importance of constructing a Europe that made sense to Russia:
We do not want to push the Soviet Union to the edge of Europe. She should rather continue to be incorporated in Europe as a whole, and that includes the political dimension of Europe ... We do not want anyone to feel themselves the loser because of German unification ... The CSCE provides a guarantee for the Soviet Union that it can play a foil role in Europe. The Soviet Union has opened its doors and in such a situation we must go through the door, not let someone slam it shut from this side. (The European, 11-13 May 1990., p.9)
Thus while it is possible to see specific visions of Europe as corresponding to the German concept of state and nation -- in particular network like non-state patterns in Central Europe -- it is equally important that Germany due to its conspicious success in 1990 and its fear of a return to balance of power has an interest in securing the Europes of other major powers, Russia and especially France. the leading statesmen of the early 1 990s have attempted to shape a European order -- not very logical or neat and much maligned for it -- that allows for the simultaneous unfolding of competing Europes, a Europe where all of the majpr powers are able to imagine themselves in a meaningful future. But is this complex constellation stable?
5. The four lines in German thinking on state, nation and Europe in the 1990s
The decisive question for an evaluation of the future role and direction of Germany in Europe is: will the Germans continue to make a Virtue of its lacking power/political role? Will Germany continue on the path of the low profile, or will it slowly turn onto a more normal behavior where economic weight is translated into influence in international politics, and if so: what Germany will it be whose interests are taken care of? This will be decisive for future patterns in Europe, for the fate of the EU and thereby for more or less all questions in Europe.
The most likely road is a continuation of the low political profile. Its original rationale was connnected to regaining sovereignty and retaining support for the principled aim of reunification. This rationale has dropped out. At the same time, this line has proven economically useful. Both Japan and Germany have realized that their roles as political dwarfs had their advantages, not only in money saved on defence, but first of all by economic expansion triggering less opposition when not connected to political-military strength. The German establishment its today overwhelmitngly itn favour of continuing. Michael Stürmer, a historian allegedly close to Kohl, who in the early 1980s did his part of the resurrection of German self-confidence and national feeling, commented on the upheavals in the GDR by stating that it was now more important than ever to continue self-binding, nesting in multi-lateral structures, etc. "The German questions do no find their answers in nation-state concepts of the 19th Century but in the ways of integration of the 21st Century". 51 In this view: Germany does better the more Europe moves in the direction of a political universe where the nation-states are relativized as only an element in a larger picture. By (foreign) observers, this very deep-seated Europeanism is often presented as a more or less free-floating perception of integration and an interpretation of German interests. It should, however, be noticed that even a diplomatic historian like Sturmer expresses a vision which combines an idea of Europe with a conception of Germany that involves deep transformation of the meaning of state, nation and 'Germany'. In an argument that is also used by another historian, Helmut Kohl, there is one possible Europe which historians know well, that of balance of power Europe; it corresponds to one kind of Germany, and even if one might like elements of this Germany, it is so ominous to get into this Europe -- especially for Germans -- that this is not the route to be taken. 52 The alternative is a Europe which transforms the meaning of statehood, and thereby both the nature of international relations in Europe (anti balance of power) and the nature of Germany. Thereby even rightist politicians draw on the anti-power-state interpretation of Germany, and intertwine European and German developments on the basis of concepts of state/nation that outsiders would probably expect to find only among the Centre and left.
The less likely road points towards a Germany that acts more like a traditional great power. It was especially at first quite difficult to find reasons for Germany to chose this route. Accordingly, the political class was almost totally united in 1990 in rejecting nation-state high profile for newly unified Germany. Also economic interests seem mainly tied to the project of sub- and supra-statism, the invisible Mitteleuropa and European integration. The arguments that appear in German debates for a stronger political role were and to some extent still are curiously formalistic and empty. A nation-state has to have political space for manoevre and political-military profile because: a nation-state has. What Germany should gain by this was not immediately clear. This is not as at the turn of the Century when there were aims (colonies for instance) to be realized through a position of political power. With the course of non-statism the most important aims seem to be realized slowly and securely: German unification nested in a stable Europe and emergence of a Central European zone tied together by German activities.
It will be spelled out in a page how this formalistic argument works. First should only be noted that it has not been close to threatening the dominant self interpretation in German politics. Foreign observers generally underestimate the commitment of the German political class (and not least the CDU) to this strategy, to European integration and to self-binding. One does not strive for classical room of manoevre. The risk of proving counter productive is too high according to the establishment line. Post-cold war Europe holds new possibilities and motives for German 'power politics', but this is more than balanced by the increased fears and risks for a general re-wakening of power politics and power balancing within Western Europe. Germany has as the potentially strongest power most to lose from a Europe of power balancing. This interpretation is so strong that the necessity of integration has only become more solidly establshed by the end of the cold war.
The mistake of the usual interpretation of Germany is to assume that all states act alike, that there is a given and natural hierarchy of aims and thus a natural behavior that all states tend towards. If, in contrast, we assume that states follow different logics, the task is to understand the logic of a particular state: how its political thinking makes sense out of a foreign policy. It might be that Germany ends up doing what the alarmists expect, but then it is not (only?) because this is the rational policy, because it is in Germany's 'interest', but because the political process in Germany has created a universe of meaning where this becomes German rationality, becomes Germany's interest. An analysis of the period 1990-96 finds that Germany predominately has continued the policy of the low profile.
But there are new voices present, and there are international conditions that could upset the balance. This section will deal with the sounds heard in Germany, and the two that follows point to one of the most important international sources for a possible radical change in German policy.
While foreign policy based on the anti-power-state has proven itself quite stable and enjoys broad support in the political system, three lines are possible that are the most obvious candidates should it change: 1) a return to the political logic of the power state possibly combined with moderate elements of romantic nationalism, and 2) a national, economic (typically not very statist) policy of more power behind German interests. To complete the picture of main positions at the level of concepts of state/nation and Europe, there is also as 3) a pacifist and/or Greenish line taking the anti-power-state very literally, and finally there is of course: 4) the current line: a pragmatic continuation of the anti-power-state pursuing a policy of European integration and Franco-German cooperation first. 53
- The logic of the power state showed in unified Germany most of all in the form of criticism of various elements of the policy of the anti-power-state: Europe of the regions, EU integration, continued acceptance of foreign troops and NATO integration. Then the argument does not follow very clearly from political or economic aims. It is rather what one might call a teenage syndrome
54
: with the 2+4 treaty one came of age, now one wants to be 'fully grown up . A sovereign state can not be as integrated in NATO as Germany is, not host foreign troops, not be manifestly West-oriented, can not continue towards a federalism of the Länder under the slogan of 'Europe of the regions'
55
A nation-state is a nation-state is a nation-state.
The strongest expression of this restless search for new ideas is a lively debate on 'normality'. It is striking how the metaphor of 'normality' and even that of 'growing up' are all over German debates. I will return below to the general usage of these. Of special interest its, however, the most extreme brand of the argument where a previous argument from the voices of the anti-power-state about Sonderweg is re-appropriated by the right wing to become an argument where the low profile is abnormal. Not only is this German lack of political presence stupid and against German self-interest, it is dangerous. The old Sonderweg argument said: for one or two centuries Germany had been on a special track different from West-European normality and this ended in the disasters of World War II. The anti-power-state argument was that a significant gain had been made by breaking afier the war away from this Sonderweg with its anti-democratic tendencies and search for a place between Bast and West (instead of solidly in the West). They therefore demand a constant awareness of this special German deviation in order to repeat the fight against it. Sonderweg for them means the break with Germany's route from at least the 19th Century to 1945. This, the normalizers generalize into the argument: German history has shown that the world is badly served with having German deviation. The current anti-power-state is abnormal and thus dangerous -- a new Sonderweg. 56
At a more philosophical level, a strand has emerged which we might call the neo-statists. This is not about nationalism, rather about rehabitlittatitng the state. Post-war Germans are criticised for being un-political consumer animals without sense for the big questions. Big here means 'big politics', art and action. Thus we see a return of elements of the connection of esthetics and politics central to the power-state: foreign policy as an arena where the great statesman displays his creative will. As contrast to this, Karl Heinz Bohrer paints a picture of the safety searching German tourist who "flees from world politics into a fairytale forest where no one finds us except for the good fairy who announces that world peace has broken out." Our times are seen as dominated by a ban on danger and search for health which signifies a longing for an innocent idyl beyond the big politics. This is a denial of the fact that after the fall of the wall, an extemely political situation has emerged. Kohl understood this in 1989-90 when he captured the initiative and carried unification safely through, but the excessive Europe policy in all leading parties is seen as an expression of attempts to avoid a political construction (Germany) and opt for a utopian "Miteinanders" . 57 In this perspective, increasing regionalization -- an alleged growing power of the Länder -- is yet another sign of provincialism, de-politicization and undermining of the remnants of state still left in the Federal Republic. The anti-provincialism clearly shows the distance between this (intellectual) line and those voices more noticed by the world outside Germany: nationalists who typically celebrate the local against urban, provincialism against cosmopolitanism. The new intellectuals of the right clearly use less 'the nation', and more arguments about the nature of true politics and the idea of the state. 58 They are the ones who explictly attack the anti-power-state and want to repeal the negation involved in this concept.
The neo-statist strand should be noticed even if it is today only visible in very narrow intellectual circles. Its logic is in less explicit form at the core of the above argument in relation to German troops, that a state is a state is a state -- and a great power is a great power is a great power -- and Germany therefore has an obligation to act normal. Theo Sommer, for instance, wrote about the decision of the Bundesverfassungsgericht about 'out of area' that it crowned Germany as 'a state among states'. 59
Also in relation to the discussion about future capital, Bonn versus Berlin, the neo-statist logic was clearly in play. "Will the Bonn republic become a Berlin republic -- and what will this mean?" was the title of the article in Die Zeit on the debate in the Bundestag on June 20, 1991. Berlin carries connotations of unitary state, great power and militarism. This was used by the opponents of Berlin during the debates -- not much by the supporters. After the decision, however, one could see hints by the pro-Berliners arguing on this tune. Frankfurter Allgemeine's editorial on June 22 is an almost too complete illustration. Title: 'A Historic Decision'.
Germany must grow up (!) ... Berlin was a test for what kind of self-understanding the country will follow in the future Germany will take the seat it deserves in Europe., in the alliance, in the World. As a sovereign country, it is now equipped with all the duties and rights of each member of the community of peoples.... With the decision for Berlin., the new Germany has acknowledged that it is time to end the semi-sovereign past and assume the role in the world corresponding to its changed position. The old republic could feel fine with a capital oriented towards low profile and always characterized as provisional.
This neo-statism is generally not very active in re-launching the nation in any far-reaching sense, and is therefore possible to delineate from the different shades of fascism and nazism, although of course complex mixtures can be found too. One illustration should however be given of how the logic of the romantic nation can enter into a neo-statist logic without involving nationalist arguments about Germanicness; this illustration is of special interest for being sanctioned by the constitutional court:
In various contexts an argument has been made against the EU on the basis of democracy. 60 Traditionally, Germans were quite unified itn asking for a strengthening of the European Parliament as a way to strengthen EU democracy. A number of critics have countered that this is not possible because there is no European nation-state and no 'state people'. In a German context this means increasing focus on the importance of there being now a German nation state. Remarkable is it that the argument that a European state people not only is absent now, it can not emerge, now has been sanctioned by the Bundesverfassungsgericht. In the verdict on the compatibility of the EUs Maastricht treaty with the German constitution, the Karlsruhe court explained why Europe can not become a state. After the sensible insistence that this demands a European Offentlichkeit, it is added that Europe can not become a state and a democracy, because there is no state-people. This must imply that 'the people' by definition is the existing nations, and nations are treated as eternal, given basic units -- romantic nationalism sanctioned from the highest court. 61
There is hardly a pressure for change towards the more extreme interpretations of state logic, but the logic is now articulated and barriers against it has been removed. This goes for external barriers as Germany is now unified and sovereign, and it goes for internal ones where a generation of intellectuals and authors who kept up the ideal of the anti-power-state has either died, become harshly attacked or converted. Unification triggered an Intellektuellendebat, where East German writers (Christa Wolf in particular) were attacked for having lived too well as the official critics of the regime, and writers on both sides were said to have celebrated a self-conception of opposition while they really were the priviliged elite and held a distinct function in the reigning order. 'The literary miracle' had been complementary to the economic miracle. The whole elite had been frozen in a fictive role as dissident. 62 Bohrer criticised the post war literature for being "obsessed with a repressive moral paternalism, partly as a reaction to the second world war and Holocaust, which made the authors unable to relate esthetically to art. Instaed the artists became didactic, moralistic and political". 63 A new German political identity should hopefully enable Germany to wind up this moralism and puritanism. Not only can Germany as a nation become politically normal, its literature moves towards esthetic 'normality'.
Why is this of relevance to foreign policy? Because the 'carriers' of the Holocaust nation were the writers. If you ask about national identity in France today, you get an answer quoting statesmen, newspaper commentators, history and philosophy. In the US you probably get a story about the history of the US, and especially the role of ethnic and racial groups. In Germany not many minutes would pass before the answer would involve writers such as Grass, Böll, Lenz, Wolf, Walser and Weiss. They have defined the German self-conception, the German belabouring of history. They felt like a beleagured minority, but really they were intellectually dominant. That much the right wing is right about. Their call for an 'un-political', purely esthetic art, however, can only be partly serious. These persons are intelligent enough to know they are pushing another political role for the writers.
The writers used to uphold the moral obligation for Germany to be against power politics, the obligation to pursue constant self-criticism and moralistic peace politics. The German anti-power-state was held in place by a specific repeated reflection on national history: the Holocaust nation. Now the authors are partly pushed away from this role, partly abdicate freely. Now they are to write literature. But (the idea of) the state is free of its conscience.
Other intellectuals abandoned the role assigned to them more visibly on the political scene. The Gulf war was met in Germany by a certain revival of the peace movement -- much stronger than elsewhere. More remarkably, many of the intellectuals to which the movements might look surprisingly Supported the war: Biermann, Enzensberger, Ditner. 64 Bernhard Giesen has offered a convincing interpretation of this event by placing it in the larger pattern of a hitstory of the intellectuals and the nations and especially by comparing it to developments in the mid-1800s. The leading intellectuals have tired of the programme they fostered themselves but which has been trivialized by the larger movement of 'the demonstrators', these school teachers, social workers and students. They transformed it into rituals and theatrics, trivialized language into all-embracing empty words like peace and life. To continue with this view is incompatible with the role of intellectuals, even if these views used to be their own. 65
The leading group of post-war intellectuals has been significantly weakened. Simultaneously, a line of argumentation has been established for acting more nation state like and more power politically, but this has so far been corfined to a rather limited group of right wing intellectuals. These are no nazis or otherwise extremists. They are respectable conservative thinkers, who carry through a show down with the dominant left- intellectual elite of the post-war period. Thereby, they establish a complete set of principles for possible national(istic) German foreign policy. Politically, these views are marginal -- the dominant policy has a solid hold on things. But it is there.
The neo-statists articulate a position which is extremely logical (even if politically a little meaningless to most) in relation to German political tradition. They capture the point around which German political logic turns, the reversal of the power state logic, and wrench it back to (something that looks like) its original track. That this position is so logical should make us watch it (not only from the prejudice that Germans have a particularly logical way of being illogical, but because the present theory generally claims there are logical patterns to foreign policy in the larger historical pattern). If the existing political main line should break down for one reason or the other, the neo-statitst conservatives have a solid basis for articulating a complete and coherent political self-conception for the Germans.
- Another kind of alternative has gained ground in parallel, and mostly in other circles. Its logical status is at least at first less clear, but it has in contrast to the neo-statists had some effect already. An economic nationalism demands that the government stops being so compliant in internal EU negotiations and starts defending German interest more forcefully. They share with the neo-statists the idea of standing up for German interests and rights, but share with the dominant discourse/elite the strong preferences for European integration. Only, Germany should demand its rights in this EU. The super-European elite is sceptical to this because it fears that cooperation in the EU is actually not solid enough to handle such a Germany, and therefore one continued in eg. the Maastricht negotiations to be those who finally threw in a bag of money and concessions so that an agreement was made possible. There is a strong fear that a more egotistic line -- inadvertently -- could have the same result as the neo-statists want: a more nation-state defined Europe where Germany is relatively isolated in the Centre of the continent. Central but exposed. Having most options, but feared by all and therefore the victim of everybody's envy and of anti-German alliances, the elite says. The economic nationalists agree to the unattractive nature of such a situation but disagree that this is a relevant risk.
In several statements by the Federal Bank, it has been obvious that one acknowledges this political issue. The disagreement is not over economic theories. The bank knows that the government in Maastricht gave priority to political arguments over economic ones. The respect for this is the reason why the Bank especially then was relatively quiet in its critique. The government found it necesssary with clear indications that Germany continued on the European line after unitfication. The economic sceptics believed it would be possible to play one's cards a lot harder without provoking anti-German reactions and upset the whole European pattern. 66
It is well-known that a large part of the population its sceptical to giving up the D-Mark. Most of these people are also pro-EU, and probably most would even give priority to the EU in case of a choice. Implicitly, it is thus assumed that European cooperation is more robust than assumed by the Government. Therefore, one should push harder for Germany's own econoic interests.
In terms of the basic categories of nation and state, the economic argument is not very interested in the state, nor in the nation in a cultural sense. But there obviously is a 'we' involved in the argument. 'We' have interests that are opposed to those of other EU member countries, and we are not currently represented politically, but exist nevertheless. There is an element of displaced romantic nation logic at play. The nation exists as a collectivity of economic individuals with a shared fate -- within a large European economic unit as 'Germans', or more seperately with its own state. In either case, there is such a thing as German collective or shared economic interests.
The super-Europeans in contrast find it necessary to let Europeanization hit deeper in Germany, to almost dissolve Germany in order to colour it European all the way through.
- For the sake of thoroughness, a third line should be mentioned although it is unlikely to be of major political importance. We can call it pacifist, even if not all supporters will be pacifists in the technical sense. It is a variation on the dominant line since it draws on the anti-power-state tradition, but it does so in a radical way. First of all it interprets German historical obligations in relation to military and high politics issues very rigidly: it is decisive that Germany remains totally abstinent. Any minor deviation is painted as already all the way to aggressive and militarist power politics.
This is the post-war tradition coloured by the peace movement experiences of the 1980s and materialized in the Greens and relatively strongly in the Social democrats, and even with some reaches into CDU and FDP. The result has often been that Kohl conducts his policy by balancing between on the one hand these views and on the other the semi-nationalist forces in his own party. It is difficult to see how the pacifist line should 'come to power', how it could manoever Germany internationally from these principles, but it is definitely a part of the German political equation.
- The hyper-European line of Kohl therefore continued. It implies a non-dogmatic continuation of the principle of Germany not being a power-state, not celebrating things national excessively, and not changing its foreign policy because of unification. Kohl and Genscher opted strongly for leading unified Germany yet further into EUropean integration. "We stand unconditionally by the connnection we made from the start between German unity and our clear obligations and involvement for European Union" 67 . Kohl often declared and declares that he wants to unify Germany as well as Europe. That he probably personally is a true European and thus loyal to Europe as such, is less relevant here, where we concentrate on the arguments he make to Germans in their capacity as Germans. Here he has a consistent argument why this is best for Germany. In the current elite there is a strong fear that Germany could again become a danger to others and thereby itself if left alone in the centre of Europe. The jealousy and insecurity of others can lead to anti-German alliance policy and Germany should therfore hurry and get tied in time before a new generation arrives in Bonn or rather Berlin who has a different historical understanding, and therefore thoughtlessly pushes for German interests, and triggger these dangerous anti-German mechanisms. The dominant group in Bonn therefore drew the lesson of unification that integration was more important than ever. 68
[An important part of analysis not conducted yet is to explore the inner tensions within the establishment and especially within the CDU. The Kohl government has some ambiguity in some how letting economic nationalism continue to have a voice within or close to the government. 69 Even more interesting, Schauble has in books and speeches mobilized conservative values regarding politics and state and it must be investigated how this influence his concept of Europe: openly, programmatically and implicitly.]
Many dilemmas in German politics are only possible to solve when Germany is no longer Germany, but rather a region of Europe. Even the problem of German troops 'out of area', it has been hinted, could find its most complete solution in a European context. In a more integrated Europe, Germans can participate in operations, because they do it not as Germans but as Europeans. The Kohl people find it difficult to imagine a German solution, hard to imagine a location of Germany that does not ultimately trigger the known patterns of suspicion. Therefore, they see the solution for Germany in Europe in a very far reaching sense. In the context of the discussion over the capital, Bonn/Berlin, this lead to the quite saying accusation that Kohl "in the long run does not want to move to a renewed Berlin but to Brussels" 70 .
The proponents of the anti-power-state have made their strategy even more dependent on the EU in recent years. The dominant line (4) is still the anti-power-state which is occassionally combined with elements of romantic nation. As intellectual back-drop it has the Holocaust nation even if it centre-right users prefer to avoid too strong doses of this. A Europe policy follows from this that strives for Germans to do a lot in Europe, but not as Germany. But the effects of state/nation on Europe is only half the picture. Equally important is to notice how dependent this whole narrative is on Europe. It is not a view of the German state and nation that rests in itself as a story about what Germany is and where it goes irrespective of Europe, a story that then as something derived supports a specific Europe policy. This vision for Germany is such a powerful one only when it includes this Europe policy -- without it would be unable to resolve a number of central dilemmas.
Currently, the continued low profile, anti-power-state line is by far the one that most easily makes sense on a German scene. The neo-statist one has found a foot hold. It is not a real challenger but it is present. Should the Kohl line fall, the neo-statist is the most likely replacement. First of all because it is hard to see why the dominant line should fall if not because Europe failed, in which case number 2 and 3 become impossible too.
Now it must be time to bring in the complete graphic depiction of German discourse which has been present in the text for a while. Figure 4 shows where the four competing lines are located in the larger landscape of possible positions. It should be noticed that the two major parties both stand -- at least their leading voices -- on the same box in terms of tier 2 options (this in stark contrast to France, see next section). Also the position that is politically the third strongest -- economic nationalism -- depends on European integration. It is willing to place harder burdens on it, but its entire argument rests on a continuation of integration, even an allegedly very robust one. The neo-statists are noticeable for being the only clearly articulate position that stand on the other side of the big dividing line that could be drawn down through the figure. To the left, all positions are based on a balance of power Europe with each state acting for itself in the classical sense. This both underscores the marginality of this position in the current sitution, and it has the surprising effect that in case European integration fails in a major way (or changes in a way which makes it impossible to project the German visions and ambitions on to it), the only existing line still able to make sense politically will be the neo-statists.
German thinking about state, nation and Europe is tied together in narratives where the dominant one solves problems for state and nation by having quite ambitious visions for Europe. The population is not necessarily in support of these views on Europe taken in isolation 71 , but the ambitious Europe policy is still consensus carrying because the German self-conception hinges on it. The explanation of what the German state and nation is today is dependent on a specific concept of Europe, and on European integration seeming to actually happen. (This disjuncture between the level of personal beliefs and discursive logic at the collective level explains why so many observers err in assuming all German parties will slide towards the more Euro-sceptical where the voters are. These arguments overlook that the leading German parties are only able to talk sense when they project [and therefore also support] far-reaching integration, and only by changing not a little but very far can a new logic be picked up, one that is radically different from that of all leading parties.) There has to be a European integration and one that to some extent points in the direction Germans talk about.
The wide-spread opposition to European integration -- especially around the Maastricht ratification -- made Germans wonder: why are we Germans the only ones accepting the offer of binding Germany? If the perception of European integration becomes one of failure or standstill, the Germans will be in a vacuum with no frame within which to think Germany in the way we have gotten used to in the last 40 years.
6. The necessity of making sense: on the nature of foreign policy shifts
The stability of peace-settlements and other international orders depends on not putting the 'loser' in too degraded a position. At this point, more than forty-five years after the war, the losers of the war, Germany and Japan, have won the peace. The problem for the peace settlement will be whether it is acceptable to the losers of the post-war peace, France and Russia, who will see a relatively high and privileged position decrease unless they can find new channels for what they deem meaningful to their nation, state, politics and security. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, in his 1954 dissertation on Europe after the Napoleonic wars, a state may not be treated only from the outside as a factor in the balance -- an arrangement is only stable if all major powers can perceive the new order as compatible with its own vision:
No power will submit to a settlement., however well-balanced and however 'secure', which seems totally to deny its vision of itself. 72
A crucial precondition for stability is that the key powers continue to pursue Europe projects that are compatible. This does not mean that they have to agree on a concept of Europe or of the EU. It is a common but unfortunate bias in most literature on international cooperation (and even presumed in the concept of 'fusion' of national foreign policies?) that somehow step no.1 has to be that countries (or whatever the parties are) agree on defining the situation analogously, then they might disagree over aims and choices, struggle over these and at best reach a compromise somewhere between their ideal positions. If the parties disagree about what it is all about, what the purpose of an institution is, etc. -- this is normally assumed to make cooperation uniikely and if achieved unstable (cf the argument for instance about superpower detente in the 1970s that floundered due to diverging concepts of detente). In the present case, cooperation and stability is predicated on the conceptions being different but compatible. Should France and Germany come to think in identical terms about what is valuable, what is a nation/state, what is Europe, they would be likely to end up in a conflictual relationship; there is hardly room for two Frances or two FRGS on the continent. By concentrating on different dimensions of Europe -- linked to different ways for nations to realize themselves -- the parallel unfolding of competing Europes becomes a possibility. But not guaranteed.
Especially for a major power, the overall foreign policy line must be explainable as to where this leaves 'us': what kind of future for 'France' / 'Germany' / 'Russia' in what kind of Europe. This is not a static challenge in the sense that there is one fixed idea of say France. But there are some basic core meanings (the state-nation) that can only be related to Europe in a limited number of ways, and thus one can construct several different Europe policies that are meaningful in a French political context -- but not just any Europe policy. Several policies that would seem perfectly logical from a Finnish perspective -- or from the perspective of some abstract theory of 'state interests' -- can be very difficult to present in the French political language. Thus, there are several articulations possible of the basic ideas, and good statesmanship will try to find ways to articulate the nation/state that result in Europe policies that also leave room for the other major nation/states (and their Europes). This was the case in Europe immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 73 Especially Germany -- who had potentially much to win, but also a lot to lose if others turned against it -- was active in building the French and the Russian Europe (and the Americans by playing with and not again unification secured some place for the Atlantic Europe) and thus we arrived at the relatively successful 'grand bargain' of 1990. Europe to the French meant strengthening of a France-like EU, to the Russians it meant securing some all-European framework that defined Russia as within Europe, and to the Germans Europe meant allowing interactions, societies and economies to re-connect across old divisions. In 1990 it was possible to give Europe a direction of development where all of the Europe projects could unfold simultaneously. They are competitors, but not incompatible -- and thereby all major powers were able to imagine themselves in the Europe promised.
An important focus is the different constellations of Europe and state/nation 'self'.Therefore, "the struggle for Europe begins with a struggle inside each nation" 74 . The main question for the future of Europe, for stability and peaceful change, is now not directly the relations among the major powers, but the inner struggles over national identity/Europe projects in France, Germany and Russia. In each country strong competitors have emerged to the project that functioned in the comprehensive quid pro quo of 1990.
An analysis like the present (discourse analysis) is able to explain even grand designs, i.e. that which is often ignored or problematic in a Foreign Policy Analysis tradition which focuses on decisions seen as reactions to specific stimuli. 75 Articulating a vision for Europe (and thereby a vision for nation and state) is politically meaningful partly because it is about achieving these aims, but setting the aim is also in itself necessary for domestic stabilization of an overall policy concept. For most major states a policy is not stable if it is not able to answer questions about, so to say, the meaning of life: who are we (we Germans, e.g.), where are we going (building Europe/becoming the most powerful nation state in Europe/winning economically in stead of old fashioned state politics/...). Several very different answers are possible, but some answers are almost totally excluded since they go against the whole national repertoire of political key terms and connotations. And a non-answer is unlikely too. This is the cause of proactive policy, or nonlinear reactions. If one line breaks down, at least for a medium or major power it is likely that one will not just live with the ensuing vacuum, but the question about the meaning of and future for the nation/state will generate a new concept that can lead to discontinuous developments in foreign policy. The alternative to a continuation of Mitterrand's Europe policy is not necessarily something a bit different, but more likely something radically different. These different policies will set aims far on the horizon and not necessarily close to the place where Mitterrand had his eyes fixed, and the specific new policy line might be difficult to explain on the basis of contemporary 'input'. It will be a creative act from a French foreign policy leadership trying to shape a world, internally and externally, that is France-compatible. With increasing tensions both on the internal side -- making the new Europeanized France compatible with basic traditions of French statehood (discussions on banalization, regionalization etc) -- and on the external side (are we binding Germany or rather binding ourself?), there are increasing room for alternative stories. If implemented they would demand radical change on either side -- in France, in Europe or both. It is increasingly questioned whether the existing France and the evolving Europe are immediately compatible, or whether a new compatibility must be created by statesmanship on either the internal or external arena.
European stability requires two kinds of compatibility: that it is in each of the major countries possible to construct a narrative of state, nation and Europe that makes sense in relation to the national tradition of political thought -- and then when we in this way get Europe in the plural, that these different Europes are politically compatible, that it is possible for instance a French integration project, German border-penetrating networks and Russian all-European structures to unfold at the same time (fig. 5). Then it is quite OK that eg. the German version of creating a 'vision of itself' - with low political profile, emphasizing economy, and downgrading of borders -- is seen as mildly ridiculous in France. Possibly, it is even a condition for European stability, that the major powers think differently about Europe. If they all thought in the same logic -- and eg. wanted a French kind of role -- there might not be room for all of them! It is a general predisposition of political scientists/IR to think that the condition for cooperation and institution building is that the different parties agree and come to define concepts identically (cf the story about the demise of superpower detente due to conflicting definitions), but probably there are important cases, where the condition is the opposite: they pursue policies that are compatible (and for instance agree on building an institution), but the story that sustains this policy is very different in one country and the other.
To judge how stable this constellation is, one has to enter into the different constructions as they look so to say from the inside. This is of course a quite demanding task, and we will therefore in this book be able to look at only the two most important countries, France and Germany. This leads amongst other things to the somewhat surprising conclusion that Europe does not first of all have a German problem, but a French problem.
Germany after the cold war has witnessed an increasing presence of alternative lines, of more nationalist suggestions for a more German, less European policy, but basically the very Europe oriented version of what Germany is, where Germany is going, and thereby what German 'interests' are, have kept its solid hold on the political elite. This, however, has one important precondition for continuing to function as the framework for German self-realization - that the European integration project actually continues. This line is often presented as drawing more on Western (Anglo-American and French) ideas and less on 'German' traditions, but the way it is articulated has an equally strong element on drawing on the 'typical German' idea of the strong state, only inverting it, holding power concentration in the state as a danger, not (as in the 19th and early 20th Century) as the way to pursue.
Not only external barriers against German self-assertion have broken down with unification, also some internal ones have been removed because a change has happened on the intellectual arena, where a whole generation of intellectuals insisting on what could be called 'the anti-power state' has been largely out-manoevred or abdicated. On the intellectual scene, one should also note the articulation of a position which is still rather marginal, but has gained respectability as a rightist intellectual position: a strangely formalist argument saying a state is a state is a state, and Germany has to play according to its power position -- not because there are specific German interests or gains to be pursued, but because it is the only natural thing to do, and Germany has already once in this century taken its own special track (Sonderweg), now it has an obligation to become a normal state, which entails also following the abstract logic of state and power. This is not linked strongly to ethnic nationalism, and thus quite different from the extremist rightwing. This position should be noticed first of all because it has a strong logic to it. Now it has not very much attraction, but this is first of all because the elite has been able to keep up its story about where Germany is going, one based on European integration. But this only works if there is some relatively successful European integration to point to. As indicated in figure 6, a model of the deep discursive structure of German thinking about state, nation and Europe, shows how the main struggles that take up most of the attention and creates worries about German orientation actually happens among two versions of the same position at the second level: between semi-pacifist Germans and social democrats who want a continuation of total abstensionism and the present government which also emphasizes integration as the rationale for Germany, but is interested in gradually taking on more 'normal tasks'. The most visible challenger outside this branch is the economic nationalism wanting to defend the D-mark. Also it builds on European integration, but just claims that it is so much more robust that German can actually be more selfish without risking dramatic effects on the EU as such. Only if the EU breaks down will the situation change radically -- then all of the positions in the right-hand half of the figure drops out, and the only serious candidate is the neo-statist position of "we have to act as a great power because we are one".
7. The French Problem
In the case of France, it is even more clear what the basic logical options are (see figure 1). There is a very distinct French concept of the state-nation saying first of all that state and nation are mutually defining and then furthermore hints at the patrie and at an external role for the state. (In the German case state and nation are two separate ideas, and level 2 therefore becomes more of a combinatorics of the typical state idea and the typical nation idea.) This state-nation can relate to Europe in three ways:
- externally with Europe as the scene on which France acts,
- through a doubling where Europe is created as a larger France which takes on the tasks and ideals of France because France has become to small to project its universal values itself (Mitterrand), and
- to execute the typical French state-nation operation on Europe as such, ie. to create a Europe that is French in its form, but not with a distinct France in it.
What is remarkable about French politics - in contrast to German - is that the three main competing rationales for French foreign (and domestic) politics represent each of the three level 2 positions. Whereas Mitterrand 10 years ago had a solid consensus around his position of the doubling of France as EU, and therefore transferring state-qualities to Europe, there has been increasing problems and challenges, and especially in the 1992 Maastricht referendum and less in the 1995 Presidential election, ideas of more strict Gaullist derivation were present as the main challenger (much stronger than the federalist alternative represented by Giscard d'Estaing). Chirac is ruling on a coalition that mixes Mitterrand continuation with strong elements of a line closer to French independence, for instance with state-based alliance politics with and against Germany. Various internal as well as external problems have made the 'Mitterrand line' more and more difficult to present convincingly, and therefore a meaning vacuum threatens in France. Up to the EU's 1996 Inter Governmental Conference, France who normally represents 'the vision thing' has found it unusually difficult to come with any concept for Europe.
In France the concept of state-nation is at play domestically for instance in debates on regionalism/decentralization and on the role of a constitutional court and at the same time in the foreign policy debates especially on the question of Europe -- and the two levels are closely interrelated. What is at stake is competing projects for the future meaning of 'France', the interpretation to be given to the typical French 'revolutionary' idea of the Etat-nation. There are competing lines in France and their fate is intertwined with European developments. Since 1983 Mitterrand has attempted to save the classical idea of the Etat-nation by 'lifting' it to the European level, doubling France in the form of the EC, but he has thereby created internal tensions in the concept since State and nation go together in French, and he therefore had to lift not only the state but also the nation, and what happens then to the 'fatherland', patrie, is it lifted too, or is it divorced from the nation? The latter has wide-ranging implications for the meaning of the state as well as for the meaning of patrie. Competing lines want to either return to a more classical gaullist application of the French state-nation only to France and thereby a less ambitious project for the EU, or to take a step further towards the European construction -- still in some sense inherently French in its mode of constructing Europe but yield more central elements of the classical conception of France including centralization (repression of regionalism). Either shift would demand a thorough re-articulation of a range of key-concepts and thereby resonate far into a number of societal issues as well as Europe wide ones. 'Europe' is not a separate question of 'Europe policy'. A Europe policy is a discourse on France in which Europe is given a specific place (thereby transforming the meaning of France). The alternative to this is another discourse on France with a different France and a different place for Europe or alternatively a third France with much less Europe.
Those who assume that 'talk is cheap' will say, you can always come up with a narrative for France. If, in contrast, one believes there is structure to language and that a large part of politics is about structuring the national conceptual landscape, options are not so abundant. For France there are the three basic structural routes, and each of these can be given different concrete policy formulations. But there are so many policies (for instance most of the roles allocated to France in American plans for Europe) that are completely unrealistic. Even if the resources of France are actually so that most of the grand visions are hard to carry through, it is more likely that the winning line will either be a self-defeating grand policy or eventually the far-reaching federalism that at least takes a French political form, rather than an un-heroic, Anglified policy without any vision for France and for Europe.
Our studies of the domestic debates in France and Germany have led to the interpretation, that Germany after the cold war has witnessed an increasing presence of alternative lines, of more nationalist suggestions for a more German, less European policy, but basically the very Europe oriented version of what Germany is, where Germany is going, and thereby what German 'interests' are, have kept its solid hold on the political elite. This, however, has one important precondition for continuing to function as the framework for German self-realization -- that the European integration project actually continues.
What evolved out of the mega-bargain was -- especially as the Franco-German deal -- a project with the EU as the core. This had different meaning to France and Germany (and Russia), but to all it seemed a wise approach that left room for their Europe to emerge. In this sense the crisis for Maastricht integration and the domestic identity crises of France and Germany are interrelated. Furthermore, the fact that the output of the concert was integration pushes a problem towards the centre of the international agenda: how does an increasingly centred, hegemonic EU based order relate to the concert out of which it is born? 76
The inner stability of a cooperative, parallel realization of the different Europes, has already been broken on the Russian side, and it is more and more likely that Russia slides out of the bargain to a mixture of confrontation and cooperation. In Germany an alternative story is available, but it is not able to break the hold of the dominant one -- nor is there any need for this, because the dominant one continues to produce a convincing vision for Germany's future. But France is the weak point of the European scene -- the Europe oriented self-interpretation of France is challenged. And if France turns away from this line, Germany's overall concept of Europe and thereby of itself will loose its rationale. Then the alternative narratives in Germany will suddenly have the chance of filling a vacuum, and German 'interests' and 'orientations' could change drastically. This interaction of domestic struggles over the meaning of state, nation and Europe, is where the direction of developments will be decided. The regional identity 'Europe' clearly has become more important and today plays a key role in self-conceptions. Its meaning is not settled once and for all, but of the concepts of state and nation that compete, most are thoroughly Europeanized. National and state identities have not been replaced by 'European identity', but it is impossible to analyse European affairs in terms of German and French interests or identities if their dependence on the category of Europe is not included. Thereby the internal struggles over identity in the two countries have become dependent on each other. Mostly this has served to reinforce the most pro-European of competitors. If several lines in Germany are possible, the one that is France-compatible will have an advantage. But if one of the countries breaks away from ambitious European integration, the other will almost be forced along. At present this means that although most people tend to think a German problem is worse to have than a French problem, a German problem is unlikely to re-appear in any other way than via a French one. This ought to cause critical self-reflections among most American experts on European affairs who seem little inclined to do much to make France comfortable in the new Europe. If a German problem is a cause for worry, there is reason to take French vulnerabilities serious.
Many of the quotes are unofficially translated from German, several via a translation to Danish. They will therefore have to be checked against the original once again. Therefore: please be careful about 'quote quoting' from this paper!
Note *: Paper presented November 6, 1996, at University of California at Berkeley, Institute of International Studies in its International Relations Colloquium and co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies as part of its colloquium series on "Germany's New Role in International Relations."
This paper is based on the manuscript for The Struggle for 'Europe': French and German Concepts of State, Nation and European Union by Ole Wæver, Ulla Holm and Henrik Larsen, in preparation. Should any readers be interested in seeing a more elaborate version of the theory chapter, there is now an October 1996 draft of chapters I.A., I.B. and I.C. It will probably be printed as a working paper by the Center for German and European Studies, as will a later version of the present paper. It was not my intention when I left for the US to produce an updated version of my Germany analysis (which then existed only in Danish) but as the theory chapter has now been revised, it seemed natural to revisit the German part of the analysis What follows is therefore not as well documented in the empirical part and as fully illustrated by recent quotes as I could wish
I am most interested in comments both on the theoretical part and on the interpretation of Germany.
Outline for the whole book:
French and German Concepts of State, Nation and European Union
Ole Wæver, Ulla Holm, Henrik Larsen
I. Introduction
A. Executive Summary
B. Theory and Methodology
C. Structure of the Book
II. State and Nation: Systems of Political Discourse
A. France
B. Germany
C. German-French Comparison
III. Europe: Systems of Political Discourse
A. France: European Integration and/or French Independence
B. Germany: European Forever?
C. Europe and Europe
IV. After the Wall: Diplomatic Manoeuvreing and Interactions
A. Systems under pressure
B. French Reactions
C. German Reactions
V. Future Europes in France and Germany
A. In France
B. In Germany
C. The Future(s) of Europe
VI. Europe after the Cold War: Challenges and Discursive Structures, 1990-1996
A. Main events: French and German Positions
B. Close reading of two key parliamentary debates
C. German policy: explanation and anomalies according to existing theories
D. French policy: explanation and anomalies according to existing theories
E. Kohl and Chirac: too inconsistent for discourse analysis?
F. Trends among competing discourses: a formalized investigation
VII. Conclusion: Changes, Convergence and Conflicts to Come
Note **:
Ole Wæver, current address:
University of California at Berkeley
Department of Political Science
210 Barrows Hall, #1950; Berkeley
California 94720-1950; USA
Phone: (510) 643-1732; Fax: (510) 642-9515
e-mail: after March 1, 1997:
olew@dk-online.dk
Note 1: "An American Social Science: ..." in Dædalus -- and/or autobiography in Rosenau book? Back.
Note 2:
"Power and Interdependence Revisited," International Organization, vol.41/4, 1987, pp.725-753; see especially pp. See also Joseph Nye, "Neorealism and Neoliberalism", in World Politics, vol. XL:2, January 1988, pp.235-251, espec. pp.
The main candidate these days for a successful, structured theory including domestic as well as international factors is probably 'two level games'. A brief discussion and comparison with the discourse analysis approach is included in chapter lB of Wæver, HoIm & Larsen, The Struggle for 'Europe': French and German concepts of state, nation and European Union.Back.
Note 3: Ole Wæver, "The Language of Foreign Policy" (Review Essay on Carlsnaes, Ideology and Foreign Policy), Journal of Peace Research, vol.27/3., 1990, pp.335-343; O.Wæver, 'Thinking and Rethinking in Foreign Policy' (Review Essay on Goldmann, Change and Stability in Foreign Policy), Cooperation and Conflict, vol.25/ ,1990., pp. 153-170; 0. Wæver, 'Resisting the temptation of post foreign policy analysis' in Carlsnaes & Smith (eds.) European Foreign Policy, (London: Sage 1994), pp.238-73; 0. Wæver, 'Two Level Games meet Structure-Agency' forthcoming. Back.
Note 4: Robert Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory, Westview Press 1989, p.30. Back.
Note 5: One possible further usage is to combine a structured 'minimalist' conception of the international level (like a neo-realist one) with a parallel construction of some minimum structures at the domestic level that are sufficiently stable to tell a few., but highly important things about the possible policies of a state. (The present book is not predicated on this dual construction -- the reader can accept the structural-discursive model of foreign policy analysis with or without the idea for pairing it with international structure.) For an exposition of the minimalist version of neorealism., see Kenneth N.Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1979); for an application of a working, minimalist neorealism., see Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup, Pierre Lemaitre, Elzbieta Tromer & Ole Wæver, The European Security Order Recast: Scenarios for the post-Cold War era, (London: Pinter 1990); for an elaboration of the implications and basis of 'minimalism' in neo-realism and neo-liberalism, see Ole Wæver, Introduktion til Studiet af International Politik ('Introduction to the Study of International Relations'), (Copenhagen: Politiske Studier 1992), pp. 157f. and 'The Rise and Fall of the Inter-paradigm Debate', in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, pp.149-85. For the combination, see 'Resisting ...', op.cit., and 'Two-Level Games ...', op.cit. Back.
Note 7: As argued by Kuhn, the criteria of science is not that it puts up testable hypotheses (even medieval astrology did), nor that the theory itself is put at disposal in the case of failure of the test (theory never is, unless a general crisis is in play), but hypotheses should be derived from theory in a sufficiently close manner, that failure creates puzzles, which foster further work on data or theory; cf pp.8-10 in Thomas Kuhn, 'Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research', in Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970), pp.1-24. Back.
Note 8: Lene Hansen & Ole Wæver (eds.) Between Nation and Europe, forthcoming (1998?). Back.
Note 9: At some point in the process we considered adding two more concepts: 'security' and the general mode of conceptualizing 'international relations'. This probably could be assimilated into a coherent whole since these will partly reflect general modes of thinking politics, but there will also be numerous particularities, and we decided it would become too loosely attached. Renrik Larsen, however, picked up this idea in his Ph.D. to be published as Foreign Policy and Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge, which explores (for Britain and France) exactly: state/nation, Europe, security and international relations. The two last do not become part of the basic generative models, and thus his investigation seems to confirm the case for treating state/nation and Europe as primary. Back.
Note 10: Anthony Smith, for instance, has argued that European identity is unlikely, because Europe does not have a sufficient arsenal of common myths and symbols; "National identity and the idea of European unity" in International Affairs, vol.68:1, Jan.1992, pp.55-76. Back.
Note 11: Iver B. Neumann has pointed out how this stress on complex differences together with an emphasis on internally contested identities differentiate what he calls 'the Copenhagen coterie' (of which The Struggle is probably the main exemplar) from most other post-structuralist works on self/other relations and identity in general; "Collective Identity Formation: Self and Other in International Relations" in European Journal of International Relations, vol.2:2, 1996, pp. Back.
Note 12: For the finer nuances of this slide in the most elaborate work, David Campbell's Writing Security, see section 7 of ch. lB in The Struggle, op.cit. Back.
Note 13: Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, New York: Philosophical Library 1959; these lectures of 1906-11 were published post-humously in 1916. Back.
Note 14: Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Pantheon 1972); Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1982; Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge: CUP 1995(?), [p.62 in Swedish version]. Back.
Note 15: Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Pantheon 1972), p.49. Back.
Note 17: John G. Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neo-Realist Synthesis", in World Politics, vol.36/2 (1983). Back.
Note 18: Cf Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso 1985 (?), chapters 3 and 4. Back.
Note 19: A hierarchy of depth over surface definitely exists in many structuralisms and is related to the fact that the code is seen as constant, only to be transformed in correspondence to its own rules of transformation., and the relationship between code and manifestation is seen as one of perfect correspondence (or isotopy), and thus these structuralisms contained assumptions about stable, self-present meaning which is -- as argued above -- drastically subverted by various forms of post-structuralism. Generally structuralism can be seen as a science of the sign and post-structuralism as a critique of the sign. Structuralism operates on the basis of an optimism regarding the possibility of finding the codes and mechanisms that actually produce the manifestations we meet, whereas post-structuralism work from the attitude that meaning is always precarious, transient and self-contradicting. Post-structuralism is, however, not (as often implied in American playful post-modernisms) a negation of structuralism -- it is post-structuralism because it has grown from and through structuralism. Thus, the present study will balance on a line between structuralism and poststructuralism in that it attempts to use methods and ideas of structuralism but with a general attitude to language that is closer to post-structuralism. The various mechanisms of meaning generation analysed by structuralists can be registered but they will never be seen as full, complete or self-confirming. Meaning is always an attempt, a process, a move that temporarily counters the indeterminacy of signification. The present concept of discourse is therefore simultaneously process and structure, realization and precondition. Back.
Note 20: Streuver, op.cit., pp.250f. Back.
Note 21: Kjell Goldmann, Change and Stability in Foreign Policy: The Problems and Possibilities of Detente, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988), pp.5-13. Back.
Note 22: John G. Ruggie, 'Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Towards a Neorealist Synthesis (Review Essay on Waltz, Theory of International Politics)' in World Politics, vol.35/2, 1983, pp.261-285; quotations from pp. 266,280). Back.
Note 23: This specific interpretation of France is the work of Ulla Holm, cf. her Det Franske Europa, Arhus: Arhus Universitetsforlag 1993; and the chapters on France in The Struggle for 'Europe'. Back.
Note 24: This option is not included in the figure because it is not a relevant option today. Nor is non-relationship included, as we -- maybe slightly less safely -- project that this is impossible today as well. This question will be addressed in the text. Back.
Note 25: This reiterates the point that the first level is not just 'root' in the sense of a unity, stable and given by itself; always implicit in it (the state-nation fusion) is a narrative and image of its 'relevant other' which in the case of France (as most often) is the previous period. Alternatively, it can be a more or less real period seen as particularly disastrous -- as in the case of Russia "The Time of Troubles" (17th Century) which gives to the central level-1 concept of Russia, 'stateness' ( ) a central meaning of non-anarchy (cf. Neumann op.cit. ??). The two level 1 boxes of -- in the case of France -- state-nation fusion and regionalization -- make up a mutually constitutive contrast. This, however, does not mean that if this constellation should be transcended (to the mysterious 'third', the "?"), one would necessarily achieve something that would in all respects be different from the two historically known options; it would most likely carry over the present (the closely fused state-nation) as its relevant other, and then the new would be the in this way related to the present; it just does not negate the present along the axis where the two previous periods (state-nation and regionalization) had negated each other. When no second and third level is added for the possible new positions at the first level this is simply because the situation would be so radically different, that speculating about possible actualizations would be too hazardous. Back.
Note 26: Studies of specific states and their foreign policies are starting to emerge along lines more or less similar to the here outlined: France: Holm, Det Franske Europe (The French Europe), Arhus: Arhus Universitetsforlag 1992, Holm, "The French Garden is not what it used to be" forthcoming in Knud-Erik Jorgensen, Reflective Approaches to European Governance (London: Macmillan), more fully developed in Wæver, HoIm, Larsen, The Struggle, op.cit.; Germany: Wæver 'Det tyske problem i l99Oerne' (The German Problem in the 1990s), in "Internasjonal Politikk (Oslo), 1991/4, pp.401-419 and 'Hvordan det hele alligevel kan ga gat ...' in Henning Gottlieb and Frede P. Jensen (eds.) Tyskland i Europa (Copenhagen SNU 1995) pp.297-336 -- more fully developed below and in The Struggle; Russia: Iver B. Neumann, Russian Debates about Europe, 1800-1991, M. Phil at Oxford 1992, published as Russia and the Idea of Europe, Routledge 1996; Turkey: Isil Kazan, Omvendt Osmannisme og Khanaternes Kemalisme, MA-thesis, Copenhagen 1994, under publication, and Isil Kazan and Ole Wæver, 'Tyrkiet mellem Europa og europaeisering' in Internasjonal Politikk, vol.52:1(1994); Finland: Pertti Joenniemi, "Euro-Suomi: rajalla, rajojen, valissa vai rajaton?" in Pertti Joenniemi, Risto Alapuro and Kyosti Pekonen, Suomesta Euro-Suomen: Keita me olemme ja mihin matkalla, (Tampere: Occasional Papers of Tampere Peace Research Institute, No.53, 1993) pp.13-48; U.K.: Henrik Larsen, Foreign Policy and Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge forthcoming (based on Ph.D. from LSE); Egypt and India: Sanjoy Banerjee "National Identity and Foreign Policy", ?unpublished; Slovenia: Lene Hansen "Nation Building on the Balkan Border", forthcoming in Alternatives; Greece: Helle Stauersboll., MA in prepar'ation; the Nordic Countries, Between Nations and Europe: The political construction of 'Norden' in Finland, Norway Sweden and Denmark, ed. by Lene Hansen & Ole Wæver, forthcoming; ++ Austria; ++ Dietz; Algeria: Ulla Holm in preparation; USA: Ole Wæver - at a very early stage! Back.
Note 27: Jeffrey J. Anderson and John B. Goodman conclude in a book which is otherwise predicated on an instrumental view of institutions that in the case of Germany, "there is more to German participation in international institutions than instrumentalism". The institutions remained an essential part of 'the reason of state'. Germany has advanced firther than others "in leaving behind nineteenth-century principles of national sovereignty and national interests". Consequently: "the fundamental German bargaining position during this period belies the image of a sovereign actor seeking to impose its will on other participants. For if Germany were to realize its vision of Europe, it would emerge as a consequential but semi-sovereign member of a supranational authority"; "Mars or Minerva? A United Germany in a Post-Cold War Europe", pp.23-62 in Robert 0. Keohane., Joseph S. Nye and Stanley Hoffmann (eds.) After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989-91, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1993, quotes from pp.60, 56 and 61f. Although I filly agree with this interpretation, it will be clear below that I can not accept this as a German peculiarity placed on the back cloth of a 'normality' where states pursue instrumental strategies of no impact on their identity and thus on the aims of strategies. France in a different way has also become dependent on international level developments and visions which transforms the meaning of France. But surely it is easier to see this in the case of Germany., cf. Timothy Garton Ash., In Europe's Name . .. Back.
Note 28: On German and Non-German views of German foreign policy., see Gunther Hellmann's thought-provoking reflections in "Goodbye Bismarck? The Foreign Policy of Contemporary Germany" in Mershon International Studies Review, vol. 40: Supplement 1, April 1996, pp.1-40, in particular pp. 26f. Back.
Note 29: For the origins of this policy., see Beverly Crawford., "Explaining Defection from International Cooperation: Germany's Unilateral Recognition of Croatia", World Politics, vol.48:4., July 1996., pp.482-521. Back.
Note 30: Quoted in FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, February 8,1992. People like Jurgen Habermas in Germany warn that such 'normalization' of Germany does not necessarily stop where one wants it to., but frees the way for an unbinding of Germany's ties, including those to the West. Shortsightedly, one wants Germany freed in order to have its assistance, but in reality removes it from the Westbindung. Cf. Per Ohrgaard, "Er Tyskland i Skred", Udenrigs, 1993/1. Back.
Note 31: This frustration probably explains the uncharacteristic, almost threatening remark of then President von Weizsakcer: "We would soon see that the world really does not want to rediscover how good soldiers the Germans can be", interview in Die Zeit, February 8,1991. Back.
Note 32: An excellent overview is given in Peter V. Jakobsen, EC Great Power Disagreement over Policy vis-a-vis the Wars in Croatia and Slovenia: Causes and Implications for the Future Stability in CSCE-Europe, speciale i Statskundskab, Arhus Universitet, 1993, s. 58-68, and "Myth-making and Germany's Unilateral Recognition of Croatia and Slovenia", European Security, vol.4:3, Autumn 1995, pp.400-16. See also Crawford, op.cit. Back.
Note 33: William Horsley, "United Germany's Seven Cardinal Sins: A Critique of German Foreign Policy" in Millennium, vol. 21, nr.2, 1992, s.225-241, quoting from p.240. (re-translation from Danish --check original!) Back.
Note 34: About Germany as 'leader'., who creates common EU policy, see especially Michael Brenner, "The EC in Yugoslavia: A Debut Performance", in Security Studies, vol.1/4, 1992, pp.586-608; more generally as status on German and French policy on Yugoslavia, see Martin Rosefeldt, "Deutschlands und Frankreichs Jugoslawienpolitik im Rahmen der Europaischen Gemeinschaft (1991-1993)" in Sudosteuropa, vol.42:11-12, 1993, pp.621-653. Back.
Note 35: to be documented Back.
Note 36: See eg. Die Zeit, Sept.16 and 23, 1994, Le Monde, Sept.24, 1994. The interview (30 Aug.) with Edouard Balladur is reprinted (in German) in Europa Archiv vol.18/1994, Sept 25 1994, pp. D544-7; the original CDU/CSU document is reprinted in Blatter fur deutsche und internationale Politik, vol.1994/10, pp.1271-80. In both cases the derivation of the diversification need from the upcoming enlargement is quite explicit. Back.
Note 38: "Streitbare Demokratie" for instance is, as noticed by Gregg Kvistad has noticed, not really a concept of democracy, but a concept for the state. Gregg 0. Kvistad, 'Radicals and the State: The Political Demands on West German Civil Servants', in James A. Caporaso (ed), The Elusive State: International and Comparative Perspectives, (Newbury Park: Sage, 1989), p.97-128, see p. 114 It does not rely on mobilizing politically conscious citizens to defend democracy, but relies on the state, the rule of law and the civil servants. It trusts the constitution to be so well designed that all dangerous impulses are captured by other instances. Kvistad quotes Kurt Sontheimer for the harsh words: "Germans tend to go about democracy as an affair of the state, in the style of a democratically organized authoritarian state ... [because it] has not been possible to make the citizens understand that democratic order is a mechanism by which the people, by delegating representatives, rule themselves." (ibid, p. 114.) Back.
Note 39: The genesis of these two concepts are placed in the context of German history in Wæver, Holm & Larsen, The Struggle, op.cit. Back.
Note 40: When he occasionally writes about the state, his interest is to make it good and contribute to the cultivation of "Humanitat"; cf. Johann Gottfried Herder, 'Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanitat' (1793), i Herder: Ein Lesebuch fur unsere Zeit, selected by Gunter Mieth and Ingeborg Schmidt, Berlin (Ost)/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1986, especially p. 261f, 268-270. The argument about Herder's constant support for an anti-political, anti-state national feeling -- or patriotism is forcefully presented by Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the Historv of Ideas, London: The Hogarth Press 1976, pp. 156ff. Back.
Note 41: Thomas Nipperdey, Nachdenken uber die Deutsche Geschichte. Essays, Munchen: Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,1986, p.32. Romantic nationalism first caught roots among the peoples not living in nation states, Germans and East Europeans in particular (ibid., pp. 141ff.). It did not, however, remain limited to Central and East Central Europe. 'Even' in France, romantic nationalism became a strong -- at times dominant -- challenger to the individualistic-civic Western conception. Back.
Note 42: Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsrason in der neueren Geschichte, (Munchen: R. Oldenburg, 1976; first edition 1915), pp. 409ff. Back.
Note 43: Ole Wæver, "The Rise and Fall of the Inter-Paradigm Debate", in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, pp.149-85. Back.
Note 44: Cf. Dan Deudney's concept of negarhcy, see ### in I0, and Binding Powers, Bound States: The Logic and Geopolitics of Republican Negarchy, forthcoming. Back.
Note 45: Cf. the limited success of Reagan or Thatcher style neo-liberalism in Germany, cf. Gregg 0. Kvistad, op.cit. Back.
Note 46: Bernhard Giesen, 'German national identity and the Intellectuals', paper presented in Florence, March 1991 and Die Intellektuellen und die Nation: eine deutsche Achsenzeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993. Back.
Note 48: ref to Korte, Weidenfeld and other summaries ... check old Struggle manus and Polyphony ... Back.
Note 49: See the table summarizing this in Ole Wæver "Det 'nye' Tysklands Internationale Profil" in Grus, 1992(?), pp ... Back.
Note 50: Ole Wæver, Hele Europa: Projekter. Kontraster, Copenhagen: SNU 1989; Ulla Holm, Henrik Larsen and Ole Wæver, "Forestillingen om Europa: en studie i fransk og tysk taenkning efter revolutionerne i Ost" in Vandkunsten: Konflikt, Politik og Historie, no.3/1990, pp.212-136; Ole Wæver., "Three Competing Europes: German, French, Russian" in International Affairs, vol.66:3, July 1990, pp.477-493. Back.
Note 51: Michael Sturmer, "Die Deutschen in Europa. Auf dem Weg zu einer zwischenstaatlichen Innenpolitik", Europa Archiv, 25/12 1989, pp.721-732. Back.
Note 52: Sturmer ... numerous references incl my own newspaper interview with him + Kohl speeches ... Back.
Note 53: Others exist such as 'real nationalists,' chauvinistic and militaristic, but this does not constitute a serious candidate at the political level. Back.
Note 54: Ole Wæver, 'Tyskland - en teenager midt i Europa' (Germany - a teenager in the middle of Europe), Information 2 Oct 1990, continued as 'Tyskland bliver voksent' (Germany grows up), Information 7-8 September 1991. Back.
Note 55: Hermann Rudolph, "Vorwarts zum Staatenbund", editorial in Suddeutsche Zeitung, 8-9 Sept.1990, p.4. This critique of 'Europe of the regions' contains much of the logic latter to unfold across the scene about the logic of a normal state. At the time of its appearance, this line was less conspicious, and it was probably only because it fitted so nicely into my anaytical model that I picked it out and started over-interpreting it from the start (see for instances the two articles in the previous note). Today this interpretation seems much less controversial. Back.
Note 56: -- numerous possible references ... eg. Stephan Wehowsky, "Abmarch in Richtung Sonderweg?", Suddeutsche Zeitung, June20, 1991, p.11. Back.
Note 57: Karl Heinz Bohrer, "Provinzialismus" in Merkur, no.501, pp. 1096-1102. Back.
Note 58: In this context there is also reason to look out for a revivial of interest in Carl Schmitt. This does not happen in IR, but mainly in law, not in English language writings, only in German., and not in the places most observed by foreigners, but eg in Munich. Therefore it is not noticed as a trend outside Germany., but it is there, and when Schmitt is in circulation he is always important. His impressive system of philosophical, political and legal thinking has a logical force and a degree of connection to German traditions, that gives it strong potential powers. The fate of Schmittianism in Germany is a major indicator of intellectual trends.
Schmitt is experiencing a revival in other countries as well, but there mainly by post-modernists who find his concept of friend/enemy interesting for their self/other arguments, and his concepts of politics and his critique of liberalism useful more generally, while they of course also use the fact that he is 'unacceptable' as a challenge to understand the limits and differences to him. Cf. Mouffe ... + Connolly review in Political Theory. This is very differat from the revival in Germany and should therefore not make us downplay the importance of a 'return' of Schmitt in Germany.
In relation to geopolitics, Schmitt's Groraum theory etc, see the chapters by Tunander, Neumann, Baev, Hassner and Wæver in Tunander et al (eds.) Geopolitics in post-wall Europe, London: Sage forthcoming. Back.
Note 59: Die Zeit, July 22, 1994. Back.
Note 60:
chronicle in Der Spiegel, xx; etc
Note 61:
BVerfG, Verdict from 12 October 1993, reprinted eg. Recht der Internationalen Wirtschaft, 1993/12. This verdict on the compatibility of European Union with the German constitution was mostly noticed abroad for its immediate effects on European integration: on the one hand it allowed Germany to ratiiy the Maastricht treaty (which could thereby enter into force)., and on the other hand the court defined clear limits to what interpretations from the EU system (especially the EU Court) Germany would in the future accept (whereby the Karsiruhe court established itself as a kind of highest appeal above or besides the European). (I have explored the implications for European integration and national sovereignty in 'Identity, Integration and Security: Solving the Sovereignty Puzzle in E.U. Studies', in Journal of International Affairs, vol.48:2, Winter 1995, pp.389-431.) Equally important might be the logic in the judgment as such which might very well set a format for the EU debates of the coming years. On the one hand it contains a logic well known from other European countries (especially the euro-sceptic ones): how do we secure that the sovereignty we 'give' is clearly metered out and does not give the EU-system an ability to create new competences by itself? On the other hand, it has a less defensive element which is absentin most other countries: if we do transfer stateness to the Europen level., how do we ensure that the European level assumes central elements of our system: those elements inscribed in the Constitution as unchangable? This refers to political and civil rights, democracy, competence to the Länder and in practice at a level equal to this: price stability. The judgmenet deserves a close reading both because of the curious sanctioning of a static concept of nation, and because in contains a logic regarding the relationship between state and Europe., which relate to the questions central to the present analysis. Back.
Note 62:
Frank Schirrmacher, "Abschied von der Literatur der Bundesrepublik", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung literature section p.2, October 2 1990. The whole debate is summarized by Stephen Brockmann., "The Reunification Debate" i New German Critique No.52, Winter 1991, p.3-30. Back.
Note 63:
"Die Asthetik am Ausgang ihrer Unmundigkeit", in Merkur vol.44: 10/11, Oct-Nov. 1990; see also Bohrer, "Warum wir keine Nation sind: Warum wir ene werden soll", in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 13 1990, in "Bilder und Zeiten" supplement, p.l -2. Critical -- and often strongly polemic -- counter attacks from the intellectuals of the left can be found in Forum Wissenschaft (theme: "Ende der Linksintellektuellen?"), 1991/2, and in Neue Gesellschaft, 1991/8 (theme: "Konservative Intelligenz"). Back.
Note 64:
Biermarin in Die Zeit February 1,1991; Enzensberger in Spiegel the same week. Back.
Note 65:
What maybe tires the intellectuals even more than their guardian role, or the content is the form, gradually taken by this new national identity, the new German culture. Originally, in the post-war years, "The mode of discourse producing this collective identity of the 'holocaust nation' was the traditional pattern of the educated public: writing or public lectures, debates within small groups. In contrast to these purely cultural patterns, political parties, formal associations and ritual ceremonies failed to appeal to this public; they were frowned of for lacking individuality and sophistication". (Giesen, 'German national ...', op.cit.., p. 12.) But during the 1970s and espeically the 1980s something happens which is very similar to what happened in the 1830s when the 'Young Germany' movement (with Heine, Gutzkow, and Mundt), who reacted against the trivialization of romanticism. (Das Junge Deutschland: Texte und Dokumente, published by Jost Hermand, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun.1966.) What was originally an exclusive code of the romantic intellectuals became during the war of liberation a widely mobilizing idea of Volk and nation. In the years 1815-1848 the concept got a new and expanded social-structural basis and experience a certain trivialization. The pattern of communication was changed to a "trivialized asthectic approach: athletic-associations and Singing-associations are the most remarkable new types of these associations. Here, collective identity is produced by rituals of esthetic uniformization, by common singing of national anthems, by synchronous training of the body, by marching and centering around a flag. The reception of the romantic idea of the nation resulted in a ritual construction of identity (...) also by large ceremonial gathering -- the Wartburg-Fest or the Hambacher-Fest (...). In contrast to the romantic intellectuals (...) a new generation of writers, the socalled 'Junges Deutchland' were repulsed by the beer-drinking and chanting nationalism of the petit bourgeosie. This group included Heine, Borne, Gutzkow, Herwegh and Buchner. They used irony and satirical poems to distance the preceding generation of romantic literates as well as the dull nationalism of the petit bourgeoisie and the authority of the restaurative state." (Giesen, op.cit., p.9) The holocaust nation experienced a first change with the students revolt. A second generation of the Bildunsburgertum entered the stage and radicalized the critique, broke the rules of their fathers game. "New patterns of communication, rallies, mass demonstrations, sit-ins, even street-fighting were used". (Ibid., p. 13.) And further in the 1980s this identity took a direction similar to that of romanticism. It became mute, symbolic, and ritualistic. The essential basis for the collective identity -- with now an expanded social basis -- became participation in rituals: mass-demonstrations, rallies, chanting etc. With the culture of the Greens and probably especially the peace movement, the code became extremely restrictive: the referent became more and more un-articulated and un-differentiated (life, peace, ...) and thus politics changed from words to just being. For the peace movement it was a virtue to avoid expression in (established) language, and change the whole level, form and mode of discourse (to a non-linguistic one). Collective identity now depended on participation in rituals primarily. The intellectuals again had to react. They thought they were avantgarde, but actually their ideas (ecology, feminism, peace) had been adopted by large parts of society. The critical attitude had become a new self-righteous, invinsible community of political correctness. The intellectuals no longer felt at home in the culture they had created. Back.
Note 66:
A clear example is "Die Bundesbank und Maastricht", editorial in the economic/business section of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10. February 1992, p.15; by Gerald Braunberger. Back.
Note 67:
Kohl in the Bundestag June 17, 1992 Back.
Note 68:
The clearest and most provocative expression of this interpretation is probably that of The Economist, October 12 1991 ('The German Question'). "Curiously, among those who fear Germany the most are the Germans themselves. With unity, Germany is suddenly bigger, potentially bolder and drawn to the east as well as to the west. German leaders are anxious to avoid the follies of the past. They want to bind their country surely into the Community -- to create a European Germany, they say, not a German Europe. Better do the tethering soon, they say darkly; in a few years the beast will be stronger, wilder, possibly untameable. (...) It cannot be assumed that this offer will remain open for long. The next generation of German leaders. less misty-eyed about Europe, may well prefere an overtly Germany-first policy. For other Europeans., there is a high cost in accepting the German offer; they would have to give up chunks of their own sovereignty. But (...) they must be clear about their choice - between a Europe in which they have more direct influence on Germay (and vice versa); and a Europe in which reunited Germany is free to go, alone, its German way." Back.
Note 69:
Actually, both Kohl and Chirac (as it can be seen in figures 1 and 4) seem to be representing positions somewhere between two of the logical positions. Is this possible? Have we overestimated the pressure for ending up in logical positions? Is it maybe an illusion that they mix positions., close textual analysis might show that they draw their meaning from one tradition and only graft views from the other on to it? Or have they managed to built new positions? Or does the ambiguity of especially Chirac have the price we should expect: that he is not only inconsistent., but since words derive their meaning from the systems., buying into different systems simultaneously empties meaning out of all central political categories, and thus can be shown to have serius effects for Chirac? This will be examined in more detail in ch. VI of The Struggle.
Back.
Note 70:
Arnulf Baring, Deutschland, was nun?, Berlin: Siedler Verlag 1991. Back.
Note 71:
It actually isn't. 42% feels poorly represented regarding policy on Europe, because they think all four old parties are more Europe positive than they are; cf Han Rattinger, "Public Attitudes to European Integration in Germany after Maastricht: Inventory and Typology" in Journal of Common Market Studies, vol.32:4, Dec.1994., pp.529-540. Back.
Note 72:
Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich and the Restoration of Peace, 1812-1822, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 1957, p.146. Back.
Note 73:
Wæver, 'Three Competing Europes'. Back.
Note 74:
Etienne Tassin, 'Europe: A Political Community?' in Mouffe., Dimensions, op.cit., p.189. Back.
Note 75:
Carlsnaes 1993. Back.
Note 76:
Wæver, 'Power, Principles and Perspectivism: Peaceful Change in Post-Cold War Europe' in Heikki Patomaki (ed.) Peaceful Change and World Politics, Tampere 1995, pp/??; "Europe's Three Empires: A Watsonian interpretation ofpost-wall European security" in Fawn and Larkins, International Society after the Cold War, Macmillan 1996, pp. --. Back.
