Commenting on German foreign policy is hampered by the fact that this is a moving target,[1] today more so than ever,  To complicate things further, the target not only moves quickly, it also changes direction in an apparently erratic manner. Accordingly, Germany has been making global headlines as a general source of befuddlement. The question seems obvious: “Where does Germany stand on all of this?”—with “all of this” referring to the distinct impression that, from the political and economic turmoil in the EU to the contentious abstention from the UN Security Council vote on Libya, there is no shortage of problems waiting to be tackled. At the risk of overstretching the metaphor, it seems safe to say that while Germany is not standing at all, it is also fundamentally unclear where it is heading. Predictions, generally risky business in the social sciences, would be particularly futile in light of a situation that appears to be genuinely open in both historical and political terms.

What we can do, however, is to strive toward a better understanding of the current situation not only in order to better understand how we got here, but also in order to get a sense of plausible futures in light of current controversies. To this end, I will first give a brief account of what has changed in German foreign policy. Contrary to a larger part of the academic literature I do not start from the question of whether German foreign policy since the end of the Cold War should be characterized in terms of either continuity or change. I rather treat foreign policy change as a perfectly normal condition thus focusing on the question of how German foreign policy has changed. The general pattern, I contend, is one of gradual, incremental de-Europeanization amounting to a shift from the ideal of a European Germany to the idea of a more German Europe.[2]

Second, I will make the case that both recent changes and plausible futures can best be understood in terms of a dynamic of generational change. Across a broad variety of policy fields we cannot observe a clear party cleavage or any particular clash of different ideologies or interest groups. What we can observe, however, is a generational shift. With the red-green coalition of Social Democrats and Greens elected into office in 1998 for the first time, all key positions in public office were occupied by individuals with no personal memory of the Second World War. In Germany’s equivalent to an “only Nixon could go to China moment,” and contrary to what party-political arithmetic may have us expect, it was the red-green coalition under Gerhard Schröder that broke decisively with the taboo over German military involvement in out-of-area missions.

Lessons Unlearned? Generational Change in German Foreign Policy

More recently, a similar logic of generational change has become particularly apparent in an episode that had assumed center stage in German foreign policy prior to Libya and the euro, namely Germany’s bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. Both Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel made it a key project of their foreign policy agendas, both Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl rejected the idea as entirely futile. Even more important than the distribution of positions across a generational divide, however, are the arguments presented in justification for the respective positions. Those in favor of a permanent seat characteristically begin with the first person plural: We are ready to bear more responsibility; we are the third-largest financial contributor. Those skeptical of the project characteristically start from the point of view of the institutional consequences a permanent seat for Germany might entail. Proposals to reform the UN Security Council are typically motivated by the observation that it fails to adequately reflect how configurations of power have changed since the end of  the Second World War.  From the point of view of institutional reform, adding yet another  Western European highly industrialized nation seems far from conclusive. Moreover, the European ambition to work toward a joint seat (which used to be a German ambition as well) seems hardly compatible with a German bid, presenting France and Great Britain with an opportunity to reaffirm their own special privileges.[3] What has changed is not merely the substantive preference, but also the fundamental mode of interaction. Rather than always taking into account the consequences of institutional embeddedness, Germany has come to define its position in more self-centered terms. The question of interest here is not one of justification, i.e., whether this is legitimate, whether other states are doing the same thing, etc. What is of interest is the observation that a more assertive posture only defines them in the context of a more narrow timeframe.