Stephan Vormann: The End of German “Normalization“?
[Stephan Vormann is working on a PhD on German Foreign and Security Policy at the “Centre for the Study of Wider Europe” at NUI Maynooth.]
For the last 20 years German foreign policy has been remarkably continuous. Despite widespread fears over the future course of the country after the end of the Cold War, a mix of strong normative and material interests has ensured that Germany continued to work towards further European integration and towards the further development of NATO and the UN. Simultaneously, the country from the mid-1990s onwards contributed increasingly more to international security by means of providing troops for UN, NATO and EU-military missions (“Normalization”). Thus, the decision to abstain from the vote on Security Council Resolution 1973 is a hugely worrying sign to say the least. It seriously calls into question some of the core tenets of German foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. While the rhetoric has not changed, German willingness to contribute to multilateral military operations has dramatically declined since German participation in them has become unpopular with the electorate. However, Germany can only be a reliable and trustworthy international partner if its foreign policies are formulated without leering at opinion polls.
A comparison with the Kosovo War in 1999 dramatically highlights the long way German foreign policy has gone in the last 20 years. Almost to the date 12 years before the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, the then newly elected red-green coalition under Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer had led Germany into the Kosovo War. For the Federal Republic the participation in the NATO air strikes against Serbian forces was in many ways a “coming of age”. It was the first time since the end of WW2 that German troops participated in combat action. Internationally, it signaled that Germany was willing to assume its role as a leading European power and that the country had broken with its taboo of not using force in international conflicts. Domestically, it signaled that after years of sometimes heated debates the main German parties had once again reached a broad consensus on foreign and security policy. The “normalization” of German foreign and security policy seemed to be well under way.
In the years immediately after the end of the Cold War, expectations inside and outside Germany were raised that the country would finally contribute more to international security. Within Germany these expectations initiated a debate on the future foreign and security policy in general, and in particular on the use of force outside NATO-territory and for purposes other than territorial defence; namely the question of German contribution to UN peacekeeping and peace-enforcing missions. While German politicians in general welcomed the opportunity to take on more responsibility on the world stage, the German public was rather hesitant to endorse this “opportunity”. To narrow the gap between international expectations and domestic constraints, the conservative-liberal coalition under Helmut Kohl employed what later became known as “Salami tactics” during the early 1990s. Slice by slice so to speak, the number of German troops deployed abroad and the intensity of the missions they were assigned to increased. The intention was to get a highly sceptical German electorate used to the idea of using force in the realm of international politics. Considering that at the start of the 1990s the German debate centred on whether or not the country should participate in UN-mandated peacekeeping missions, the intervention in Kosovo without such a mandate only a few years later represented a quantum leap for the young Berlin Republic....
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For the last 20 years German foreign policy has been remarkably continuous. Despite widespread fears over the future course of the country after the end of the Cold War, a mix of strong normative and material interests has ensured that Germany continued to work towards further European integration and towards the further development of NATO and the UN. Simultaneously, the country from the mid-1990s onwards contributed increasingly more to international security by means of providing troops for UN, NATO and EU-military missions (“Normalization”). Thus, the decision to abstain from the vote on Security Council Resolution 1973 is a hugely worrying sign to say the least. It seriously calls into question some of the core tenets of German foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. While the rhetoric has not changed, German willingness to contribute to multilateral military operations has dramatically declined since German participation in them has become unpopular with the electorate. However, Germany can only be a reliable and trustworthy international partner if its foreign policies are formulated without leering at opinion polls.
A comparison with the Kosovo War in 1999 dramatically highlights the long way German foreign policy has gone in the last 20 years. Almost to the date 12 years before the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, the then newly elected red-green coalition under Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer had led Germany into the Kosovo War. For the Federal Republic the participation in the NATO air strikes against Serbian forces was in many ways a “coming of age”. It was the first time since the end of WW2 that German troops participated in combat action. Internationally, it signaled that Germany was willing to assume its role as a leading European power and that the country had broken with its taboo of not using force in international conflicts. Domestically, it signaled that after years of sometimes heated debates the main German parties had once again reached a broad consensus on foreign and security policy. The “normalization” of German foreign and security policy seemed to be well under way.
In the years immediately after the end of the Cold War, expectations inside and outside Germany were raised that the country would finally contribute more to international security. Within Germany these expectations initiated a debate on the future foreign and security policy in general, and in particular on the use of force outside NATO-territory and for purposes other than territorial defence; namely the question of German contribution to UN peacekeeping and peace-enforcing missions. While German politicians in general welcomed the opportunity to take on more responsibility on the world stage, the German public was rather hesitant to endorse this “opportunity”. To narrow the gap between international expectations and domestic constraints, the conservative-liberal coalition under Helmut Kohl employed what later became known as “Salami tactics” during the early 1990s. Slice by slice so to speak, the number of German troops deployed abroad and the intensity of the missions they were assigned to increased. The intention was to get a highly sceptical German electorate used to the idea of using force in the realm of international politics. Considering that at the start of the 1990s the German debate centred on whether or not the country should participate in UN-mandated peacekeeping missions, the intervention in Kosovo without such a mandate only a few years later represented a quantum leap for the young Berlin Republic....