Alister Miskimmon

Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power:

Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to understand power and communication in international affairs. Analyses of soft power overwhelmingly focus on soft power ‘assets’ or capabilities and how to wield them, not how influence does or does not take place. It has become a catch-all term that has lost explanatory power, just as hard power once did. The authors argue that the concept of strategic narrative gives us intellectual purchase on the complexities of international politics today, especially in regard to how influence works in a new media environment. They believe that the study of media and war would benefit from more attention being paid to strategic narratives.

German Foreign Policy and the Libya Crisis

German foreign policy has come under scrutiny due to its decision to abstain in the vote on UN Security Council Resolution 1973 in March 2011 on the Libyan no fly zone. Germanys decision not to support France, the UK and the USA ensured that no common EU position emerged and NATOs response to the crisis proved difficult. German foreign policy was caught between enlarging its influence and role in crisis management and reserving the right to reject involvement in operations that do not fit with its national interest. Drawing on the work of Robert Gilpin, the article argues that Germanys decision to abstain on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 can be explained by understanding the cost/benefit calculations of the German government, pressured by the protracted Eurozone crisis.

Continuity in the Face of Upheaval—British Strategic Culture and the Impact of the Blair Government

This chapter will consider how the elements of continuity and change in British foreign policy that emerged under the current Labor government will be managed in the short to medium term and ask what their fuller implications for the UK and European security may be in the longer run. The article will examine how the change that transpired after 1997 which saw a new pro-European stance on security can be reconciled with the prevailing continuities in British strategic culture, namely Britain’s special relationship with the US, its global role, and, as demonstrated in the case of Iraq, the UK’s negation of Franco-German security initiatives. The article will also emphasise the central importance of the UK’s commitment to the EU’s security policy ambitions, given that the UK armed forces are the most capable in Europe and as confirmed in Iraq, an ESDP without a UK contribution would have no credibility. Despite Blair’s policy overtures towards developing greater European military capabilities, the continued reliance on the US has meant that British strategic culture has displayed remarkable continuity rather than fundamental transformation.

Recasting the security bargains: Germany, European security policy and the transatlantic relationship

This article analyses recent developments in European Union (EU) security policy and their implications for Germanys bilateral relations with France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. It contends that the development of a greater EU security capability has significantly affected Germanys bilateral relations with the USA and Germanys main European partners. This has resulted in a recasting of the previous transatlantic security bargains of the Cold War period. Greater expectations on behalf of France and the UK concerning German involvement in military security within the Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP) have also affected Germanys approach to security policy-making.

Same Challenges, Diverging Responses: Germany, the UK and European Security

This contribution considers British and German relations in the context of European foreign and security policy. Beginning with an appraisal of how the relationship functioned during the Cold War, in the form of the ‘Stille Allianz’, it proceeds by describing how German unification altered the political and geostrategic frameworks of European security. After evaluating the relationship in the late 1990s, a period which saw a certain closeness emerge, the discussion moves on to account for the sharp divergences that transpired in the British and German responses to 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. The remainder of the analysis highlights British and German perspectives on a number of key contemporary security issues, including ESDP and EU Neighbourhood policy. The principal conclusion is that, despite similar challenges, British and German starting points and long-term goals tend to differ, rather than converge.

Perceptions and responses to threats: introduction

During the Cold War, the study of threats was largely conditioned by the East/West stand-off. Threats were understood in existential and inter-state terms as a result of the high profile of nuclear weapons in deterring either the United States (US) or Soviet Union from encroaching on each other’s spheres of influence. Each of the articles in this section outlines how this conception of threat in the policy community, in public opinion and in the academic literature has undergone significant change. Threat perception and responses to threats have been conditioned by the ‘post-Cold-War disorder’ and by events relating to the US response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 (9/11) (see, for example, Eadie 2007; Edwards and Meyer 2008). Threat perception and misperception can have significant impact on policymaking (Gross Stein 1988), which is complicated in a highly interconnected world defined by key multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Even more radically, it is not just that sources of threat in international politics may have changed since 1989, but also that our way of thinking about how threats are ‘being made’ by various types of actors inhabiting local, national and transnational communities, each interconnected in old and new ways through the conventional news media as well as peer-to-peer information technology. What motivates politicians, news media and political activists when they portray somebody or something as a threat? And do such motives inevitably lead to false threat perceptions? What do our threat imageries tell us about who we are, how we see the world and what we believe in? And, finally, how do our perspectives on threats lead us to privilege certain responses over others? Each of the articles contained in this thematic section sheds light in different ways on these big questions, aiming to advance our critical thinking about, and research into, how threat perceptions form, change and influence behaviour. The section brings together scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds— international relations (IR), EU politics and communication studies—working on the perception of and response to threat. These articles were first presented at a research workshop convened by Christoph Meyer and Alister Miskimmon and held at the Centre for European Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London on 15 February 2008. All of the contributors share the assumption that threats are not

Adapting to Europe? German Foreign Policy, Domestic Constraints, and the Limitations of Europeanization since Unification

Germany is not alone in facing major foreign policy challenges that require urgent attention; a plausible argument could be made that incoherence in UK foreign policy is of longer standing and more deeply rooted. However, Germany’s position is more precarious than that of other leading European states. Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has been unable to fashion a coherent foreign policy to meet these challenges and to exert German influence on the international stage to make up for the structural advantages enjoyed by the United Kingdom and France of permanent membership on the Security Council and of nuclear power status; neither has he managed to realize his ambition of dealing with other powers at “eye level.”1 In the previous system (during the Cold War and for much of the 1990s), Germany was very good at tuning itself to, or synchronizing its position within, the global and regional order. The assumption contained in this chapter is that Germany is out of step with international developments and that it is no longer able to adequately adjust to the new rhythms of the international order as defined by the United States. In wider terms, this discordance is expressed in the difficulties within the Atlantic alliance and in debates over the future form of European security. Germany is therefore not a singular case, but rather it is exposed to the same challenges as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The EU's Peace and Security Narrative: Views from EU Strategic Partners in Asia*

The EU has consistently struggled to forge a foreign policy narrative which promotes internal cohesion and supports the EUs efforts to exert international influence. The 2016 EU Global Strategy is the latest iteration of collective efforts to tie strategy and purpose to the EUs coherent identity in the world. This study compares the EUs strategic partners of peace and security with narratives about the EU held in the EUs strategic partners in Asia. Whilst we find reasonable coherence in the EUs projection of the international system and its role in it, its identity as an actor, and its response to policy issues on the ground, views from Asia largely contest these claims. This article employs a strategic narrative approach to conceptualize and empirically trace how the formation, projection and reception of EU narratives are part of broader circuits of communication through which EU might be recognized, legitimized and achieve influence.

Foreign and security policy in austerity Europe: Budgetary aspects of the development of the common foreign and security policy and common security and defence policy

The CFSP of the EU has been a long time in the making. Whilst CFSP and more generally, the EU’s role in the world, has become a more pressing concern for the EU during the past decade, there remain considerable hurdles in developing an effective format in order to increase the EU’s influence. The Lisbon Treaty sought to streamline how the EU’s foreign policy activities are structured through the introduction of new institutions — the EEAS, the President of the European Council, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (Barber, 2010) and the CFSP start-up fund. Developing the CFSP continues to be dogged by regular stand-offs between dynamics of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism. Financing CFSP involves a hybrid structure of a common budget, intergovernmental agreements to fund operations as they emerge and national capabilities. Rather than empowering decision making, the Lisbon Treaty has renewed institutional turf wars in Brussels which have often centred on the budget. The global financial crisis, coupled with the euro crisis and reluctance on the part of member states to commit to Europeanising security and defence policy, has hampered significant steps towards building a more robust EU policy.

The Stille Allianz Revisited

This chapter highlights the changing nature of defence cooperation between Berlin and London since the end of the Cold War. We stress three important developments which have ensured that British-German defence relations have been characterised by elements of divergence rather than the closeness which defined their relationship during the Cold War. First, the end of the centrality of NATO in security and defence policy after the fall of the Berlin Wall has made British-German defence relations more complicated — and in many ways less vital. Second, the emergence of the European Union and its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has highlighted NATO’s changed position. NATO has become less central and the important role of France in the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) and wider European defence policy has altered the specificity of British-German defence relations compared with the Cold War era. Further differences have emerged concerning the geopolitical implications of the USA’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York in 2001. Third, defence priorities in Europe have become defined by the end of the primacy of territorial defence and have moved to meet the demands of expeditionary warfare. Whilst Heisbourg (2001) might characterise the United Kingdom as an ‘extrovert’ in defence policy, Germany remains caught between the role of introvert and extrovert in its view on the utility of military force.