Gunther Hellmann

Neorealism, Neoliberal Institutionalism, and the Future of NATO

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Atlanta, 31 March–4 April 1992. For their helpful comments and criticism the authors thank in particular Jospeh Grieco, Isabelle Grunberg, Helga Haftendorn, Ingo Heinrich, Otto Keck, Robert Keohane, Peter Mayer, Harald Muller, Ingo Peters, Glenn Snyder, Christian Tuschhoff, Stephen Van Evera, Celeste Wallander, Kenneth Waltz, Richard Weitz, and Michael Zurn. The authors also acknowledge the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Volkswagenstiftung.

Goodbye Bismarck? The Foreign Policy of Contemporary Germany

This essay examines the foreign policy discourse in contemporary Germany. In reviewing a growing body of publications by German academics and foreign policy analysts, it identifies five schools of thought based on different worldviews, assumptions about international politics, and policy recommendations. These schools of thought are then related to, first, actual preferences held by German policymakers and the public more generally and, second, to a small set of grand strategies that Germany could pursue in the future. It argues that the spectrum of likely choices is narrow, with the two most probable—the strategies of “Wider West” and “Carolingian Europe”—continuing the multilateral and integrationist orientation of the old Federal Republic. These findings are contrasted with diverging assessments in the non-German professional literature. Finally, the essay sketches avenues for future research by suggesting ways for broadening the study of country-specific grand strategies, developing and testing inclusive typologies of more abstract foreign policy strategies, and refining the analytical tools in examining foreign policy discourses in general.

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?: (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)

In “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik craft a curiously rigid doctrine for realism and then puzzle over why the aeld is crowded with apostates.1 The answer, I propose, is that the church of realism can be a bit more catholic than Legro and Moravcsik claim. Legro and Moravcsik have written out of the book of realism a crucial insight that informs most realist theories (at least implicitly) and have thereby inadvertently excommunicated too many of the faithful. But they are wrong in a productive way, and correcting their mistake points in the direction of a fruitful research agenda for scholars—realists and antirealists alike.

GERMANY AND THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE: 'TOTAL WAR', THE 'CULTURE OF RESTRAINT', AND THE QUEST FOR NORMALITY

For most of the past century, Germanys attitudes towards and practices of war have deviated from those of other Western countries. After the conduct of war had been pushed to new extremes during the Third Reich, following the Second World War Germans turned into zealous proponents of antimilitarism. Since the late 1980s, the discrepancy between Germany and its Western partners has, however, been shrinking, as Germany has shown a growing readiness to contribute to international military operations. This study examines these changes, paying particular attention to the interplay of public attitudes, political discourse and concrete foreign policy behaviour. Many observers maintain that the development of Germanys foreign policy behaviour on this issue has largely been a response to both (mostly international) structural incentives and (mostly domestic) structural constraints. In contrast, others view it as driven by a deliberate strategy of re-militarisation adopted by a small group of decision-makers. We argue that neither the structure- nor the actor-centred perspective is sufficient alone to understand the development of the German position on the use of military force. Thus, we assume a third perspective, stressing the co-constitutive effects of public and elite discourse, public attitudes and foreign policy behaviour. We substantiate our argument by examining the interplay of these three factors since the 1980s, paying special attention to the two most important conflicts of the 1990s, the Gulf War and the Kosovo War.

Are Dialogue and Synthesis Possible in International Relations

Editors Note: Descriptions of the state of the art in international relations usually oscillate between the diagnosis of an impoverished present and visions of a better future based on dialogue, pluralism, and synthesis. It may be difficult to come up with any precise measure of the “growing frustration with this rather ‘anarchic’ field.” Yet “the lack of dialogue among subfields and specializations” is felt by many ( Hermann 1998:606 ). Where parochialisms of different sorts (geographical, linguistic, methodological, and political) undermine the goal of achieving “a synthetic and genuinely global interdiscipline of international studies” ( Biersteker 1999:4-5 ), dialogue is widely considered …

Fishing in the mild West: democratic peace and militarised interstate disputes in the transatlantic community

According to many of its proponents, the proposition that democracies do not fight each other is ‘as close as anything we have to an empirical law’. However, there have been several incidents among solidified liberal democracies where force was threatened or even used. Since these inter-democratic militarised interstate disputes (MIDs) almost always took place in the context of fisheries disputes, we examine two of these conflicts in detail: the cod wars between Iceland and Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s and the turbot war between Canada and Spain. We ask why these fisheries conflicts became militarised in the first place but did not escalate further. In both cases it was actually the presumed impossibility of a more violent escalation which led the parties to use force in the first place. Moreover, the (limited) use of force was almost always accompanied by the efforts of the parties involved to achieve some formalisation of international rules in the context of expanding regimes. Having demonstrated how some of the more prominent causal mechanisms stipulated by democratic peace theorists fail to convincingly account of these cases, we refrain from concluding that any of this falsifies the democratic peace proposition. However, in conclusion we do call into question the premises of the falsificationist methodology underlying much of the democratic peace debate on both theoretical and metholdological grounds. Reframing the democratic peace proposition in terms of a large-scale process of descuritisation, we contend, allows us to understand better how democratic interstate interaction remains inherently conflictive and possibly still subject to process of resecuritisation.

Deutsche Außenpolitik in historischer und systematischer Perspektive

Ein Handbuch, so umschreibt das Deutsche Worterbuch der Gebruder Grimm den Begriff, ist ein „buch von maszigem umfang, zum leichten gebrauch, entweder um hineinzuschreiben oder darin zu lesen“. „In neuerer zeit“ (womit wohl die Zeit um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhun- derts gemeint war) werde der Begriff aber auch „haufig verwandt zur bezeichnung eines bu- ches das in knapper fassung das hauptsachlichste einer lehre gibt“. Diese Funktion haben Handbucher auch noch heute: Sie sollen der schnellen Orientierung in einem grosen, schwer uberschaubaren Feld dienen. Von „maszigem Umfang“ (oder gar von der zu Grimms Zeiten noch gangigen Verniedlichungsform, also dem „Handbuchlein“) kann heute aber schon des- halb nicht mehr die Rede sein, weil heute im Unterschied zum 19. Jahrhundert selbst die knappste Zusammenfassung des Hauptsachlichen fast notgedrungen zum Enzyklopadischen tendiert.

In conclusion: Dialogue and Synthesis in Individual Scholarship and Collective Inquiry

We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behavior is not inquiry, but simply wordplay. (Rorty 1996:40) Historically, international relations as a discipline has come to view dialogue and synthesis as incompatible objectives. The contributors to this forum seem to confirm this impression by emphasizing either some form of dialogue (Kratochwil, Lapid, Neumann, Smith) or some form of synthesis (Harvey and Cobb, Moravcsik). In this conclusion to the forum, the argument is made that we will be more successful, both as individual scholars and as a scientific community, if we conceive of dialogue and synthesis not only as compatible practices but as mutually reinforcing. Given the connotations many of us associate with the term “synthesis” in particular, this statement is not meant to imply that the incompatibilities seen by the other contributors cannot be construed as creating an unbridgeable tension between dialogue and synthesis. Rather the argument here is simply that these incompatibilities need not necessarily be construed in this manner. Based on classical ideals, science has always been an impossible undertaking. Serious scholarship has had to constantly aim for truth while being stuck with a fallibilistic attitude emphasizing doubt and transitoriness. “Scientific ‘fulfilment’” was meant to imply that science “ wants to be ‘surpassed’ and become obsolete” (Weber 1973:316; emphasis in original). Yet, everyday life in the modern academy shows that few careers are built on the merits of a record of falsification, irrespective of whether the falsification occurred with regard to the theories of others or our own. Instead, modern recruitment practices place …

The sirens of power and German foreign policy: Who is listening?

The unification of Germany has, unsurprisingly, provoked much speculation as to the future foreign policy of the country. Two images ‐ Germany as Gulliver and Germany as Ulysses ‐ have dominated the debate, each coming in a popular and an academic version. This article analyses German foreign policy behaviour and discourse in order to determine which one is more accurate. As to behaviour, the article examines two examples from the core sector of national security policy as well as how Germanys relations developed with France, the United States, Russia and Poland. As to discourse, five ‘schools of thought’ in the current debate about German foreign policy are related to a set of five grand strategies that are suggested either in the literature or in public debate. In both words and deeds the analysis shows that united Germany continues to stick to the course of multilateralism and integration.

Zivile Weltmacht? Die Außen-, Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik der Europäischen Union

Die europaische Zusammenarbeit in der Ausen-, Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik lasst die durch die okonomische Integration ohnehin problematisch gewordene Grenze zwischen „Innen“- und „Ausen“politik weiter verschwimmen. Die Moglichkeit, zwischen „Innen“- und „Ausen“politik eine klare Grenze zu ziehen, ist eng an das Modell des souveranen Staates gebunden. Entgrenzung bedeutet zwar nicht, dass der Nationalstaat als zentrales Bezugssystem fur die Formulierung von „Ausen“politik (im Sinne der Verfolgung „nationaler Interessen“ innerhalb wie auserhalb der EU) verschwunden ist. Allerdings ist das Gefuge fur die Ermoglichung und Herstellung kollektiv bindender „ausen“politischer Entscheidungen1 durch die europaische Zusammenarbeit in diesem Bereich noch vielschichtiger geworden. In der Tendenz macht die europaische Ausenpolitik auf Seiten der Mitgliedstaaten nun auch den diplomatischen Kern klassischer Ausenpolitik zu einem weiteren Teil europaischer Innenpolitik. Daruber hinaus muss sich gerade auch die europaische Ausenpolitik der Frage stellen, inwiefern sie nicht europaische oder gar nationalstaatliche Innenpolitik ist (vgl. Krippendorff 1963).