Comparing Germany's and Poland's ESDPs

Since the start of the twenty-first century, Germany’s and Poland’s European Security and Defense Policies (ESDPs) have converged with regard to the use of force, cooperation within the ESDP, and its geographical scope. Nevertheless, differences over the European Union’s finality and ambivalences in their respective ESDPs persist. This chapter argues that national role conceptions explain the German and Polish ESDPs. The following assumes that “how the policymaker imagines the milieu to be, not how it actually is” (Sprout and Sprout 1957: 328) is crucial to understanding a state’s foreign policy. It is argued that as an actor-centered approach, role theory is especially useful in explaining German and Polish decision makers’ role behavior: First, the observed convergence resulted from changes within role conceptions due to crisis learning from Kosovo and Iraq and socialization through EU institutions, especially the Political and Security Committee (PSC). Second, continuing differences between both states’ ESDPs can be traced back to their role-beholders’ divergent understandings of statehood, international institutions, and the use of force.² Third, ambivalences in the German and Polish ESDPs are symptoms of unresolved tensions between different role elements within their overarching role conceptions.