ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on German foreign policy after 1989, and examines responses to forces and influences emerging from the domestic polity and from real or potential challenges and opportunities externally. These include: a new assertion demonstrated in the reunification process; development of a more pragmatic and authoritative German approach within the European Community/European Union; and policy toward central and eastern Europe where the German agenda envisages security, trade and investment. Operating as the epitome of the trading nation, German export industries were well served by western European economic integration. The only area of the German polity apparently 'at odds' with European integration was reunification. For sovereign liberal democracies, 'normalization' suggests an endorsement to act in and however a government, conscious of popular desires, domestic pressures and various exigencies, determines to be in the national interest. The German Staatsrason has been intoned through a rhetorical convergence of the national interest and co-operative multilateralism, of pragmatism and idealism, self-interest and responsibility.
