Germany: From a reluctant power to a constructive power?

Analyses of post-Cold War German foreign and security policy typically employ the leitmotif that everything remains different: they claim new sea-changing challenges to and changes in German policy, while concluding that these very alterations result from the constant of Germany’s civil and self-restraining strategic culture (Berger 1998; Duffield 1998; Erb 2003; Rittberger 2001; Webber 2001). An example of this bias is the geo-strategic slant of many studies on united Germany’s foreign and security policy. After the eradication of the Cold War borderlines in Europe, many authors continued to analyse German security strategy in terms of responses to structural pressure, to which Germany remained exposed as a power in the centre of Europe (Schlör 1993). Thus, the bulk of research came to focus on the ‘normalization’ of the ‘new’ Germany’s foreign and security policy – a normalization, however, which extended over a broad spectrum, from an enlightened power in the service of Kantian democratic peace to a Waltzian power, choosing to seize any opportunity to safeguard, if not improve, its position in the international system.