ABSTRACT
Germany’s ordering visions have strong ideational and normative foundations that rely on the key traits of the Western liberal international order: institutions and multilateralism. In the German visions, the custodians of these are the international and intergovernmental organisations such as the European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the United Nations. Germany supports these institutions because they are ultimately thought to represent the best bulwark against the resurgence of war. However, Russian war of aggression in Ukraine has undermined these visions to the extent that Germany is now undergoing a Zeitenwende, which current Chancellor Merz has rebranded as Epochenwende. These refer to a major and permanent change in the post-Cold War European security order and the end of a linear historical progression towards democratic forms of governance. Drawing from German security policy discourse and official documents, this chapter analyses the rearrangement and reimagining of Germany’s international ordering visions from a distributional, normative, institutional and temporal perspective.
