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Review Essay: Profiling Germany

Is German foreign and security policy back to ‘normal’? The answer, of course, depends on the standard taken as a measure. Over 15 years after unification, fears of a revival of aggressive hypernationalism have receded, yet it appears the soothing ‘civilian power’ label earned during the Cold War does not quite fit anymore. Credible signs of ‘continuity’ sent from (now) Berlin sit uneasily with the fact that currently there are 9000 Bundeswehr personnel spread across the globe, a third of whom are on duty in Afghanistan. For analysts of German foreign policy, then, the question is how to (re)frame their object of study. Profiles generally become sharper over time, so it is welcome that two recent publications trace the development of German security policy through the 1990s. Their attempts to grasp German ‘actorness’ in a post-Cold War world are reviewed here in terms of both empirical insights and conceptual offerings. Franz-Josef Meiers’ weighty study Zu Neuen Ufern? [Towards New Shores?] sets out to assess whether unified Germany’s security policy from 1990 to 2000 fits one of four types of actorness: (1) a state that aims at increasing its influence in international institutions to become a Grossmacht, (2) a state that adjusts to international requirements by adhering to the maxim of ‘collegial and cooperative’ behaviour, labelled by Meier an Institutionsmacht, (3) a state that attempts to ‘civilize’ the system by externalizing democratic rules and principles, thus behaving like a Zivilmacht and, finally, (4) a state whose domestic norms create a culture of restraint averse to leadership, a Führungsvermeidungsmacht. He generates these types, the former two driven by systemic factors and the latter two by domestic ones, from dominant approaches in IR theory, namely realism, institutionalism, liberalism and constructivism (although these are visibly adapted to the German context by assuming a default commitment to act within international institutions). In order to assess which profile best captures German actorness,