German Foreign Policy: Navigating a New Era.

By Scott Erb. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. 272p. $53.00.

For the first time since 1945, Germany has a grand capital that befits a powerful state and an assertive foreign policy, but, according to Scott Erb, post–Cold War German foreign policy has demonstrated an impressive degree of continuity since the Bonn republic. Erb's purpose in this book is threefold. First, he describes the emergence during the Cold War of (West) Germany's devotion to multilateralism. Second, he argues that multilateralism has remained the guiding principle for the formulation and implementation of German foreign policy priorities since unification. Third, he presents Germany's “post-sovereign identity” as a model for all states in the era of globalization.

During the Cold War, West German foreign policy was frequently cited as evidence of the flaws in realist assumptions concerning state behavior. Even the realists conceded that German foreign policy was characterized by multilateralism and an eagerness to pool sovereignty. The debate focused, however, on the essence of Germany's self-proclaimed “European identity.” From the realist perspective, Germany's devotion to multilateralism was a rational pursuit of national self-interest within the structural constraints of the Cold War. Liberal-institutionalists saw in German behavior evidence of the significance of interdependence and institutions in promoting cooperation. Constructivism's focus on identity suggested that something much deeper was at work. Multilateralism may have begun as a means to strategic ends (e.g., national unification), but by the 1980s, German policymakers had come to identify their interests with the interests of others, and, in particular, with “Europe.” In short, for the Germans, multilateralism had become an end in itself. German unification and the end of the Cold War provided an important test of realism and constructivism that has not received the attention it deserves. According to realist assumptions, Germany's European identity would fade as the strategic usefulness of this multilateralism diminished. According to constructivist assumptions, we would see a continuation of Germany's devotion to multilateralism, because the Germans had internalized this new identity as the guiding principle of foreign policy priorities.

Erb enters this theoretical debate in defense of constructivism. The most striking feature of this book is that Erb manages to weave a serious theoretical argument into an historical narrative in a way that gives the reader a solid grasp of more than 50 years of German foreign policy. He makes a compelling case that the story of German foreign policy between 1949 and 2003 has been the emergence, and then strengthening, of what he calls a “post-sovereign foreign policy identity.” His thesis is: “Germany's multilateral cooperative approach to foreign policy is likely to persist both because it rests on culturally shared values and because it works” (p. 8).

Erb begins his history in the Adenauer era when the Federal Republic of Germany was caught between the priority of Western integration and loyalty to the alliance, on one hand, and the rejection of war as a policy option, on the other hand. This “dualism” returns later in the book when Erb describes the recent domestic debates over German military policy in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Adenauer forged Germany's first consensus: “the redefinition of German national interest within a Western set of ideals, such as economic cooperation, free trade, and shared values” (p. 34). Willy Brandt's reconciliation with the East complemented Germany's “Western identity.” At this point, according to Erb, multilateral cooperation was still a “tactical necessity,” but “the efficacy of these principles in balancing German Cold War concerns and pursuing national interests via the use of soft power in institutional settings slowly came to define the norms and shared understandings guiding German foreign policy” (p. 49). By the mid-1980s, Germany had adopted the post-sovereign identity and defined national interest in terms of promoting cooperative institutional structures. Considering the significance of this transformation for Erb's argument, it is puzzling that he devotes so little of his book to examining the process that produced this new identity. He provides compelling evidence that something had changed by the 1980s, but he does not adequately answer the important question: What caused this change?

In the post–Cold War era, German leaders defied realist predictions and strengthened their dedication to European integration. The apparent “militarization” of German foreign policy (e.g., the decisions to support U.S. military action in Kosovo and to send German troops to Afghanistan) has been mistakenly interpreted as a break with the post-sovereign identity; instead, Germany's “new” security policy “allowed both Kohl and Schroeder to engineer an adaptation of German foreign policy to a new and very different environment while maintaining the norms and principles guiding that policy” (p. 177).

The current U.S.-German rift is best understood as a clash between Germany's post-sovereign identity and the “U.S. realist/power-politics foreign policy identity” (p. 184). Erb argues that this division was overshadowed by the Cold War. But with the frustration of U.S. unilateralism and the broadening of Germany's foreign policy horizon, it was inevitable that Germany's determined multilateralism would generate tension between Washington and Berlin: “At the start of the twenty-first century the Germans have become Wilsonian, and the Americans practitioners of Bismarckian realpolitik” (p. 212).

Erb's concise history provides strong empirical support for constructivism, but one of the few shortcomings of German Foreign Policy is that in his eagerness to dismiss realism, he does not present a fair description of the realists' explanation of the national self-interest behind Germany's “European identity.” For example, he never mentions Timothy Garten Ash's (1993) impressive work In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent. Nonetheless, Erb has made an extremely useful contribution to the literature on German foreign policy. He makes a solid case that there is something different about German foreign policy and that the rest of the world would be well served to examine Germany's uniqueness: “By historical irony, the most nationalist state of the early twentieth century may be in a position to play a leadership role in moving the international system away from the kind of myopic national self-interest that has dominated world politics to this day” (p. 226).