A few months after German unification and the end of the Cold War, the United States led a coalition of states into Operation Desert Storm, a large-scale military operation to force Iraq out of Kuwait, which it had invaded and annexed. Referring to lessons learned from its history of military aggression, Germany refused to make any military contribution to the operation. Since then, however, Germany’s reluctance and antimilitarism have given way to deployments of the Bundeswehr to military interventions as a widely accepted, normal practice for German policy makers. This “curious expansion of involvement abroad by the German armed forces” (p. 3) is the puzzle that Frank Stengel addresses in The Politics of Military Force: Antimilitarism, Ideational Change, and Post-Cold War German Security Discourse.
Stengel argues convincingly that the changes in German security discourse and practice are not inevitable adjustments to any functional requirements of a changing security environment. Drawing on the Essex School of critical discourse analysis, he argues that “a particular, contingent representation of reality within the German security discourse, rather than reality itself” (p. 10), provides the key to understanding the normalization of armed force abroad in Germany.
The book’s first two chapters provide an in-depth introduction to poststructuralist theory and methodology that is meant “to engage with a general IR audience, including scholars skeptical of poststructuralist approaches” (p. 56). These two chapters, which account for nearly half of the book, indeed stand out for their accessibility, and I recommend them as a reading assignment for courses in (critical) security studies. Stengel provides a lucid and sophisticated theoretical framework, as well as fundamental reflections, on the nature of a poststructuralist approach to foreign policy change.
The remaining three chapters examine the transformation of German security discourse empirically in three steps: chapter 3 shows that in the early 1990s, floating signifiers such as peace, military force, and alliance solidarity (p. 122) were rearticulated in a way that made the use of military force, previously associated with tyranny, compatible with Germany’s self-image as a peaceable nation. Chapter 4 argues that, in a next step, comprehensive security emerged as a project that tore down boundaries between the use of force, conflict prevention, and development, redefining military and nonmilitary instruments as equally useful, appropriate, and normal. After 9/11, “comprehensive security” further morphed into “networked security,” as discussed in chapter 5. According to Stengel, “networked security” is an expanded version of “comprehensive security” and combines military and nonmilitary instruments: it emphasizes “threats as direct physical security threats instead of uncertain risks” (p. 158).
The text corpus that Stengel analyzes empirically comprises the plenary debates in parliament on external security between 1987 and 2013. The empirical chapters show that this corpus is sufficiently rich to trace the transformation of the German security discourse over a period of 25 years. These chapters achieve their aim of demonstrating how traditionally antimilitarist demands, such as calls for civilian conflict prevention, were rearticulated and contributed to the normalization of military force in Germany.
Stengel’s book contributes to a growing body of literature that—correctly in my view—treats security policy change not as inevitable adjustments to a country’s changing environment, but as the result of political decisions that reflect value commitments, worldviews, and the expectations of the domestic public as well as allied states. Stengel’s contribution is theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich. In the remainder of this review, however, I want to zoom in on what I see as two weaknesses.
First, Stengel’s conceptualization of the puzzle misses interesting nuances. His commitment to poststructuralism discourages an analysis of decisions, missions, troop levels, mandates, caveats, and rules of engagement and instead directs him to focus on the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse that made all of this change possible in the first place. A closer look at the details of Germany’s interventionism, however, raises doubts about Stengel’s conceptualization of the puzzle as a “transformation away from military restraint…with German participation in multinational military operations increasing both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the level of intensity” (p. 199), a tendency that he considers to be “unbroken” (p. 199). However, in quantitative terms, the number of deployed German troops has been declining after reaching a peak in the late 2000s. In qualitative terms, Germany has made decisions both against and in favor of participation in military operations. Its refusal to support the 2003 Iraq War and the 2011 intervention in Libya are, of course, mentioned in Stengel’s book, but they are not used to rephrase the puzzle from how military interventions have become normal to how (or why) some have become accepted whereas others (still) have not. In a similar vein, a closer look at mandates, rules of engagement, and practices in conflict zones would have qualified the picture of an unbroken tendency to increasing military engagements, providing a more nuanced picture instead.
Second, Stengel’s commitment to poststructuralism makes him examine Germany by and large in isolation from other states. References to other countries are only made at the outer edges of the argument; for example, when stating that “the counterterrorism discourse in Germany is significantly different from the US discourse of the ‘war on terror’” (p. 186). Such ad hoc references notwithstanding, Stengel emphasizes that at the center of the analysis are articulations, which can and should only be interpreted by someone familiar with the nuances of the language under study who can fully decipher the processes of meaning-making. This is a considerable methodological barrier to anyone who is not a native speaker. From this perspective, events and developments outside Germany are relevant only to the extent and in the way that they are articulated by German policy makers. To be sure, Stengel acknowledges the “close interconnectedness of national, international, and transnational discourses” and shows “how speakers in the German Bundestag draw on other discourses and statements by various external authorities for intertextual legitimacy” (p. 187). However, the poststructuralist methodology implies a methodological nationalism that acts as a barrier to comparisons with similar countries and thus to a broader contextualization of German (post)-antimilitarism. Of course, we do not know what a poststructuralist analysis of the security discourses in countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, or Poland would find, and whether it would make the discourse in Germany look any different.
What available comparative studies show, however, are remarkable similarities in the interventionism of those states that are typically subsumed under “the West”: the “dramatic transformation” (Sebastian Enskat and Carlo Masala, International Security: An Introduction, 2013, quoted affirmatively on p. 3) of the armed forces then no longer appears as a puzzle for students of German antimilitarism but rather as a general development in “Western” democracies. To be sure, comparative analyses have also demonstrated the importance of country-specific features and path-dependencies. Nevertheless, to what extent changes are indeed country specific or rather part of a broader movement requires comparative research—or at least references to comparative studies—which are difficult to integrate into Stengel’s poststructuralist framework.
This criticism also applies to Stengel’s claim that coloniality is an indispensable analytical category for making sense of German military operations (p. 202f.). He argues that Germany’s colonial past had a significant effect despite its relatively short duration, and that “colonial arguments continue to be reproduced not only in German media discourse but even in educational practices in school…which is precisely how arguments drawing on colonial rationality (e.g., for interventions) appear convincing, because they are familiar in light of sedimented practices” (p. 29). Germany is indeed a particularly interesting case to further elaborate a postcolonial argument. In his famous book, Orientalism, Edward Said viewed German scholarship on the East much less critically than that of their French and British counterparts. What is more, German history includes not only a period as a colonizer but also, and more recently, the experience of being liberated from a fascist dictatorship by military force and subsequent periods of military occupation and semi-sovereignty (with further interesting variations between East and West Germany). The challenge for a postcolonial approach is to make plausible why the more remote period as a colonial state should be more influential on current discourse and practices than the more recent experiences and discursive interventions to deliberately break with its past.
The elaboration of a postcolonial argument about German interventionism would also benefit from a comparative perspective. If, as Stengel suggests, a country’s own colonial history plays indeed a prominent role in accounting for contemporary military actions, comparisons with the interventionism of countries in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe would be highly interesting. Because these countries’ histories and collective memories are much closer to having been the object of colonialism than to being a colonial power themselves, the challenge for a postcolonial approach is to show that their interventionism indeed differs from Germany’s.
