The book features extremely detailed elaborations of the three theoretical approaches, complete with clear delineations of the expectations of each approach for each of four issue areas in German foreign policy: security policy within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, European Union (EU) constitutional policy, trade policy with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and EU, and human rights policy in the United Nations. The empirical chapters are tightly integrated, with each structured in the same methodical manner: The specific predictions of each approach are delineated, the actual foreign policy behavior of Germany in the particular issue area is detailed, and the approaches are evaluated on the basis of how well they fared, with the results presented in convenient table form. The overall conclusion of the volume is that constructivism, with its prediction that foreign policy will be norm-compliant, provides a better explanation of German foreign policy after reunification than either neorealism or utilitarian liberalism.

But this conclusion is not as secure as it might seem at first glance. For one thing, the volume's reconstruction of the three alternative approaches is somewhat strange, strange enough that partisans of any of the approaches might not recognize their positions in the versions presented. Many utilitarian liberals, for example, might be surprised to see so much emphasis being placed on the “politicaladministrative system” (pp. 73–77) instead of a precise focus on the interests of private actors and groups. Many neorealists—including Kenneth Waltz, who has repeatedly distinguished between a theory of international politics and a theory of foreign policy—might be quite surprised to learn that neorealism predicts a state's foreign policy behavior on the basis of “its power position in the international system” (pp. 37–38). And many constructivists might be startled to learn that constructivism deals with the independent influence of “ideas, values, or norms” understood as independent variables (p. 106). The point is not that these reconstructions are wrong but that they are (perhaps necessarily) partial inasmuch as considerable debate about precisely these issues characterizes each of these approaches in the field as a whole; the authors in this volume cut through that debate with their reconstructions, but the results might not satisfy all readers.

This problem is particularly acute with the treatment of constructivism. By converting norms into independent ideational variables, the authors back away from the agent-structure coconstitution that lies at the heart of many constructivist analyses. Their subsequent effort “to distinguish analytically structural variables from agency variables and to examine their impact separately” and thus “to explain German foreign policy behavior on the basis of those norms that are firmly embedded in... social structures” (p. 115) seems less constructivist and more structural idealist. Any approach that takes agents and structures as mutually constitutive is bound to examine both sides of the agent-structure relationship; otherwise, there is no construction in the account, but only a more or less deterministic response to an established and internalized norm. Hence, at least arguably, what the authors test as “constructivist hypotheses” are not really constructivist at all. While they acknowledge a debate within neorealism about the status of foreign policy, their synthetic “constructivist” account makes no such admission, which is somewhat unfortunate.

In addition, the testing of the three approaches is undertheorized. The main test of each of the three theories is a “congruence procedure” focusing on “the degree of consistency between the predicted and observed values of the dependent variable” in each case study (p. 308). While each of the case study chapters carries out this task admirably, it is striking that a volume characterized by so much methodological rigor provides no justification for this neopositivist stance. This would seem a necessity given that a good deal of constructivist work proceeds from a critique of precisely this logic of explanation.

The authors also derive additional observable implications about causal processes for each of the three theories, and then engage in process tracing in an effort to falsify or validate those expectations. But the case studies uniformly include “the preferences each actor holds” as a process implication of utilitarian liberalism (p. 309), which seems odd given that preferences are an independent variable for utilitarian liberalism (p. 304). An independent variable cannot by definition be part of the causal process linking independent and dependent variables, and it also remains unclear why the values of the independent variable should be an observable implication of the theory to begin with. And although the process implication derived from constructivism is that a particular normative expectation should have played a concrete role in bringing about a policy, the case studies evaluate this claim largely through interviews in which policymakers' public and private claims are used to determine whether the norm in question represented “a genuine German preference” (p. 159). But this tells us little about the power of the norm and a great deal about the power of individual preferences, which is almost more of a liberal claim than a constructivist one.

Even with these tensions, German Foreign Policy Since Unification does succeed admirably in its central task: demonstrating that predictions about Germany returning to “normal” great-power politics have not come to pass in the decade since reunification. The volume also provides the clearest sketch to date of what a neopositivist constructivism would look like. But bearing in mind the adage about new wine and old wineskins, I cannot help but wonder whether careful, nuanced, empirical work like that presented here might not find a more congenial methodological framework in a form of causal analysis more focused on dynamic mechanisms than on static correlations.