German Politics and Society

The current issue of German Politics and Society begins with Rainer

Baumann’s insightful article, “The Transformation of German Multilateralism:

Changes in Foreign Policy Discourse since Unification.”

When German foreign policy is being described, a reference to multilateralism

is rarely ever omitted. Together with Westbindung, restraint

in using military force, and a trading-state orientation, Germany’s

preference for multilateral settings is recognized as one of the central

elements of its foreign policy. In recent years, a number of studies

have shown that, in contrast to realist expectations from the early

1990s, the more powerful unified Germany has continued to embrace

this multilateralism. This applies to Germany’s willingness to bind

itself to NATO and other European and Euro-Atlantic security institutions,

1 to Germany’s policy within and vis-à-vis the EU,2 and to its

foreign policy on a global scale.

In the years since unification, Germany’s political parties have faced

a number of formidable challenges. They range from incorporating

the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Federal

Republic’s political processes, reassessing Germany’s role in the

wider world, overcoming gridlock on many pressing policy questions

at home (perhaps best understood as the overcoming of the Reformstau),

to finding a way out of Germany’s much maligned economic

malaise.1 Such challenges have had a not inconsiderable effect on the

German party system, the end product of which has been that this

system, once a bastion of cast-iron stability, has become characterized

by diversity and genuine electoral competition in a way that it has

not been since the late 1950s. Therefore, the electoral position of the

much-vaunted Volksparteien, if perhaps not their control of the political

process, has slipped considerably.

The German model of political economy that had been an enviable

alternative to the liberal market until the late 1980s in the literature of

political economy was under serious structural crisis throughout the

1990s, causing serious doubts about its viability. Many neoliberals

and industrial experts in Germany began to doubt whether Germany

was an attractive place for business activity, initiating the Standort

Deutschland debate. Even German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder conceded

“the end of German model.”1 Many political economists and

journalists expected and recommended imitating the American

model of a liberal market. Prominent German newspapers and magazines

such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, and Die

Woche ran articles titled “The Discovery of America” and “Jobwunder

in Amerika.” Wolfgang Streeck, one of the main proponents of the

German model, expected the convergence of the German economy

toward an American-led liberal market economy under globalization

because of “a secular exhaustion of the German model.” Streeck

believed that the postwar German model was based on the politics

between labor and capital within a national boundary, but globalization

represents a fluidity of financial and labor markets that extricates

whatever coordination has been nationally accomplished.

Wolf-Dieter Eberwein and Karl Kaiser, Germany’s New Foreign Policy: Decision-Making in an Independent World (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001)

Adrian Hyde-Price, Germany & European Order: Enlarging NATO and the EU (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)

Matthias Kaelberer, Money and Power in Europe: The Political Economy of European Monetary Cooperation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001)

Sascha Anderson, Sascha Anderson (Cologne, 2002)

Jörg Magenau, Christa Wolf. Eine Biographie (Berlin, 2002)

Christa Wolf, Leibhaftig. Erzahlung (Munich, 2002)

Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, Mary Whittall, trans. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001)

Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces; Artifacts of German Memory 1870-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York/Oxford: Berg, 2000)

Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001)

Daniel Levy, Yfaat Weiss, ed., Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002)

Barbara Marshall, The New Germany and Migration in Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)

Jan Motte, Rainer Ohliger, Anne von Oswald, ed., 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik – 50 Jahre Einwanderung: Nachkriegsgeschichte als Migrationsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1999)

David Rock and Stefan Wolff, ed., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic since 1945 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002)

Stefan Wolff, ed., German Minorities in Europe: Ethnic Identity and Cultural Belonging (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000)

Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolzfus, ed., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)