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Introduction
This book develops a novel approach to analysing discourse in IR and uses it to explain German foreign policy in the Iraq crisis of 2002/2003. It starts from an interest in the perplexingly inconsistent and emotional character of Germany’s response to the US push for war on Iraq. While located in a particular empirical context, I understand this problem as intimately related to broader theoretical questions concerning relations between subjects (social actors) and the social worlds within which they are embedded. The first part addresses these general issues by marrying existing discursive work in IR with social theory inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The product of this synthesis is a framework that reaches beyond the usual focus on meaning-production and is attentive also to the affective force that pushes subjects to take particular decisions. The overarching theoretical argument and contribution of this book reside in rethinking foreign policy as a practice that is both discursive and affective, and that results from the contextual interweaving of discourses and affects that occurs in and through contingent decisions.
The theoretical arguments are then translated into guidelines for practical research and utilised to enlighten the case of Germany’s policies in the Iraq crisis. I show that the inconsistencies in Germany’s actions – opposing the war diplomatically while supporting it logistically – had their roots in the discursive and affective disordering of Germany’s political space. Put simply, German politicians wanted to be too many things at the same time – loyal allies to the US, as well as good multilateralists and promoters of peace. These different principles and scripts were all crucial for the dominant understandings of Germany’s identity, to which politicians and public intellectuals were affectively attached. Yet, these principles were also plotted against each other, prompting the deeply affective experience of an identity crisis, as well as the discursive processes that would try to resolve it. The contradictions of German foreign policy then resulted from attempting to address all of these conflicting demands at the same time.
On the one hand, this book is about a few basic questions, around which it revolves and to which it keeps getting back when discussing social theory, foreign policy or the dilemmas concerning Iraq. The question of identity: Who are we? The problem of desire: What do we want? The issue of decision: How do we make our choices? On the other hand, these questions are addressed by engaging with multiple literatures, defining a range of concepts and rules and analysing a sizeable chunk of archival resources. The following pages provide an initial map of this multiplicity by defining the research problem and demonstrating its relevance, sketching the main themes and contributions and outlining the arguments of the six chapters that follow.
Problem and relevance
As the invasion army under the US leadership was attacking Iraq on 20 March 2003, Germany’s chancellor Gerhard Schröder appeared on the TV screen to address the nation. He was unusually calm, almost humble and rather statesmanlike. Leaving his masculine and combative image aside, Schröder acknowledged that he was ‘touched’ by the support that his opposition to the war enjoyed both in Germany and abroad. He regretted that ‘[t]he logic of war prevailed over the chances of peace’ and expected that this would lead to the suffering of thousands (Schröder 2003, p. 21). Intriguingly, while Schröder was praising peace from the screen, Germany’s territory was being used by the US air forces to facilitate and execute the attack, the Bundeswehr was patrolling the very military bases from which the war was being orchestrated and German secret service agents based in Iraq were passing intelligence to their American counterparts. In fact, Germany’s assistance went further than that of most countries of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – a member as important as Turkey, for instance, refused to allow the US army the use of her territory (Anderson 2011, p. 127). Contrary to the dominant narrative, Germany’s position on the Iraq war was far from simply ‘saying no’ to the Americans. Rather than presenting a principled choice in the name of the ‘courage to peace’ that Schröder was so keen to talk about (e.g. in Deutscher Bundestag 2003, p. 1879), it was incoherent, inconsistent and contradictory. It is intriguing that German leaders invested so much energy in opposing and attempting to prevent the war, while at the same time they accepted almost all US practical demands that made Germany a logistic crossroads for the war. This tension presents the first problem to be addressed in this book.
The second fascinating feature of the case is the highly confrontational and deeply emotional nature of the German political discourse. In fact, there was an astonishing extent of common ground between the preferences of different political camps within Germany. With the exception of a few outliers, most people would agree that Iraq had to be disarmed, German soldiers had no business fighting in Iraq, US unilateralism was wrong and international law had to be cherished as the primary tool for resolving international crises. Despite this widespread consensus, Iraq appeared to have hit a nerve on a deeper level. Rather than focusing on the strategies of disarming Iraq or dealing with Saddam Hussein, the Germans spent much more time arguing passionately about their identity (similarly also Zehfuss 2007). What was apparently at stake were the very central questions of social life. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Where do we come from? Where do we go? Crucially, these questions were very often articulated as uncompromising, absolute choices with titanic consequences. It was only by opposing the war in the name of peace and multilateralism that Germany would reclaim and reaffirm her post-war identity for some and, conversely, for others it was precisely by refusing to support her principal ally in Iraq that she would damage it for good. This emotional and existential nature of the debate presents the second research problem.
Taken together, these problems define the puzzle that drives this book. They are analytically relevant, as they lead to counterintuitive scholarly insights. We usually think about foreign policies as clear and unequivocal. Therefore, more than a decade and a half after the Iraq war, the dominant narrative is that Germany ‘said no’ and comparatively little attention is paid to the discrepancies between the hardly commensurable policies of rhetorical opposition and logistic support that were implemented simultaneously (see Chapter 4 for details). Similarly, foreign policies are also typically analysed as devoid of emotions or passions: either in terms of rational calculations of national interests, or, in critical IR, as tools for symbolic reconstruction of political communities by dividing the self from the other. Nevertheless, the debate on Iraq shows that we need to take into account also the affective side of politics, which has been happening only recently and very rarely in studies dealing directly with foreign policy (Koschut 2014; Solomon 2015; Dittmer 2017). The intersection of affectivity and contradictoriness opens a broader research agenda, which challenges the notions of actorness that we usually rely on in thinking about foreign policy.
These questions are relevant also politically as they speak to problems that matter in the ‘real world’. The Iraq war was one of the defining political events of 21st century and it still serves as a major reference point in political debates in Europe, America and beyond. Digging deep into the case and uncovering the discrepancies, ambiguities and tensions is therefore also a critical enterprise, as it can help us confront and destabilise how Iraq is being used to justify present and future policies. While focusing on nation-states and military interventions may sound too traditional to many in critical IR, it is difficult to argue that these issues are no longer salient. Over the last decade, we witnessed intervention debates about Iran, Libya, Mali, Sudan, Syria and, once again, Iraq. Discussions are led and decisions taken in matters concerning the life and death of whole populations. In all of them, the example of Iraq casts a long shadow. Moreover, the problems of inconsistency and affectivity speak to a much broader array of political issues. Contradictory decisions are increasingly common, since politicians have to justify themselves to multiple different audiences, both within the increasingly fragmented domestic societies and in the ever more interconnected world. With respect to affectivity, what appeared to be a marginal issue only a few years ago returned with full force with the politics of fear, hatred and anger discernible throughout the Western world over the last few years. To be able to deal with policy contradictions and the rise of affective politics, we need to be able to understand them first. The ambition of this book, therefore, is both explanatory and critical.
Key themes and contributions
To address the problems of affectivity and contradictoriness, as well as to speak to the broader themes related to discourse, subjectivity and foreign policy, I offer a perspective inspired above all by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan. In Lacanian theory, the subject is fundamentally incomplete; split both between his or her discursive and affective sides, as well as between the different identities he or she simultaneously tries to occupy. Social and political life is seen as an interaction of fractured and incomplete subjects (both collective and individual), who are haunted by their desires for whole and stable identities. This – ultimately failing – search for identity is happening within the patterned and structured, yet also fundamentally unstable and unfinished social world. I will show that the possibility of a war in Iraq disturbed the prevalent ‘common sense’ of German foreign policy. Germany’s very identity seemed to be in crisis and under threat, opening the existential line of questioning ‘who we are’. The experience of a crisis triggers anxiety, which fuels the desire to recapture a full and stable identity that promises to anchor the subject in the uncertain world. This desire is symbolised in fantasies – narrative scenarios through which the subjects imagine the achievement of a perfect identity and the satisfaction this is supposed to bring. The inconsistence of German foreign policies can then be explained as resulting from identification with too many different – at times directly conflicting – discursive resources (rules, identities, fantasies).
These concerns relate to and resonate with multiple literatures within and beyond International Relations, with particular relevance to the three disparate debates on German foreign policy, IR theory and discourse theory. By connecting these discussions that have rarely spoken to each other, the book opens conversations and generates new insights from the often surprising and unexpected encounters. Slavoj Žižek, one of my key sources of inspiration, poses a thought-provoking question: ‘Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus […]?’ (Žižek 2005, p. ix) I fully agree and this ‘short-circuiting’ is precisely what I am doing in this book. I take a problem as classic as the foreign policy of a nation state in an ostensibly well-known case, only to unpack it through the ‘minor’ and often highly controversial optics of psychoanalytically infused debates about subjectivity, fantasy and desire. Thereby, I hope to open novel ways of understanding discourse, foreign policy and Germany’s position in the Iraq crisis that are made possible only by crossing the wires and reading the three problems together.
Closest to the empirical case is the literature on Germany’s foreign policy, to which I contribute by providing novel insights into the inconsistencies and emotional nature of German policymaking, which are made possible by grounding my account in Lacanian discourse theory. Most work on German foreign policy adopts what I would call a soft-constructivist consensus. These authors acknowledge the role of cultures, ideas and identities and broadly agree that actors participate in the construction of their social realities. The main bone of contention is whether the reunited post-1990 Germany stuck to her benign Cold War identity of a multilateralist and peaceful ‘civilian power’ (Maull 1990, 2000, 2006, 2018; Risse 2004, 2007; Berenskoetter and Giegerich 2010; Wolff 2013; Crawford and Olsen 2017), or whether it rather underwent a process of ‘normalisation’ (Crawford 2007; Dettke 2009; Bulmer and Paterson 2010; Paterson 2010; Hellmann 2011; Oppermann 2012). This scholarship has much to offer by inquiring into the societal, cultural or historical background of German policymaking. However, it is limited by its narrow theoretical scope. Both camps within the civilian power/normalisation debate are reluctant to follow their constructivist argument to its radical ontological and epistemological implications. Instead, ‘constructed’ phenomena like cultures or identities are seen as competing against the more ‘material’ issues of economic incentives or security interests. In contrast, there are only very few explicitly postpositivist and interpretivist, let alone poststructuralist and discursive accounts (Bach 1999; Zehfuss 2002, 2007; Hellmann et al. 2008; Hell-mann 2009; Nonhoff and Stengel 2014). The field is ripe for a more robust intervention grounded in critical IR theory, of which my work is a part.
Critical IR theory – especially the two subfields of discursive approaches to foreign policy and Lacanian IR – also presents the second literature engaged in this book. I contribute to it by theorising affect and decisions for a discourse-theoretical approach to foreign policy, thereby also building a bridge between established discursive work and Lacanian IR. While presenting an intellectually rich starting point for my theoretical argument, the existing discursive work in IR (Doty 1993, 1996; Campbell 1998; Diez 1999, 2001; Neumann 1999; Hansen 2006; Epstein 2008; Herschinger 2011; Nabers 2015) is limited in two respects. In its structural focus, it struggles to account for policy decisions. In its emphasis on meaning, language and the symbolic aspects of social life, it neglects the affective dimension of politics. There is now also a rapidly growing number of studies analysing international politics through a Lacanian lens (Edkins 2000, 2003; Zevnik 2009, 2016; Epstein 2011, 2013; Mandelbaum 2016; Eberle 2018, 2019; Heath-Kelly 2018). However, with the exception of Ty Solomon’s writings (Solomon 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), there are no studies interested in foreign policy – and even Solomon does not formalise the broader theoretical implications of Lacanian theory for foreign policy analysis. As I will show in this book, much can be gained by bringing discursive thinking on foreign policy and Lacanian perspectives closer together, as this gives us a more comprehensive understanding of the relations between discou...
