History and Foreign Policy in France and Germany

Ulrich Krotz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230243989
• eBook ISBN: 9780230353954
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do states similar in size, resources and capabilities significantly differ in their basic orientations and actions across major domains in foreign policy, security and defense? This book addresses this important question by analyzing the major differences between the foreign policies of France and Germany over extended periods of time.

1

Historical Domestic Construction

States and countries, even if similar in a range of important respects or geographically close, frequently differ significantly in how they think of themselves and their proper and seemingly natural role and place in the world. With the background of dissimilar historical experiences and rooted in dominant interpretations of their meaning and political implications, such particular types of domestic construction relate to prevalent views of self and purpose. These may be understood as domestic aspects of national role conceptions (NRCs). As internal reference systems, elements of national role and purpose affect the formation of national interests and foreign policies. They may do so through three distinct causal mechanisms: prescription, proscription, and influences on preferences for a particular process or style of interest definition and policy-making. The core elements and characteristic vocabulary of such historical domestic construction can be extracted from various types of empirical data.

Historically rooted domestic construction

Domestically held political self-views or self-understandings regarding the proper role and purpose of one’s state in the international arena may properly be captured and comprehended as aspects of NRCs. Such domestic constructions are products of historical experiences and memories, and of dominant interpretations of their meaning and political implications. Typically, they feature specific historical reference points. Historical domestic constructions may be broken down into a few core components, centrally defining such self-views. They typically come with characteristic vocabulary that both reflects and substantiates these core elements of domestic construction, and elucidates and mirrors their meaning.

In order to understand other collectivities’ goals and actions, insisted German President von Weizsäcker, it is necessary to grasp their “self-comprehension” or “political self-understanding.”¹ Such understandings of self and purpose are historically shaped and transmitted.² To a large degree, they are products of historical experiences and memories, and the interpretations of their meaning and implications. Since historical experiences and their interpretations differ across states and nations, the central elements of such domestic-level constructions often vary even across otherwise similar or proximate states.

As internally anchored historical creations, historical domestic constructions are neither invariably fixed nor immutable across time. They appear, develop, and become dominant during one time period. They may change, decay, or recede into history during another period—and have historically done so. Yet, neither are they purely transient phenomena that quickly disappear. Often, they display great tenacity and prove to have amazingly durable “attitudinal attribute[s].”³ This frequent general stability over time makes historical domestic constructions, as key elements of national role and purpose, a useful analytic concept.

Whereas role views may be robust and unambiguous, at times they may also be politically contested or involve uncertainty. There may be “domestic disputes what one’s role implies, what one’s role is, or who one is or should be.”⁴ Views of the collective self and the nation’s proper role and purpose may not always be “clear-cut, orderly, logical, or in any other way standardized.”⁵ Sometimes, there may be tensions among different role aspects;⁶ and role conceptions and their implications might not necessarily always be clear across policy areas or with respect to particular political questions. Fundamental contestation in substance, basic tensions among different role components, or ambiguous implications can at times undermine the concept’s explanatory value, or render it indeterminate for a given case. For analytic use, historically rooted domestic constructions require a minimum of stability in place (or country) as well as across time. However, major aspects of historical domestic construction are often fairly clear-cut and robust, and what they mean and imply in terms of national goals or policies, or what they rule out for a particular country, time, and issue area, largely seems evident.

Historical domestic role constructions encapsulate “what we want and what we do as a result of who we think we are, want to be, and should be,” in light of national historical experiences and dominant interpretations of their meaning. They cannot be reduced to the interests or ideologies of dominant groups, parties, or single persons in or near power, or to the organizational features of state and society. They are not merely the sum or the overlapping consensus of individual or group interests. Nor do they simply or directly derive from the imperatives of the anarchic structure of the international system.

At a minimum, such historically rooted domestic constructions are prominently held among national political and administrative elites across a variety of public organizational units of the state, and by the relevant foreign policy communities, which encompass advisors, researchers, academics, and journalists. The particular mix of such personnel at or near the political authority centers, typically involved in thinking about and defining national interests and formulating policies, will vary across states. Historical domestic constructions’ impact on interests and policies will become stronger as they gain wider public appreciation and “become part of the political culture of a nation.”⁷ Yet, a strong elite consensus might be more consequential than a broader but shallow public agreement.⁸

This book’s conceptual formulation of constructions of self, role, and purpose emphasizes the domestic and the historical. The domestic level is the main locus for memory and interpretation of national history. This formulation enables us to take a distinctly comparative perspective on both the substance and the effects of such historical domestic construction. It directly links research on national role and purpose to the main currents of analytically oriented contemporary political science. Thereby, it endows the study of foreign policy and international relations with historical and temporal depth.

Causal mechanisms and impact

As basic elements of national role and purpose, historical domestic constructions affect interests and policies in particular through three causal mechanisms: prescription, proscription, and influencing preferences for a certain process or style of interest definition and policy-making.⁹ Such domestic constructions have prescriptive impact when they motivate wills, goals, and actions. The prescription mechanism makes some interests and policies intuitive and plausible. Thus induced, certain positions or courses of action appear instinctively adequate or practicable. The prescription mechanism might help to generate favorite answers to complex questions or diffuse problems.

Yet, historical domestic constructions also rule out or divert from defining possible positions or policies. They make interests and policy options intuitively implausible, or categorically exclude them as wrong or unacceptable. They may put them outside realistic consideration, or make them hardly thinkable or altogether unthinkable. These are historical constructions’ proscriptive effects. Historical domestic constructions are often powerful tools for predicting what actors will not want and not do and will not consider optional or feasible. They proscribe as much as they prescribe.

Historical domestic constructions of proper role and purpose further influence interests regarding a certain process or style of foreign policy-making. This includes the entire procedural range of fixing positions and formulating policies, both within the national government and with governments of other states. The substance of an interest or policy aside, role components thus affect preferences for certain ways of doing things and against possible other ways. For example, French domestic role construction frequently nourishes an autonomous style of policy- and decision-making that may at times appear solipsistic and impetuous to outsiders.

However, it is not always necessary to overemphasize the differences between these three pathways through which domestic construction components translate into national interests and policies. Sometimes a question of formulation may apply. For example, whether Germany’s internal construction of proper behavior tended to proscribe erratic unilateral policies or induce a slow and incrementalist procedural style of policy formulation may be semantic. In other instances, however, only one of the three mechanisms will be operative.

Just as historical domestic constructions of role and purpose affect interests and policies through different causal pathways, they may also do so with different shades of causal immediacy or directness. Such constructions belong to those phenomena that do not necessarily cause outcomes in “the sense that a bullet through the heart causes death.”¹⁰ Frequently, elements of historical domestic construction will “guide,” “inform,” or “inspire” wants and deeds, but not mechanically produce them. At times, historical domestic construction will establish central tendencies or define the range of possibility or options.¹¹ Arriving at political positions and policies from more or less stable role elements frequently involves interpretation, which in turn undermines causal mechanics.¹² And yet, historical domestic construction often exerts astoundingly unmediated causal impact, making some positions and policies intuitively desirable or almost mechanically ruling out possible others. Historical domestic constructions’ proscriptive effects, for example, might be strikingly immediate in making something inconceivable or almost determining a categorical “not-want.” They thus might almost mechanically prevent something from emerging.¹³

It is not necessarily intuitive that the same social phenomenon might function with varied grades of causal immediacy. In part, the matter is empirical and involves tracing the processes through which historical constructions translate into interests and policies in concrete political or historical instances. However, the matter also touches issues of epistemology and the nature of causation in things social that cannot all be settled on empirical grounds alone.¹⁴

Finally, the overall causal impact of historical domestic construction will depend on the particular mix of causal factors at work in a given policy area and time. Only in rare instances will historical domestic constructions be the only relevant cause. More commonly, historical construction effects will mingle with other causal forces in molding national interests and foreign policies. These might bolster, qualify, or undermine the impact of domestic historical construction at each specific time period and policy issue. Employed by themselves, as in this study, historical domestic constructions of role and purpose may provide certain analytic leverage on some political and historical questions and will reach their explanatory limits with others.¹⁵

Frequently, the interests and policies that derive from the substance or content of particular historical domestic constructions are considered normal and right, or generally are perceived as intuitively plausible and appropriate within the respective country. “National interest” thereby signifies what states want at a given time or time period and policy domain. It comprises their goals, objectives, and positions. This understanding of national interest is common among scholars of diverse theoretical provenances, although realists and constructivists tend to employ “interests” while liberals may prefer the terms “preferences” or “state tastes.”¹⁶ Along with “goals” and “desires,” in this study I consider all of these terms synonymous. National interests thus viewed may be products of a variety of factors and influences, including systemic pressures, international political contexts, various domestic constructions, domestic political culture, party ideologies, domestic economic interests and societal pressures, and the inclinations of individuals at or near the political authority centers. It is governments or governmental entities that execute the ultimate defining of national interests at a given time and in a policy issue area.

“Policy” is that which states do. Policies are state actions. States act based on what they want—that is, their interests drive policies. However, how directly or immediately interests translate into policies also depends on the particular international political constraints and opportunities in a given policy domain and time or time period. When NRCs influence interests, therefore, this kind of domestic construction informs what states want; they then act in light of the relevant constraints and opportunities. Just as they authoritatively define national interests, governments or governmental entities formulate and ultimately adopt policies.

Sources of data and method of extraction

In extracting key components of French and German historical domestic construction of national role and purpose, I have drawn from a wide range of empirical sources, including official publications and statements, speeches, memoirs of political leaders, newspaper articles, and diverse accounts from the two states’ foreign policy communities. Additionally, I have drawn from secondary French and German foreign policy literatures from both sides of the North Atlantic.¹⁷ Chapter 3 outlines the major French and German historical experiences and France and Germany’s involvement in Europe and the world, while Chapter 4 presents the key elements and vocabulary of French and German historically rooted domestic construction from the later 1950s to the mid-1990s. These serve as explanatory factors (or independent variables) in the analyses in Chapters 5 to 7 of France’s and Germany’s basic orientations and policies in foreign po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Historical Domestic Construction
• 2. Historical Construction, International Relations Theory, and Foreign Policy
• 3. Out of History and Time: Neighbors with Different Routes and Pathways
• 4. Elements of French and German Role Constructions, 1958–1998: Core Components, Vocabulary, and Historical Reference Points
• 5. Impact and Implications (1): Milieu Goals and Alliance Politics
• 6. Impact and Implications (2): Nuclear Deterrent and Overall Force Structures
• 7. Impact and Implications (3): Deployment, Armament, Arms
• 8. Into the New Millennium: Legacies and Change
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index