Multilateralism, German Foreign Policy and Central Europe

Claus Hofhansel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134225781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How does the foreign policy of reunified Germany differ from the West German strong commitment to multilateralism?
Multilateralism, German Foreign Policy and Central Europe focuses on German relations with the Czech Republic and Poland in order to investigate the changes and continuities in German foreign policy following the Cold War. After a theoretical introduction and an overview of multilateralism in German foreign policy. This book analyzes the 'high politics' of German foreign policy towards Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Poland, focusing on the main diplomatic agreements negotiated after 1945. The next two chapters address the legacy of the past in contemporary Czech-German and Polish-German relations, including the compensation for victims of the Nazi regimes and the rights of ethnic German minorities. Then the book shifts its emphasis to the future of German relations with its eastern neighbours, and EU enlargement in particular.
This scholarly volume will interest all students and researchers of German foreign policy and Central European politics.

1 Explaining support for multilateralism

Post-World War II (West) German foreign policy was distinctive in two ways. First, Germany showed great reluctance to use force abroad. In the 1990s this antimilitarist posture partially eroded, but only partially, as German military personnel participated in a variety of missions outside of the traditional NATO area. Furthermore, even though German pilots flew missions in the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, German forces took part in a multilateral effort. This “reflexive support for an exaggerated multilateralism” is the second, and arguably most important, distinctive characteristic of German foreign policy and the focus of this book.¹ More specifically, this book will analyze German policy toward Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Poland in a set of case studies involving the history of diplomatic negotiations between Germany and its two eastern neighbors from the 1960s until the 1990s, disputes over the compensation of Czech and Polish victims of Nazi crimes, the rights of ethnic Germans in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the German position in the EU enlargement negotiations.

There are a number of studies on German foreign policy which have found considerable continuity in German policy across the Cold War divide, despite a radically changed international environment.² To some extent, though, the fact that there has been a fair amount of continuity in German foreign policy should not be so surprising since simple institutional inertia may at least partially explain why German policy makers have not given up on policies that have served Germany well for decades. Thus, German policy toward the Czech Republic and Poland is a particularly interesting case since a record of institutionalized cooperation was not (yet) in place by the early 1990s. There is also a historical basis for distinguishing between German policies toward Western and Eastern Europe. In the interwar period Weimar governments were willing to consider multilateral arrangements with Western European countries, but in the East, and Poland in particular, Germany pursued revisionist policies.³ This study also allows me to compare German policy toward Poland with German policy toward the Czech Republic, which is significant since German-Czech reconciliation lagged behind similar efforts with Poland.

A study of German policy toward Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Poland is also important because German–Czech and German–Polish relations have been among the most sensitive relationships in German foreign policy this century. In fact, their repercussions reached far beyond the three countries directly involved. The infamous Munich Agreement of 1938 not only became a national trauma for Czechs, but American foreign policy makers from Truman to George Bush, Snr have invoked the “lessons of Munich” to justify American military intervention from East Asia to the Middle East.⁴ World War II began in Europe on September 1, 1939 when a German navy ship fired the first shots against the Polish garrison at Danzig. On a more positive note, the most potent symbolic gesture of West German détente policy occurred on December 7, 1970 when Willy Brandt kneeled in front of the monument for the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the government of united Germany negotiated new treaties to replace the détente era treaties of the 1970s and to put the relationships with its eastern neighbors on a new basis.

In the aftermath of German reunification, academics, policy makers and journalists raised a number of questions, such as whether Germany would lose interest in Western integration and once again turn its gaze toward the East. Furthermore, given that falling boundaries between East and West and the reorientation of Central and Eastern European economies toward Western Europe were bound to result in increased economic opportunities for German firms, would Germany once again seek to exploit its economic influence in the region for a variety of other purposes? These questions fit into a broader debate which has centered around the relative significance of interests, institutions and norms, including collective memories as a source of norms, for explaining foreign policy. Will the changed international environment of the post-Cold War era result eventually in a renewed German pursuit of traditional great power politics, or will Germany remain a “tamed” or “reluctant” power due to either its deep enmeshment in European institutions or its aversion to militarism and unilateralism rooted in a changed political culture?⁵ Applied to German policy toward the Czech Republic and Poland, Emil Nagengast has argued

that the [German] government's policies have demonstrated an unmistakable break with past nationalist priorities. The promotion of European institutions as the defining feature of post-Cold War foreign policies concerning east Europe strengthens the argument that German foreign policy makers have made conscious efforts to sustain the pre-1989 pattern of FRG multilateralism as the surest safeguard against a reemergence of unilateral priorities.⁶

In a study of German–Polish relations he argued that due to Germany's “European identity” Germany included the fate of Poland in its own definition of its “national” interest.⁷ Others, such as Patricia Davis, completely reject such claims. Regarding Poland, she argued that German interests have changed relatively little; what has changed is that German governments no longer use aggressive military means to achieve their goals. This change notwithstanding, Germany still seeks to advance its own narrow national interests at the expense of Polish ones.⁸

Much of the debate over German foreign policy and the larger controversy over the relative contributions of rationalist and constructivist approaches to international relations theory have been marred by a number of problems. Too many authors engage in what Jeffrey Anderson called “causal one-upmanship,” which gives primacy to either material interests, institutions or norms/ideas as the key sources of foreign policy and relegates the rest to the status of mere supplements.⁹ Furthermore, not enough attention is being paid to the conditions under which German foreign policy exhibits particular traits, e.g. unilateral versus multilateral policies.¹⁰ During the Cold War, German multilateralism had a geopolitical basis in that a semisovereign West Germany depended on the support of its Western allies, particularly in relations with the East. Furthermore, West German governments sought to reduce fears or suspicions of Germany by deeply binding themselves to multilateral institutions. In West Germany's relationships with Central and Eastern European countries, geopolitical considerations trumped economic interests. This book argues that, overall, post-Cold War German governments have continued to champion multilateral organizations and extended their multilateral approach to Germany's relations with Central and Eastern Europe, but in some areas we have witnessed a decrease in German support for multilateral principles, and on balance German governments are less willing to subordinate national economic or other domestic interests to geopolitics.

Defining multilateralism

How can we explain German support for a foreign policy committed to participation in multilateral organizations and to multilateral principles of conduct in the past and assess the likelihood of continued support for such policies in the future? One difficulty in answering this question is that the term multilateralism can refer to different things. At a minimum a multilateralist foreign policy is distinct from its bilateral or unilateral alternatives because it requires three or more states to coordinate their policies. A thicker alternative to this thin definition “may imply a deeper, rule-bound form of cooperation, whereby independent countries agree to coordinate their conduct in a particular realm according to certain principles, norms and procedures.”¹¹ James Caporaso, following Ruggie, has spelled out the meaning of this thick alternative by defining multilateralism as “an organizing principle [of international life] . . . distinguished from other forms by three properties: indivisibility, generalized principles of conduct, and diffuse reciprocity.”¹² The best illustration of indivisibility is the principle governing collective security that an attack on any one member is treated as an attack on all members. In international trade the most-favored nation principle is a good example of generalized (nondiscriminatory) principles of conduct in contrast to the discriminatory Nazi trade policies of the 1930s. Diffuse reciprocity differs from specific reciprocity in that the grantor of a benefit does not expect the grantee to reciprocate in the short term.

In principle it is possible to distinguish multilateral foreign policy strategies from the goals of foreign policy, which may be focused on narrow national interests, the interests of the international community of states, or the interests of humanity as a whole.¹³ In practice this distinction frequently breaks down since a multilateral strategy may become an end in itself. Thus, analyses of German foreign policy frequently do not clearly distinguish between goals and strategy and instead associate multilateral strategies with broad internationalist rather than narrow nationalist goals. During the Cold War, West German governments assiduously avoided “going it alone” and tended to define German interests in the European Community, for example, in relatively broad terms. After the end of the Cold War the key question became whether this would continue to be the case.

Explaining multilateral preferences

In broad terms, there are two ways to account for support for multilateral policies. First, states may support multilateral policies because these policies are in their instrumental interest. Second, states support multilateral policies because such policies fit broadly held norms or a country's foreign policy culture. Institutional arguments may play a role in either interest- or norm/culture-based accounts as institutions either facilitate such policies or make their adoption more difficult.

Interests

Realists emphasize the centrality of differing distributions of power defined in terms of material capabilities, such as the size of the economy and military strength. In an anarchic environment states will change their behavior in response to changes in the international distribution of power. Thus, a common realist argument is that unilateralism rather than multilateralism is “the default strategy of great powers.”¹⁴ The reasoning behind this argument is fairly straightforward. As Moravcsik put it:

Multilateral commitments tie governments down to common rules and procedures designed to promote reciprocal adjustment. In deciding whether to enter into a multilateral arrangement of this kind, rational governments must make a cost-benefit calculation as compared with unilateral or bilateral alternatives. For any given state, the costs of multilateralism lie in the necessity for each participant to sacrifice a measure of unilateral or bilateral policy autonomy or legal sovereignty in order to impose a uniform policy. All other things being equal, the more isolated and powerful a state – that is, the more efficiently it can achieve its objectives by unilateral or bilateral means – the less it gains from multilateral cooperation.¹⁵

Even if unilateralism is the default strategy of great powers this does not necessarily mean that great powers consistently favor unilateralist strategies. On any given issue the benefits of a multilateral strategy may outweigh its costs in terms of lost sovereignty or autonomy.

The arguments discussed so far tend to infer what a state's interests might be on the basis of its capabilities (power). A more direct way to analyze state preferences is to examine the preferences of German political actors and how the political process aggregates these preferences. Following Moravcsik, we would then be able to explain “variation in the substantive content of foreign policy.”¹⁶ Given that the preferences and relative influence of domestic actors vary across issues, there is no reason to assume that a given actor consistently favors (or opposes) multilateral strategies across different issue areas. Thus, labor unions, for example, might favor a multilateral trade policy but bilateral agreements on immigration issues.

The role of domestic institutions

Understanding the preferences of different actors is not enough, though. Different institutional arrangements may handicap or favor the effective representation of different actors. Peter Cowhey has argued that, for multilateralism to work, great powers need to be able to make credible commitments.¹⁷ This ability in turn depends on a state's domestic political system, and its electoral system in particular. More specifically, Cowhey claims that:

Multilateralism will be more credible if (1) the structure of political competition in the country (e.g. typ...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Multilateralism, German Foreign Policy and Central Europe
• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1   Explaining support for multilateralism
• 2   German multilateralism in East and West
• 3   From the “policy of movement” toward reconciliation
• 4   The diplomacy of compensation for Eastern European victims of Nazi crimes
• 5   German minorities in Poland and the Czech Republic
• 6   Germany and the eastern enlargement of the EU
• 7   Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index