Germany's Foreign Policy Towards Poland and the Czech Republic
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Germany's Foreign Policy Towards Poland and the Czech Republic

Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff

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Germany's Foreign Policy Towards Poland and the Czech Republic

Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff

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This is a new exploration ofhow the events of the twentieth century still cast a shadow over relations between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.Using social constructivism theory, itprovides a comparative assessment of Germany's post-reunification relations with the Czech Republic and Poland within the framework of the contemporary alliance structure. Identifying the key actors and factors, Cordell and Wolff examine the long-standing continuity in the norms and values that underpin German foreign policy and explore the issues of borders, territory, identities, minorities and population transfers. Paying particular attention to the process of European integration and the role of the new Germany within Europe, the authors identify how new possibilities for co-operation might finally overcome legacies of the past. This pioneering study will be of particular interest to students of European politics and international studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781134201358

1The German question and German foreign policy

A conceptual introduction

Introduction

During his historic visit to Warsaw in December 1970 to sign the second of the so-called OstvertrĂ€ge, German Chancellor Willy Brandt made a historic and unprecedented gesture. During a commemorative act for the victims of the Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944 he fell to his knees in an act of apology for what Germans had done to Poland during the Second World War. Some twenty-four years later, in August 1994 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of that same uprising, German President Roman Herzog also apologized for German actions during the war in a speech in Warsaw and expressed Germany's unconditional and strong support for Poland's accession to NATO and EU. A further ten years later, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder paid respect to the heroism of those that participated in the Warsaw Uprising and to the contribution they made in liberating Europe from the Nazis. His speech, however, dealt also with a different kind of past and present. In categorically ruling out German governmental support for any claims for either restitution of property or financial compensation on the part of the Polish state to Germans expelled from Poland in the aftermath of the war and in denouncing plans to create a Centre against Expulsions in Berlin, Schröder took the opportunity to reassure Poles that, from a German perspective, there was no longer a German or any other question related to the consequences of the Second World War that remained open.
These three events, stretching over a period of three decades and across two distinct periods of European post-war history, are highly indicative of the change and continuity that characterizes German–Polish relations in particular, and Germany's relations with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in general. They emphasize the significance of history to contemporary bilateral relations and they highlight, in the public debates preceding and following each individual event, the persistence and consistency of specific norms according to which Germany has conducted its foreign policy towards Central and Eastern Europe despite problems and discord at the bilateral and German domestic levels. To the extent that these problems and divisions continue to exist, they also highlight that despite the enormous progress that has been made in achieving reconciliation between Germany and its Eastern neighbours, several aspects of the so-called German question are still of political significance with regard to Germany's relations with some of its neighbours in Eastern and Central Europe.
Their significance, however, is also of another kind. Each of the events referred to in the previous paragraph self-evidently refers to Germany's relations with Poland. For reasons that are elaborated upon elsewhere in the book, there is no single comparable event of similar nature and significance in German–Czech relations. This is astounding in more than one way. When compared with Poland, the rifts between Germany and Czechoslovakia (as of 1993, the Czech Republic) were similarly deep, the wounds inflicted by Germany on that country in the context the Second World War were as painful, and the magnitude of the post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans were, proportionately, at least as great. Yet, it took until 1973 until a treaty similar to that with Poland was concluded (and only after Soviet pressure on the Czechoslovak regime) and afterwards there was no measurable improvement in relations between the two countries. Since 1990, relations have been at best civil, and at times openly hostile, with a low point being reached with the cancellation of an official visit by Chancellor Schröder in 2001. If anything, and in clear contrast to German–Polish relations, the state and development of German–Czech relations seems to underscore the continuing significance of the so-called German question rather than its resolution even at the level of political elites.
Taking these observations as a starting point, this book explores the main determinants of German foreign policy-making and implementation in relation to Poland and the Czech Republic. Our main aim is to show the basic continuity of German Ostpolitik since the late 1960s to the present and to explain it in terms of the development of, and adherence to, a set of norms to which the overwhelming majority of the German political class and public subscribes, regardless of changes in the broader regional and international context in which Ostpolitik is formulated and implemented. This is not to say that Ostpolitik has not been affected by such changes. It fared better during periods of dĂ©tente during the Cold War and has had unprecedented success since the end of the Cold War. Rather our point is that German Ostpolitik priorities – peace, reconciliation and ‘change through rapprochement’ – have remained largely the same while the opportunities for them to succeed have at times gradually and at other times rapidly increased. Focusing on two distinct cases – Poland and the Czech Republic – allows us also to determine the degree to which opportunities created in a broader regional and international context are used to pursue the priorities set and accepted by Ostpolitik and to explain the somewhat different outcomes that they generated in relation to the current state of German–Polish and German–Czech relations.
In this first chapter, we will set out a theoretical framework for a foreign policy analysis of Ostpolitik. However, as this is intrinsically linked with the German question as such, we first need to explore the conceptual context to which this theoretical framework is then to be applied in order for it to be relevant for our subsequent analysis.

Conceptualizing the German question

From about the time of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the present, the history of Europe could be told as a history of different national questions large and small. Many are and were intimately linked to one another. Most at some point caused conflict and sometimes full-scale warfare, and all, in one way or another, related to questions of nationhood and territory. In this sense, the German question is not very different from, say, the Russian or Albanian questions. However, what distinguishes it from any other national question in Europe are the sheer extremes to which the German question has driven the continent, and on two occasions ultimately the entire world.
A single German question as such has never existed; rather, a multitude of issues have arisen from a fundamental problem of European politics, namely the fact that the territory of any German state or states has never included the entirety of the German nation. A unified German state only came into existence in the second half of the nineteenth century, stretching from Alsace and Lorraine in today's France all the way across Central Europe to East Prussia, known today as District Kaliningrad and as such part of the Russian Federation. Although this German state included some 60 million Germans at the time of its foundation, large groups of ethnic Germans remained outside the territory of the state. This was most obviously the case with Germans in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who, although not a majority in numerical terms and widely dispersed outside the territory of today's Republic of Austria, played a dominant role in the empire. A third group of Germans, who hardly ever figured in the national or territorial calculations of German nationalists, were the Germans of Switzerland. They had entered into a confederal state with three, significantly smaller, other ethnic groups (of French, Italian and Romansh origin) several hundred years earlier. Following a short civil war-like conflict in 1848, the Swiss federation as it exists today was formed. The only other significant group of ethnic Germans living outside the confines of these three states were those Germans who had emigrated to Russia since the middle of the eighteenth century and lived there as colonists, enjoying specific privileges granted by imperial decree.
Quite clearly, the German situation, or rather the situation of Germans, is no exception in this respect. The demarcation of borders in Europe, and particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, happened according to the interests of the great powers rather than according to the apparent distribution of ethnic groups. From the late nineteenth century, the gradual withdrawal from Europe of the Ottoman Empire and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth century created a series of new states, hardly any of which was either homogenous or contained all members of the titular ethnic group within its boundaries. The settlement patterns of diverse ethnic groups that had grown over centuries of imperial hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe would, at best, have made it extremely difficult to create states in which political and ethnic boundaries would coincide. The fact that borders were established in accordance with the interests of the great powers rendered any such attempt impossible. In addition, even though a Romantic version of nationalism had become a powerful ideology in the region, not all ethnic groups had a well-established national identity in the sense of expressing a preference for their own or any specific state at all. Instead some of them had developed strong regional identities that were, in the first instance, not focused on ethnicity. Nevertheless, nationalism had a tremendous impact on inter-ethnic relations in the region, and the three waves of state ‘creation’ – at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, after the First and Second Balkan Wars in 1912/1913, and after the First World War in 1919 – left their mark in Central and Eastern Europe by establishing ethnically plural states whose constituent ethnic groups were ill at ease with each other.
The Romantic conception of the nation held by increasing numbers of people at both mass and elite level throughout Central and Eastern Europe additionally complicated matters. It defined the nation as being based on shared cultural, linguistic and customary traits within a geographic and demographic context in which migration, colonization and conquest more than anything else had shaped the ethnic composition of the four empires. The Russian, German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires were truly multi-national entities. The German Empire stood out among them as it was a latecomer in the sense of nation-state building. By the time the first German nation-state was founded in 1871, an understanding of what the German nation was had existed for much longer: and this leads us to the ‘first set’ of German questions.
‘Where and what is Germany?’ is a common way of paraphrasing the German question, focusing on the nature and content of a German national identity, and thus on a question that is primarily directed at the Germans themselves. At the same time, however, it also gives rise to broader considerations about Germany's place and role in European and world politics. These are considerations that have been made by Germany's neighbours, and that more often than not in the twentieth century, amounted to serious concerns for the security and stability of the European and international orders. From that perspective, the German question is also about how Germany can fit into any system of states without threatening, or being perceived as threatening by, its neighbours. Many answers have been given to this particular dimension of the German question. A loose confederation of states was the answer of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. A German nation-state excluding Austria was the answer provided in 1871. A state truncated territorially and burdened by reparations was the solution decided upon in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. An enlarged Germany was the answer provided by the Munich Agreement of 1938. An occupied and subsequently divided state was in effect the chosen solution of the Potsdam Conference of 1945, and a unified Germany firmly integrated in NATO and the EU was the answer in 1990. In the long term, with the exception of the latter (so far), none of these proposed solutions to the German question proved to be stable, or even viable, although the reasons for the eventual collapse of each settlement varied considerably over time. What they all had in common was that they only partially addressed the complexity of the German question.
This complexity arises from the fact that the German question is a multidimensional phenomenon. It has been, and to some extent still is, first and foremost a political problem. As such, the German question has been about whether there should be one German nation-state or more, what the borders and internal political structures of such a state (or states) should be, with which methods nation-state building should be achieved and what consequences this would have for Europe and the world (Geiss 1990: 22). At the same time, the German question is also a cultural problem, or, more precisely, a problem of defining German culture. Related to this is the question of how to define a German identity and thus determine who is German. Obviously, the cultural and the political dimensions of the German question are inextricably linked through time, albeit in different ways.

A foreign policy analysis approach to the study of the German question

The complexity and multidimensionality of the German question manifests itself in the (long-term) links between domestic and international dimensions. Political and ethnic aspects of the issue originate from the fact that the essence of the German question is the incompatibility between (the borders of) its territory and (the perceived size of) its nation, and the way in which Germany and European/world powers have responded to this problem. This complex and multidimensional context thus forms the background to our analysis and simultaneously defines its parameters. Focusing on Ostpolitik as a specific instance of German foreign policy, the German response to the incompatibility of territory and nation becomes the object of our analysis. In other words, what we are examining is the factors that determine the course of German foreign policy towards Central and Eastern Europe, specifically towards Poland and the Czech Republic. We limit ourselves to developments in the period after the Cold War, but make a case for the explanatory value of historical developments that reach back much farther. The bottom line of our argument is that longstanding links between the three states and nations, and especially events immediately before, during, and after the Second World War and the interpretation of those relations on the part of the German political elite have given rise to a set of norms that have governed the conduct of German foreign policy since the late 1960s in the sense of setting out the objectives of Ostpolitik and the appropriate means with which to pursue them.
Our approach is thus informed by both foreign policy analysis and constructivist international relations theory. Exploring the main tenets of both and establishing links between them is the task of the remainder of this chapter that will allow us to develop an analytical framework that we can subsequently apply to our comparative study of German policy towards Poland and the Czech Republic in the post-Cold War period.

The study of foreign policy

There are many definitions of foreign policy. In a very broad approach to foreign policy analysis, Mark Webber and Michael Smith consider it to be composed ‘of the goals sought, values set, decisions made and actions taken by states, and national governments on their behalf, in the context of the external relations of national societies’ and to constitute ‘an attempt to design, manage and control the foreign relations of national societies’ (Webber and Smith 2002: 9). Christopher Hill, in a more succinct definition, sees foreign policy as ‘the sum of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually a state) in international relations’ (Hill 2003: 3). Comparing these two recent definitions to one developed by George Modelski almost four decades earlier, reveals that the understanding of the object of foreign policy analysis has not changed significantly since the early 1960s. According to Modelski, ‘foreign policy is the system of activities evolved by communities for changing the behaviour of other states and for adjusting their own activities to the international environment’ (Modelski 1962: 6ff.). Even though the conceptualization of the object of foreign policy analysis itself has not changed much over the years, the context in which it is studied has undergone profound changes that James N. Rosenau described in the introduction to a volume on New Directions in the Study of Foreign Policy (Herman, Kegley and Rosenau 1987) as follows:
The study of foreign policy [has] become ever more challenging and intriguing . . . not only because the danger of conflict and violence grows with the growing overlap of groups and nations, but also because the sources and consequences of foreign policy have become inextricably woven into the patterns of interdependence.
(Rosenau 1987: 2)
Since Rosenau's observation this interdependence has, if anything, grown and has become a major cornerstone of foreign policy analysis in the age of globalization. Interdependence is clearly also a significant feature of the background of our own analysis in this volume. It manifests itself at different levels and in different dimensions. First and foremost, there is interdependence between the national, bilateral and broader regional and international levels of analysing German Ostpolitik. For example, during the Cold War, domestic debates over what was deemed acceptable in the efforts of West Germany to normalize relations with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and achieve peace, reconciliation and change in the political regimes of these countries was inextricably linked with the room for manoeuvre that successive German governments had and claimed for themselves. West Germany's sovereignty and room for manoeuvre was in turn constrained by a geopolitical situation determined by relations between the Cold War superpowers, who exercised considerable influence on the policies pursued by their allies.
Interdependence is one key feature of what many scholars refer to as the foreign policy arena in which factors located in the international, governmental and domestic contexts interact with one another and determine the course and outcome of specific foreign policies (Webber and Smith 2002: 31). To place the illustration of the arena in which Ostpolitik was and is ...

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