The Paradox of German Power - Softcover

Kundnani, Hans

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190658703 ISBN 13: 9780190658700

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Since the Euro crisis began, Germany has emerged as Europe's dominant power. During the last three years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Bismarck and even Hitler in the European media. And yet few can deny that Germany today is very different from the stereotype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. After nearly seventy years of struggling with the Nazi past, Germans think that they more than anyone have learned its lessons. Above all, what the new Germany thinks it stands for is peace. Germany is unique in this combination of economic assertiveness and military abstinence. So what does it mean to have a "German Europe" in the twenty-first century?

In The Paradox of German Power, Hans Kundnani explains how Germany got to where it is now and where it might go in future. He explores German national identity and foreign policy through a series of tensions in German thinking and action: between continuity and change, between "normality" and "abnormality," between economics and politics, and between Europe and the world.

About this title

About the Author:

Hans Kundnani is Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, having previously worked as a journalist for The Guardian, The Observer, Financial Times, Prospect, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.

Review:

"In his wide-ranging book, Kundnani examines the exercise of German geo-economic power in Europe. He reviews the well-known history of 'the German question' -- the long-running debate about Germany's proper role in Europe. He goes all the way back to the story of the country's initial
unification in 1871 and examines its postwar policies in order to show that present-day Germany is more straightforwardly self-interested than is commonly argued. [...] Germany, Kundnani argues, increasingly exercises a 'semi-hegemonic' position, at least within Europe, due to its growing influence
and tough diplomacy."

--Foreign Affairs

"A punchy and persuasive survey of 150 years of German foreign policy ... Kundnani's conclusions are sobering. 'The Europe that is emerging from the crisis,' he warns, 'is not so much German as chaotic.'"

--Wall Street Journal

"[Kundnani argues] that today's European Union is seeing a rerun of 'the German question' that emerged after the founding of the Prussian empire. This time, Germany is not a military power but an economic one. Its economy is too dominant to preserve a stable balance with its Eurozone and EU
partners, yet too weak to enforce economic stability from above, he says. He calls it a 'geo-economic semi-hegemon', with the potential to cause a bitter and possibly disastrous conflict with its closest partners... his thesis is tempting."

--Quentin Peel, The Financial Times

"This is an intelligent, [...] lively and well-written survey of recent German foreign policy and Hans Kundnani's emphasis on Germany as a geo-economic power will be influential."

--International Affairs

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0190658703
• ISBN 13: 9780190658700
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 158