International Theory and German Foreign Policy

The central aim of this book is to foster connections between scholarly discussions of German foreign policy and broader theoretical debates in International Relations and beyond. While there has been a lively discussion about ‘new German foreign policy’, this book argues that it has not engaged substantially with international and foreign policy theory, especially with respect to its more recent developments.

Reviewing the recent literature on German foreign policy, this book posits that the most discussed works are still largely provided by the ‘Altmeister’ (Maull, Szabo, Bulmer and Paterson) who were already dominating the field a quarter of a century ago. While there is a general decline in the academic study of German foreign policy, the chapters in this edited volume show that a range of novel, theoretically sophisticated but often disconnected scholarship has appeared on the margins. This book contributes to this emerging work by providing conceptual interrogations, which question the existing research and provide theoretically-grounded alternatives; initiating critical discussions and evaluations of the nature of Germany’s actorness and the environment in which it operates and proposing applications of less familiar perspectives on German foreign policy.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of German Politics.

Jakub Eberle is Research Director at the Institute of International Relations Prague and Lecturer at Prague University of Economics and Business. He works on the role of language, emotions and identity in foreign and security policy. He is the author of Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War (Routledge, 2019), as well as a dozen of articles published in International Political Sociology, Political Geography, Political Psychology, Cooperation and Conflict and elsewhere. The work on this volume was conducted during his stay at Charles University.

Alister Miskimmon is Professor of International Relations and Head of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. His most recent books include, with Ben O’Loughlin and Jinghan Zeng, One Belt, One Road, One Story? Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative (2021), and with Ben O’Loughlin and Laura Roselle, Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations (2017).