3 - Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture

Summary

The concept of “normalization” continues to have great resonance in discussions of Germany's post-Cold War development, especially in the field of German foreign and security policy. The notion that Germany's foreign and security policies have or should become more “normal” also remains a potent theme in official discourse among policy makers in the pursuit of defining Germany's international role. The purpose of this chapter is to appraise the notion of normalization in the context of developments in Germany's post-1990 security policy and to consider its limitations and weaknesses in the face of what we call Germany's prevailing strategic culture — a variable that tends to work against a “complete” normalization of German foreign and security policy.

In the early 1990s a forceful argument, pursued mainly by American academics, suggested that a profound change in German foreign and security policy after the end of the Cold War was inevitable. This line of thinking articulated the notion that a normalization would occur by which the policies and preferences of the post-1945 “Bonn Republic” would give way to a less institutionally bound, more powerful and self-interested new Germany prone to maximizing its autonomy outside of the post-Second World War institutional milieu. The normalization of German security policy would result, the argument ran, from change in the international balance of power after the implosion of the Soviet bloc, twinned with the relative growth in terms of territory, population, and resources of the unified Federal Republic.