Introduction

Summary

The book’s introduction explains why the years 1963 to 1975 were a period of tremendous experimentation in German foreign relations. A succession of relatively weak chancellors gave scope for cabinet members to push in various directions, whether this involved voracious weapons procurement, a single-minded battle against inflation, more generous development aid, or a tighter commitment to European integration. Even in periods of political instability, developments in West Germany had great import for Europe and the world beyond. Historiographically, the introduction stresses the broader historical relevance of German foreign relations: its study reveals the contested values of postwar Germans and how those priorities came to shape the international environment. Methodologically, the chapter presents a brief discussion of constructivism as outlined by political scientists Alexander Wendt and Susan Strange. International relations theory informs the book’s core question – how West Germans shaped and were shaped by the international system.

To Willy Brandt, there was little doubt about Germany’s status. “We are not a military great power, we never wanted to be one,” he remarked in March 1965. “And since we are a divided country, we cannot be a political power of the first order… .” There was, however, another side to the story. “We have become something like an economic great power,” Brandt acknowledged. “That does not just make friends for us in the world; to many, we have grown too fat.” As a result, outside observers were far more critical than they had been ten years earlier, on the tenth anniversary of the war’s end. Germany in 1965 was rich yet vulnerable.

Brandt was speaking to a closed forum of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), the party he chaired while also serving as mayor of West Berlin. His comments reflect the questions many German leaders were asking in the mid-1960s. Now that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the western portion of the former Reich, had achieved a certain stability and prosperity, what was its proper place in the world? Although Brandt stressed the limits of German power, he expressed the conviction that the German people – he used the word Volk – had positive traditions of international relevance. His speech closed with a plea that Germany’s economic standing be supplemented with efforts to promote “the worldwide impact [Weltgeltung] of this people in intellectual, cultural, and scientific matters.”¹

Sentiments like Brandt’s would later be flattened into a tired cliché about Germany as an “economic giant but a political dwarf.” That phrase does little justice to the wide variety of aspirations harbored by Brandt and others of his generation, who clearly believed that setting export records was not enough. Some pressed for a more equal status within the North Atlantic alliance, up to and including the sharing of nuclear weapons with France, Britain, or the United States. Others thought the time ripe for a more concerted push toward German unification. Later in the 1960s, the SPD would articulate a vision of West Germany as a principled bearer of peace and détente. Meanwhile, the allure of European unification had not entirely faded in Bonn, despite the tremendous difficulty of cooperating with France’s Charles de Gaulle.

This great profusion of ambitions might be attributed to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, a time when the phenomenal success of the Western economies tempted some to believe that the “end of all crises” was at hand.² But the timing also reflects a kind of uncramping of German politics following Konrad Adenauer’s long-anticipated retirement. For fourteen long years, from 1949 to 1963, the Federal Republic’s founding chancellor had successfully advanced the integration of the Bonn republic into Western economic and military institutions. Adenauer finessed West Germany’s admission to NATO; co-founded the European Economic Community; and pioneered Franco–German partnership.³ Yet however momentous these achievements, the chancellor cautiously sidestepped many problems – and opportunities – arising from West Germany’s pivotal position within the Cold War and the Atlantic economy.

Adenauer’s departure touched off an era of creative experimentation in German foreign relations. This was facilitated by the weakness of his successors: Ludwig Erhard (1963–66), Kurt-Georg Kiesinger (1966–69), and Willy Brandt (1969–74) all suffered from an erosion of authority during their years in the Chancellor’s Office. Cabinet members and politicians enjoyed unusual latitude in pursuing independent agendas. The result was sometimes chaotic, as talented ministers unfolded a range of potentially contradictory initiatives; but taken collectively, they represented a wide-ranging effort to explore the boundaries of what the Federal Republic could and could not hope to achieve in world affairs. It was a learning process that would, by the mid-1970s, set many of the patterns of German diplomacy for decades to come.⁴

This book presents a narrative account of that learning process. In fourteen chronological chapters, it traces the successes and failures of a generation of German political leaders as the Bonn Republic emerged as a substantial force in European, Atlantic, and world affairs. Two basic propositions animate this approach. First, the contours of German diplomacy resulted from conscious choices and contingent circumstances. The Federal Republic’s economic prowess did not inexorably catapult Bonn into the first rank of Western capitals; West Germany floundered in the 1960s before emerging confidently in the 1970s. Likewise, Bonn’s renunciation of military power was not foreordained, and it did not proceed in a linear trajectory. Roughly speaking, during the years from 1963 to 1975, West Germans traded in many conventional trappings of military power and acquired a striking degree of influence in a globalizing economy. Yet these two processes did not run in parallel, nor did one necessitate the other. The “unlearning” of military problem-solving and the “learning” of financial leverage proceeded haltingly and independently from each other. Taken together, these developments yielded a significant transformation in Germany’s international position – culminating in a new grand strategy under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in the mid-1970s.

A second, related proposition concerns the need to treat West German leaders as active agents in shaping the political and economic environment of the Western world. Too often, scholars have cast the Federal Republic as a passive subject with no choice but to conform to the dictates of the international system.⁵ This is what many West German observers believed at the time; but outside Germany, it was obvious enough that decisions made in Bonn – and in Frankfurt, seat of the Bundesbank – could ripple across Europe and indeed the entire Western trading system. Even at its most hapless and indecisive, Germany had a strong impact on its neighbors. This book highlights the systemic importance of the Federal Republic of Germany, assessing how West German ideas and initiatives helped to shape the broader international environment – and how, in turn, external pressure modified German priorities and expectations. Studying the interaction between German ambitions and the wider world offers fresh perspectives on many levels – domestic and international, German and European.

Revisiting German Foreign Relations

This book contends that it is high time to reconsider the stolid, loyal, somewhat plodding image conveyed in classic surveys of West German foreign policy.⁶ Outwardly, leaders of the Federal Republic sought to project an air of predictability – a sensible strategy, given the tendency of earlier German leaders to tear up treaties when it suited them. Below the surface, however, policy makers engaged in heated debates about how to promote shared values such as security or stability.⁷ Should Bonn send soldiers overseas to shore up pro-Western regimes, or to serve as blue helmets for the United Nations? Would West Germany be allowed to participate in the nuclear deterrence of the Western alliance? How could the Federal Republic leverage its massive contributions to the European Economic Community to promote institutional reform, free flows of capital, and other German priorities? Peering behind closed doors from a distance of several decades, historians are now in a position to document how governments in Bonn pursued certain goals quite avidly – even as they maintained a studied reserve in public.

For historians of Germany, the payoff for studying diplomacy may not be self-evident. What do diplomats and party politicians and central bankers – elite and overwhelmingly male circles – have to tell us about postwar Germany more broadly? Over the past decade or so, scholars have published vivid accounts of transnational links with foreign counterparts, including student activists in the United States, nurses in divided Korea, and African and Iranian revolutionaries in West Germany.⁸ Yet these studies focus on society and culture, with less attention to policy makers; where state actors do come into play, they are often seen suppressing the social movements that stand at the center of historical attention. Even historians who do take an interest in elites as such, notably Norbert Frei, tend to focus on career continuities with the Nazi past rather than the substance of policy.⁹ The one genre of historical writing that consistently drives new insights on foreign policy is biography: all of the postwar German chancellors showed a tremendous interest in foreign affairs, as their biographers well know.¹⁰

The present volume does, of course, address the actions of German chancellors and foreign ministers; but it also highlights the goals and priorities of prominent figures across a range of West German institutions. These include Katharina Focke, a pro-Europe lobbyist; Heinrich Krone, a Catholic conservative; and Erhard Eppler, an energetic promoter of aid to the Global South. Such activists brought the values of broader social movements into their political work. More subtly, perhaps, leading economic experts represented widely shared schools of thought rather than purely individual agendas. Otmar Emminger, the Bundesbank’s foremost traveling salesman, sought to enshrine the bank’s commitment to price stability in various international monetary agreements. Karl Schiller, minister for economic affairs, took the Social Democratic message of “stability and growth” to his European counterparts. Finance minister Hans Apel stood for all the fiscal hawks in Germany when he tried to throttle extravagant plans for a European regional aid fund. All told, foreign relations involved a half-dozen ministries representing a large field of constituencies. In that sense, this is not a work of diplomatic history at all, but rather a study of Germany in the wider world.

For many outside Germany (and a good number within) the conduct of the Bonn Republic was always judged in relation to memories of wars past. Historians have long couched the story of German reintegration into world affairs as a problem of atonement or restitution; that is the central theme of most historical writing on German–Israeli and even Franco–German relations.¹¹ Less common is the attempt to show how, at specific times and in very specific ways, the “politics of the past” created a tangible barrier to German ambitions.¹² As seen in these pages, unrelenting Soviet hostility – a legacy of Nazi Germany’s genocidal war – was not a mere nuisance for West Germany. Moscow’s enmity constrained Bonn’s options, especially in light of West Berlin’s precarious geographic position. As argued here, the key to salving that hostility was to accept the consequences of German defeat. The moral message of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik lay in acknowledging Germany’s position of weakness. In many ways, this was an act of deflection: Brandt’s government did not seek to atone directly for Nazi crimes in Poland, and it brushed aside Warsaw’s requests for billions in export credits. Schmidt hoped to put a definitive end to postwar restitution by presenting Israel with a “closing gesture.” In that sense, what West Germany learned in the 1970s was to work around dark memories. A more thoroughgoing reckoning with the past would await another decade.

Fear of Germany’s potential was not simply a matter of recalling past aggression. As a prosperous and scientifically advanced society, the Federal Republic was a significant player in the burgeoning field of nuclear technology. Acting more or less in concert, French, British, and Soviet leaders worked to ensure that West Germany would not take part in a proposed multilateral nuclear force under NATO auspices. Yet Bonn’s influence weighed heavily in drafting the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1967–68, gaining substantial concessions for West Germany’s nuclear industry. In other respects, too, Germany’s phenomenal export success created challenges for its trading partners. Record-breaking German surpluses helped to generate a pattern of debilitating currency crises, particularly from 1968 onward. By 1973, the entire Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates had come crashing down – a result of German rigidity as well as lax monetary policy in the United States. Germany’s strength could shape the international system in profound ways.¹³

So, too, could German weakness. In 1969, a “grand coalition” government facing fresh elections was paralyzed by indecision on many counts – with uncomfortable economic consequences for European neighbors. When Willy Brandt’s parliamentary majority nearly collapsed in 1972, the entire course of East–West détente was jeopardized. In the Middle East, Bonn’s ungainly retreat from the region in 1965 left behind a vacuum, prompting the United States to step in abruptly as a supplier of tanks to Israel. Germany’s unique vulnerability vis-à-vis Israel and the Arab states came to a head in the early 1970s, when a series of kidnappings, hijackings, and bombings – some within the Federal Republic itself – helped to give Palestinian terrorists a prominent world stage. To some in Germany, this was further evidence that only European solutions, up to an including an integrated European foreign policy, could protect West Germans from being singled out.

Over time, however, it became clear that the Bonn Republic was too large and too outward-looking to operate on a strictly European level. Acting as finance minister from 1972–74 and as chancellor from 1974–82, Helmut Schmidt cultivated ties with counterparts in Europe, North America, and Asia. In 1975, Schmidt and French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing proposed a World Economic Summit – the first meeting of what became the G-7 grouping of Western industrial nations. More and more, Bonn found itself burdened by heavy expectations of financial support to its European and Atlantic partners. Rather than shrinking back from these expectations, Schmidt’s Germany chose to push forward, shaping international institutions in ways that met the needs of its rapidly globalizing business interests. This is what heralded West Germany’s emergence as a major international power in the mid-1970s.

Whereas other scholars have tended to write about policy areas in isolation, focusing specifically on NATO or Ostpolitik or European integration or monetary turmoil, the present volume aims to offer an integrated view of major problems facing Bonn at any given time.¹⁴ The result is a narrative with tight chronological focus and careful attention to the constantly changing international environment. This approach is particularly helpful for charting West Germany’s relative standing over time. In 1968, for example, the student uprisings, the Prague Spring, and the simultaneous crises of other Western currencies combined to augment Bonn’s stature. It was no coincidence that Moscow signaled its readiness to pursue rapprochement with Bonn in spring 1969. Likewise, the “oil shock” of 1973 proved that West Germany was uniquely prepared to face down inflationary pressures and buoy the stability of the Western industrial economies; this elevated Bonn to a position as Washington’s foremost partner in handling numerous geopolitical crises. Treating seemingly distinct policy areas in relation to one another offers a more nuanced window into the policy-making context in Bonn.¹⁵

What follows is not a comprehensive account of West German foreign relations. Many regions, such as Scandinavia or Latin America, deserve more consideration than they receive in these pages. Multilateral settings, including the United Nations, NATO, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), receive only sporadic attention. One deliberate omission is the relationship with East Germany, which often centered on intra-German problems such as river management or cross-border visits.¹⁶ Nor have I devoted substantial coverage to West Germany’s international campaign to isolate East Germany, commonly known as the Hallstein Doctrine; that subject is explored in detail in my first book, Germany’s Cold War.¹⁷ The chapters in this book do aim to present successive phases in German foreign relations from a fresh perspective – capturing the naïve optimism of Erhard’s opening months and the intense partisanship of the Ostpolitik years. In short, this narrative charts lessons learned in historical time, with the outcome open ended.

As historians well know, the best way to recapture a sense of contingency is to return to the sources. Rather than synthesizing existing accounts, this book draws heavily on German diplomatic files from the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these documents originated in a declassification and publication project spearheaded by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich – the maroon-bound volumes of Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic]. These materials are supplemented by records from the cabinet ministries, the political parties, and the Bundesbank. The personal papers of leading policy makers also play a major role. In order to capture an outside perspective on German actions, heavy use is made of records from the U.S. State Department and the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford presidential libraries. British and French documents, published and unpublished, further augment the source base. The net result is a series of chapters that explore the unfolding of West Germany’s learning process during this period in unprecedented detail.

International Systems as Social Constructs

Like most historical narratives, this study is not intended as a theoretical contribution. Nevertheless, the chapters that follow do rely on conceptual understandings of international politics as articulated by political scientists. Major influences include Robert Jervis on “system effects”; Susan Strange on “structural power”; and Alexander Wendt’s model of constructivism. Classic interpretations of Germany’s particular status, such as historian Andreas Hillgruber’s thoughts about its “half-hegemonial” standing and Michael Staack’s presentation of the “trading state,” also inform the narrative. A brief sketch of these theoretical models will help to illuminate the reasoning that informs the interpretations advanced in this book.

Diplomats and policy makers often like to think of themselves as realists, taking the distribution of power in the international system as a given and seeking to advance their country’s interests within that context. This mode of understanding treats power as objective and knowable, based on such tangible measures as military might and economic capabilities. In international relations (IR) theory, realists and neorealists model the international system as a tangible constellation of power dynamics among weak and strong states. By contrast, IR constructivists such as Alexander Wendt hold the system to be “socially constructed” – a product of interactions among the society of states. Wendt does not deny the reality of “hard” forms of power (such as nuclear weapons), but he contends that “soft” concepts (such as nuclear deterrence) are what ultimately structure the system. As he writes: “the meaning of power and the content of interests are largely a function of ideas.”¹⁸

Constructivism has many advantages for historical analysis. Most obviously, the construction of a system plays out over time; it is an inherently historical process. Constructivism is also more heterogenous than realism. Whereas realists focus almost exclusively on nation-states, constructivists take greater account of non-state actors and the evolutionary impact of international norms such as human rights.¹⁹ One might, indeed, imagine the entire history of international relations as one continuous constructivist narrative, with the contours and operation of the international system shifting constantly in response to economic, military, and political developments as well as governing norms. The challenge, as international historians well know, is to render such an account manageable in scope.²⁰

Is it possible to analyze a system and a single element of the system at the same time? Political scientists tend to write about one or the other, using one type of theory to write about the making of foreign policy and a separate set of theoretical tools to approach international systems. The study at hand aims to bridge the distance by working in two directions: it considers how West Germans shaped and were shaped by the international system. As Robert Jervis observes, systems are inherently interactive, and the behavior of one unit necessarily affects the whole.²¹ The precise contributions of a Luxembourg or Norway might be difficult to detect, but it hardly defies logic to imagine that a state with the population and economic resources of West Germany could inflect the orbits of still weightier countries such as the United States or the Soviet Union. Thus the central claim of this volume can be rendered as follows: during the 1960s and 1970s, West Germany developed the capacity to influence how the international system functioned.

The concept of “influence” is not very precise. Political scientists might prefer to use the term “power” (Macht) instead – though this was a word that postwar Germans actively avoided. What kind of power could the Federal Republic of Germany hope to exercise? Susan Strange offers a useful differentiation between relational and structural power.²² The former is direct and tangible, involving an overt assertion of authority or control. This was seldom an option for West German leaders, who took great pains to distance themselves from the aggressive legacy of the Third Reich. In the 1930s, Berlin had ruthlessly exploited Germany’s strong export position in order to dominate markets in the Balkans.²³ After 1945, in order to avoid the appearance of coercion, Bonn starkly dissociated trade policy from political considerations. This book highlights numerous cases where the Federal Republic failed to drive a hard bargain – whether with respect to its partners in the European Economic Community (EEC) or the Soviet bloc.

By contrast, Bonn did learn to wield what Strange calls structural power, which involves shaping the framework of international relations. Germans had not taken part in fashioning the United Nations or the Bretton Woods monetary and trading order in the 1940s. During the 1960s, however, West Germany became essential for systemic stability. It was structural power that Bonn governments amassed as they acted, via “offset” programs, to shore up the position of the pound sterling and the U.S. dollar; and it was a structural decision when the Federal Republic led its closest European partners in a joint float of EC currencies in 1973, marking the end of Bretton Woods. In 1974–75, West Germans helped to found a range of new structures, including the European Council, the International Energy Agency, the Nuclear Suppliers Club, and the G-7.

In light of its structural power, West Germany should be seen as something more than a “trading state.” This is a term that Michael Staack has highlighted in an important analysis of united Germany’s foreign policy. Expanding on the “trading state” concept introduced by Richard Rosecrance in 1986, Staack argues that the Berlin Republic prioritizes material welfare over other goals; willingly forgoes sovereignty for the sake of multilateral institutions; and pursues its goals by civilian and not military means.²⁴ West Germany certainly did display these characteristics during the 1960s and 1970s; yet that was not the full extent of German ambitions. Helmut Schmidt’s grand strategy – an updated version Konrad Adenauer’s – involved reinforcing Western economic, political, and military solidarity on terms that played to German strengths. Bonn governments pressed for solutions that balanced the principles of free trade, unfettered capital flows, and macroeconomic stability. West Germans had found a way to work within the structures (and strictures) of the international system – a system that they had, after all, helped to reconfigure over the preceding decades. The Federal Republic was, in short, a trading power.