German Europe: Strategies of Power in the Euro Crisis

2011

Rarely has Germany been as important in Europe – or as isolated – as it is today. Germany has had Europe’s biggest economy since integration began, but since the beginning of the euro crisis last year, there has been a kind of “unipolar moment” within the eurozone: no solution to the crisis was possible without Germany or against Germany. At the same time, from Greece to Libya, Germany has been seen as increasingly evasive, absent and unpredictable. Although Germany has now signalled that it will do whatever it takes to save the euro, much of Europe is worried about the way that this will be done and is even resentful about where Germany seems to be heading.1 To many, it appears that an increasingly powerful and independent Federal Republic is renegotiating the two fundamental principles that have guided its foreign policy for decades: European integration and the western alliance. Some even suggest that Germany is laying the foundations for a new Sonderweg, or special path. While G...

Hong Kong Economic Journal, 14 December 2011

Undergraduate essay. Unpublished. This essay examines the role of hegemonic Germany in the EU and the Eurozone particularly. It briefly explains the theory of Hegemonic stability and presents the main contributors. Further, it presents the case of how Germany, systemically, was dragged to such an hegemonic position. It follows the idea of a relunctant hegemon. Finally, the essay concludes that Germany should resume its natural hegemony, as the Maastricht negotiations developed such a perspective. A hegemonic Germany is deemed to be benevolent for the whole european peace project.

e-international relations, 2021

The debate on the theme of German domination or “hegemony” in the European Union (EU) has proliferated in the last decade, be it in the academic world, but also in political circles and the mass media (in Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon world). The resulting literature mentions not only the existence of such a domination but focuses on characterizing some of the aspects of its functioning, whether its non-military nature or its “civil / normative” or “geoeconomic” character. This debate became particularly pressing in the subsequent decade, which will be the period analyzed in this article. The trend towards leadership – or “hegemony”, depending on the source – of Germany within the EU would be maintained in the crises that followed the beginning of the so-called Euro crisis, namely the one caused by the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the refugee crisis with its peak in 2015.

Journal of Contemporary European Research, 2014

The euro crisis points towards the limits of the post-war pro-European integration consensus in Germany, a trend that has manifested itself in both the legal and political realms. In the legal arena, the powerful German Constitutional Court (GCC) has heard complaints on several key rescue measures, including the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the European Central Bank’s (ECB) bond buying programme. The Court’s ruminations on these initiatives both reflect and feed German eurosceptics’ concerns. They also have implications for the Eurozone as a whole, insofar as they limit the German government’s room to manoeuvre. In the political arena, a new eurosceptic party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), contested the September 2013 federal election and the May 2014 European parliamentary election, winning a handful of seats in the latter. AfD’s emergence potentially marks a shift towards a more overtly eurosceptical political discourse in Germany. Thus, both legal and political developments have the potential to constrain the choices for the EU as a whole by reconfiguring the political and policy landscape of Germany, the Union’s reluctant hegemon.

2012

Europe, which focuses on current EU political and policy debates (see back cover for more information). Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed are attributable only to the authors in a personal capacity and not to any of the institutions with which they are associated. ISBN: 978-94-6138-213-9 Available for free downloading from the CEPS (http://www.ceps.eu) and EPIN (http://www.epin.org) websites

The Eurozone Crisis and the Future of Europe, 2014

International Journal of Political Economy, 2010

Moving from the current global and European imbalances and crises, and from the consideration of the German reaction to them, the paper explores the political economy origins of the conservative German policy stance. It emerges that an export-oriented economy was a deliberate decision of the German elite after WW II and that the external constraint may be regarded as appropriately designed for internal discipline and efficiency (and vice-versa) in a self-reinforcing process. The conclusions illustrate some possible future scenarios for Europe.

2016

The subject of the study is the discursive articulation of German nation-state identity and Europe in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung during 2010, the first year of the euro crisis. The material consists of editorials and commentaries. As evaluative and argumentative text types they both contribute to and reflect the public discourse on a given topic, and therefore engage in politics, defined in the broad sense as negotiation and struggle over the attribution of meaning within society. The theoretical background of this study is in post-structuralist discourse theory and its application in a model originally designed for foreign policy analysis. The concept of nation-state identity is used to describe the relationship between Europe and the nation. Although not often contested, nation-state identities are subject to redefinition at times of crisis, defined as critical junctures. The euro crisis is treated as a critical juncture that has the potential to induce discursive change. The methods for analyzing these discursive articulations are taken from German Diskurslinguistik. The methodological approach include both quantitative and qualitative analyses of specific keywords. These keywords were partially derived from previous research of nationalist discourse in the media and included words related to the German nation-state, EU and Europe. These words were then categorized into semantic roles, on the basis of which their relationships and positionings could be analyzed. The study found that the German nation-state identity is articulated in a way that emphasizes its economic power while attempting to justify an orientation based on national interests, Germany's leadership role and a break from the country's pro-European past by the fact that the euro's stability is at stake. While the meaning of what it means to be "European" becomes thus contested in the light of the country's past, there is also some emphasis on continuity with the past.