Shifting Constellations: Germany and Global (Dis)Order (Jan. 2019 ‒ Dec. 2021)

Institutions provide the formal and informal rules of European and global politics. The ongoing “counter-revolution” is destabilising the liberal institutions which underpinned “Western” dominance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

On a global level, traditional providers of political (United Nations) and economic (WTO, G7) governance are losing appeal and legitimacy. Reforms of both the United Nations and the WTO have been discussed for a long time but never properly addressed. Now, both international organisations appear obsolete. On a European level, the Brexit process, the rise of Eurosceptic parties, and the erosion of European law and solidarity is undermining the very idea of European integration. Germany in particular has benefited from a rules-based liberal order. Berlin’s political influence and economic prosperity crucially depends on reliable, credible institutions. Disruptions to the global order are thus contesting Germany’s belief in the rule of law as well as its civilian and normative power capacities. Comments such as “Germany remaining leader of the free world” may not come as a surprise, therefore. Yet German leadership is both desired and feared. Leadership depends on followership, where leadership is “understood as a social role shaped in a process of interaction between leader and followers” (Aggestam and Johansson, 2017). Satisfaction and discontent can change quickly, depending on the policy area. While Central European EU member states – for example – supported Berlin’s austerity stance during the “Euro crisis”, they strongly resist Germany’s handling of the “refugee crisis”. This strand of the project will investigate the impact of shifting global constellations on Germany’s roles in various institutional settings on different levels of analysis: on a global level, within the UN, WTO and G7; on a European level, in the EU and the OSCE; and on a transnational level, Germany’s commitment to non-governmental organisations and multilateral civil society projects. Role theory is a bridge-builder between agency and structure (institutions), between IR and domestic-level explanations of state behaviour (Harnisch, 2011). From this theoretical perspective the strand explores role conceptions, expectations, contestations, and performances of Germany by itself and others.

Contrary to much popular opinion, Germany has always been an Einwanderungsland. At the same time, it is a country which places great emphasis on facilitating international exchange, especially amongst students and scholars, not only to foster cross-cultural understanding but also as a key foundation of intellectual innovation and economic power. While these distinct but related phenomena have deep and complex historical roots, various events and developments across Europe and the wider world in recent years have increased the volume and frequency of forced and voluntary migration to Germany, whether through war and violence in the Middle East, in response to socio-economic crises within the Eurozone, or political and intellectual restrictions in long-standing partner nations such as Turkey. Against this backdrop, this strand of the project explores how different types of migration and mobility shape, and are shaped by, diverse and contested understandings of Germany’s role in a continually changing world, and how this has developed and changed over time, particularly in response to wider disruptions and shifts on the global stage. This strand  is particularly concerned with ways in which the movement of people to and from Germany presents (or is seen to present) both challenges to and new opportunities for German society on various levels, within and outside Germany’s borders.

Having accepted approximately one million refugees in 2015, for example, Germany has found itself at the centre of European efforts to manage the most significant movement of people since the end of Second World War. This has elicited many different – often widely divergent, but nevertheless co-existing – responses from the German population, ranging from the often overshadowed Willkommenskultur embraced by large sections of civil society to the well-known surge in support for far-right movements such as Pegida and the Alternative für Deutschland. In addition to interrogating the diversity of these grassroots responses, as well as the reasons for them, the strand will investigate efforts to integrate and support refugees and other new arrivals to Germany through social initiatives and educational institutions, not least in German universities and through vocational apprenticeships. In doing this, it explores tensions between responses to elite, high-skilled mobility on the one hand, and mass migration patterns on the other, and, in turn, addresses longer-term questions concerning who contributes to, and has a stake in, shaping German society and identities.

Crises and world events are mediated, constructed not just by political actors but also journalists and, in the age of social media, ordinary citizens (Galpin, 2017, see also Schmidt, 2008). This process is integral to making sense of world politics and legitimising and contesting policy responses. This strand will explore the way in which current disruptions to the world order are mediated in Germany.

Firstly, traditional news media have long been the primary key arena for political elites to communicate with the public. This mediatised communication, however, does not just provide a link between political actors and the broader public, but also serve to construct nation-state identities (Risse, 2010). In the era of globalization and European integration, national public spheres are undergoing a process of Europeanisation and transnationalisation (Koopmans and Statham, 2010) crucial to the legitimacy of international institutions such as the EU. This strand will explore the way in which political elites and media actors communicate about the shifting constellations in the world order and (re-)construct Germany’s identity in the world. Outside of Germany, news media are also a key vehicle for reproducing and transforming images of the “other” and Germany’s role in the world.

Secondly, shifting media constellations, particularly the rise of social media, lie at the centre of current challenges to liberal democracy. While it is impossible to quantify the effect on outcomes, both Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election were profoundly shaped by the social media landscapes of Facebook and Twitter, raising questions about “fake news”, “bots”, and ways in which “big data” has been weaponised by campaigns. Generally speaking, political campaigns on social media have been found to be primarily dominated by nationalist or far-right parties (see e.g. Usherwood and Wright, 2017; Dutceac Segesten and Bossetta, 2017). In Germany specifically, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland uses social media as its primary campaign tool (Arzheimer, 2015). At the same time, following the online circulation of fake news stories relating to refugees, Germany has been at the forefront of attempts to tackle the negative impact of social media on democratic elections. Social media is also the vehicle through which counter-movements (such as anti-racism groups) mobilise, organise events and challenge narratives. This strand will therefore explore the role of old and new media in Germany during a time of shifting global constellations.

The recent surge in populism in the US and many parts of Europe represents a challenge to the idea of a Western “community of values” and a liberal Western identity. While some hail Germany as “the new leader of the free world”, others oppose it, precisely because of Germany’s perceived liberalism, branding its tolerance towards minority groups as “political correctness gone mad”. Interestingly, Germany is perceived as representing liberal values by both sides in this debate, as a paradise for refugees, ethnic minorities and and LGBTQ+ peoples, in spite of Germany’s pursuit of policies to return asylum seekers to their homelands or to third countries wherever possible, despite the increased popularity of xenophobic groups such as the Alternative für Deutschland, despite its gender pay gap being one of the largest in Europe, and despite Chancellor Merkel’s only reluctant endorsement of same-sex marriage. Furthermore, if Germany today is held to embody Western or European identity, this represents a remarkable transformation from the past, when Germany was perceived as a threat to the European order, or as not entirely “Western”. In Russia, for instance, the perception of Germany as a “Western” power, i.e. as antagonistic to Russia, has only taken firm hold since the Ukraine crisis.

The “Ideas and identity” strand of the project will ask how this idea of Germany as a haven of liberal values has been constructed, how it is being performed, and which voices – inside and outside Germany – are contesting it, and why. Has the meaning of “Western” or “European” changed over time, or is it Germany that has changed? How have German artists, writers and intellectuals dealt with Germany’s uneasy relation to these concepts over time, and how is cultural production in Germany today dealing with its newly assumed – or ascribed – role and identity? What part does the German cultural and intellectual scene – including cultural mediators such as the DAAD and the Goethe-Institut – play in projecting its (new) identity to the world and to its own population, and how are producers of culture and opinion-formers outside Germany engaging with and contesting these projections? To what extent are shifting cultural and intellectual representations of Germany, inside and outside the country, helping to enact or contest imagined communities of the German nation?

These distinct yet related research strands, which underpin existing research interests of the IGS project investigators, have been chosen because they provide foci for examining actors, vehicles and channels that connect Germany with the wider world in a variety of ways, and help to add important layers and nuances to ways in which Germany’s global role is understood, shaped and contested.

All four strands will be discussed – in plenary sessions ‒ at each project event, enabling the crystallisation and cross-fertilisation of core research interests and themes across the project. Overarching themes and findings will be explored throughout the project as well as in the published outputs. In order to facilitate the interdisciplinary exchange between humanities and social sciences that is at the heart of the project, strand leads will also participate in discussions of all other research strands at the full series of events associated with the research network.