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The article takes stock of German foreign policy under the Merkel IV government and adopts an analytical perspective that zooms in on the role of coalition politics. Specifically, it explores the impact of party-political contestation inside the 'grand coalition' both between (inter-party contestation) and within (intra-party contestation) the coalition partners on the foreign policy record of the Merkel IV government. In the empirical analysis, the discussion focuses on selected foreign policy areas that dominated the German foreign policy agenda during the Merkel IV government, namely transatlantic relations, European integration, the UN and multilateralism as well as Germany's relations to autocratic states, in particular Russia and China. While the analysis points to some foreign policy contestation between and within the coalition parties, it finds that the foreign policy of the Merkel IV government remained largely unaffected by party political contestation inside the 'grand coalition'. The article argues that the limited influence of coalition politics points to the key role of the foreign policy executive in German foreign policy and reflects the broad foreign policy consensus at the centre of the German party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes to scholarship on symbolic interactionist role theory in Foreign Policy Analysis, focusing on the concept of altercasting. Altercasting refers to verbal and non-verbal state behaviors in a role relationship to cast another state into roles that are complementary to its own roles. The article suggests putting more attention on the agency of the actor "doing" the altercasting to gain a better understanding of how altercasting works. To this purpose, the article develops a framework to unpack the agency of the altercasting actor. The framework addresses the preconditions for actors to engage in altercasting, the interplay of altercasting with domestic politics, and the available altercasting techniques. The article illustrates this framework in a case study on the efforts of the Biden administration to altercast Germany into a "faithful ally" role vis-à-vis China when the new German government transitioned into office in late 2021. Building on evidence from expert interviews among the U.S. foreign policy community, the case study demonstrates that the Biden administration had clear role expectations of Germany and understood the balance of opinion between the German coalition parties. The Biden administration used the altercasting techniques of self-presentation, signaling approval, and disapproval and making direct behavioral demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research shows that the pariah regime of North Korea—as other countries too—cares about how it is perceived internationally. However, so far, we know very little about how effective North Korea's strategic efforts are in improving its image among foreign audiences. As a first step toward addressing this gap, we employ a rigorous survey experiment among a representative sample of US adults (N = 800) to demonstrate that propaganda photographs of Kim Jong-un—produced and distributed by the regime's official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)—succeed in improving perceptions of North Korea, albeit only among audiences with limited political knowledge. By providing evidence that news photographs are effective strategic communication instruments, our paper also makes an original and significant contribution to general scholarship on mediated public diplomacy, which has until now paid little attention to visual media as a tool of image management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital sovereignty has become a prominent concept in European digital policy, and Germany stands out as its leading advocate in Europe. How digital sovereignty is being understood in German politics is therefore highly relevant for broader policy debates on the European level. This motivates the main objective of the article to map out the different meanings that are attributed to digital sovereignty in German political discourse. Specifically, the article adopts a narrative framework to reconstruct the narratives through which these meanings are constructed. The analysis identifies seven different but overlapping narratives of digital sovereignty in the German discourse that serve to promote partly contradictory political agendas. We argue that this diversity is not a bug, but a feature. Specifically, it supports rich internarrative linkages which benefit the broader resonance of each individual narrative. It also enables a broad set of political actors to enlist digital sovereignty for their specific priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article maps party support for national EU-related referendums across the EU after Brexit. It is motivated by conflicting expectations about the trajectory of EU referendum politics in the post-Brexit environment which foreground either possible contagion or deterrent effects of the Brexit referendum. Against this background, the article explores the scope of party support for EU referendums in EU member states, which types of political parties endorse popular votes on European issues and how the Brexit experience has affected EU referendum support among European parties. To that purpose, the article presents novel data from an EU-wide (except Ireland) expert survey. The findings show that EU referendum support varies greatly between national party systems and that it comes mainly from Eurosceptic opposition parties, often on the populist far right. The impact of the Brexit precedent on party positions on EU referendums is relatively weak overall and uneven across parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of his personality, had Donald Trump won the 2020 election the remarkable and unexpected united response by NATO allies to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened. Relying on leader personality research in foreign policy, we demonstrate this by using the counterfactual method of analysis. Specifying key differences between Biden's and Trump's personalities in terms of their experiences, traits and beliefs, we explicitly show that president Trump would have been very unlikely to share US intelligence, rally NATO allies in support of Ukraine or challenge Vladimir Putin. In contrast, these responses fit very well with Joe Biden's personality. We first present counterfactual analysis as a method before comparing Biden and Trump along personality characteristics known to significantly influence foreign-policy decisions. Through our case-study, we demonstrate the value of using systematic and theoretically grounded counterfactual methods for assessing the importance of individual differences between leaders and emphasizing their impact on international affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brexit was potentially a highly divisive issue for the EU27 with states having different relationships with the UK. And yet in the period from the UK's referendum in 2016 until the exit of the UK in 2020, the EU27 maintained a remarkable degree of unity. This article examines relative EU27 unity in the face of the Brexit process. The article is based on interviews and other research on four selected EU member states: Germany, France, Poland and Ireland. The article considers four different factors drawn from the theoretical literature that might account for EU27 unity and then examines how they played out in each of the four states. We then compare across the cases and conclude that they all shaped national responses to Brexit, but that how they mattered and the patterns of effects were differentiated among the cases. This points towards the importance of seeing Brexit as a multifaceted phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article explores the effectiveness of photographs as instruments of public diplomacy through an analysis of China's visual storytelling during the Covid-19 outbreak. Beijing considered the pandemic an existential threat to its image and responded with a communications offensive that was designed to highlight the regime's success in containing the Coronavirus — both at home and abroad — and to safeguard the wider 'China story' of a 'peace-loving and responsible global leader'. By combining scholarship on public diplomacy and strategic narratives with the 'visual turn' literature in international relations, this article focuses on the non-verbal dimension of China's storytelling and explores the impact of photographs — distributed by the regime's news agency, Xinhua — on international public opinion. Through a survey experiment among 1,000 US adults, we demonstrate that such photographs had a positive effect on China's international image, but that this effect was moderated by levels of political knowledge among the target audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers the role of humour in dealing with failure in foreign policy and brings insights together from the studies of policy failure, humour studies, customer service management and crisis communication. It investigates how research in customer service management and crisis communication points to the use of humour as an additional strategy for dealing with foreign policy failure. This research has provided valuable insights into the benefits of humour for dealing with minor service failure, reducing the level of damage done to the standing of the actor responsible for the failure. The paper transfers these insights into IR and investigates the benefits and drawbacks of self-deprecating humour by policy makers responsible for failure. To illustrate this, we consider the humour employed by US President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004 when making fun of his administration’s inability to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. We argue that humour can be a tool to address policy failure only in front of a sympathetic audience when humour can be a means of addressing the cognitive tension between support for a policy and its empirical failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs the poliheuristic theory of decision-making (PHT) to analyse German decisions to participate in, or abstain from, multinational military operations. PHT represents one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive-rationalist divide in foreign policy analysis. The theory posits a two-stage model of foreign policy-making: in the first stage, actors rely on a non-compensatory strategy as a cognitive shortcut to eliminate unacceptable alternatives and to reduce the choice set. In the second stage, actors switch to a compensatory mode of information-processing and select the alternative which maximises expected utility. While there is broad agreement that the non-compensatory dimension at the first stage of PHT concerns the domestic repercussions of foreign policy, it is less clear how this 'domestic politics' dimension should be operationalised. This article contributes to this debate by specifying the operationalisation of the non-compenstaory principle in the context of coalition foreign policy making in parliamentary democracies. Specifically, it suggests that the non-compensatory dimension in coalition foreign policy consists of the expected impact of foreign policy on coalition survival. Empirically, the article argues that PHT sheds important new light on arguably some of the most controversial military deployment decisions (Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Libya) of post-unification Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of crises over the last decade have put pressure on Europe's fundamental ordering principles. In response, German policymakers have scrambled to reinterpret Germany's foreign policy for a new era. To understand this process, the authors utilize an interpretivist approach, analyzing the discourse of German foreign policymakers through the lens of four traditions of thought informing debates: regionalism, pacifism, realism, and hegemonism. The article suggests that despite serious challenges, prevailing patterns of belief centered round regionalism and pacifism, supported by a particular civilian understanding of hegemony, persist. Yet, Germany's allies are challenging this framework and calling for it to accept more responsibility for regional and global security. As a result, a realist tradition is reemerging in Germany's discourse. The taxonomy provided here allows a richer understanding of these debates as well as an appreciation of how policymakers mobilize ideas to resist or enable policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the party political learning of the German Greens, a powerful agent of environmental policy in European politics, we identify the strategic and programmatic lessons learned from their failure in the 2013 general elections and explain the party politics that facilitated these lessons. We advance research on learning from failures by understanding failures not as objective facts but as constructed in political discourse. Tracing the main discursive elements of failure constructions, we argue that such constructions empower agents of learning and direct what actors learn from failures. Party elites might engage in strategic constructions of failures to promote their agenda and position in the party. Empirically tracing how the party political discourse of the German Greens constructed the 2013 elections as a failure, we demonstrate how this discursive construction intertwines with party politics and helped shift the intra-party balance of power and political direction of the Greens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British foreign policy stands at a turning point following the 2016 'Brexit' referendum. Drawing on role theory, we trace the United Kingdom's efforts to establish new foreign policy roles as it interacts with the concerned international actors. We find that the pro-Brexit desire to 'take back control' has not yet translated into a cogent foreign policy direction. In its efforts to avoid adopting the role of isolate, the United Kingdom has projected a disoriented foreign policy containing elements of partially incompatible roles such as great power, global trading state, leader of the Commonwealth, regional partner to the European Union (EU) and faithful ally to the United States. The international community has, through processes of socialisation and alter-casting, largely rejected these efforts. These role conflicts between the United Kingdom and international actors, as well as conflicts among its different role aspirations, have pressed UK policies towards its unwanted isolationist role, potentially shaping its long-term foreign policy orientation post-Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Leave narrative was successful in the 2016 referendum in part because it conformed to one of the well-established narrative genres of tragedy, comedy, satire and romance. These genres are story telling conventions that orientate audiences and guide the interpretation of the story being told. Specifically, the article shows that the Leave campaign constructed a largely consistent romantic narrative, while the Remain campaign mixed narrative genres. This difference in 'genre consistency' contributed to the success of Leave and the failure of Remain in the referendum. The investigation into the role of genre consistency adds to theoretical scholarship on narrative dominance in political discourse which has so far focused on the narrator, the structure and content of the story or the audience. The analysis points to structural similarities between the romantic genre and populist narratives more generally which enables populism to tap into the power of romance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In coalition governments, political parties are concerned not only with how many but also with which departments they control. The foreign ministry is among the most highly considered prizes in coalition negotiations. This article develops hypotheses to explain under which conditions the foreign ministry is likely to be allocated to a 'junior coalition partner'. The factors that are hypothesized to affect the allocation are: the relative size of coalition parties; the proximity of their foreign policy positions; the party family of the junior coalition party; the salience of foreign policy to the coalition parties; and past allocations of the foreign ministry to junior coalition partners. Employing a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article demonstrates that although the conjunction of the junior partner being relatively large and it having led the foreign ministry in the past is not sufficient by itself, those two factors are very influential in the junior partner being allocated the foreign ministry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of Turkey's increasing distance from the European Union (EU), the continued partial alignment with EU standards is often attributed either to domestic factors, or to diffusion processes induced by external actors other than the EU. Against this background, in this special issue, we explore the extent to which reforms in Turkey's environment and energy policy are (still) influenced by the EU. This introduction briefly reviews the Turkey related Europeanisation literature and previews the articles in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes stock of German foreign policy during Angela Merkel's third term in office (2013–17). It argues that the longer-term significance of Germany's foreign policy during this period is twofold. First, the Merkel government was confronted with multiple European and international crises which worked as a magnifying glass for the growing international expectations on Germany to become more actively engaged on the international stage. Second, the tenure of the Grand Coalition saw a significant shift in the German domestic foreign policy discourse that was marked by a concerted effort of leading decision-makers to make the case for Germany to accept greater international responsibilities. This emerging consensus among foreign policy elites expresses a changed self-conception of German foreign policy which, however, continues to be viewed with scepticism in the broader public. Informed by such a broad two-level perspective that focuses on the interplay between international and domestic expectations on German foreign policy, the article explores the record of the Grand Coalition in the main international crises it had to engage with. It suggests that the Merkel government was better able to live up to its own aspirations in two-level contexts which left it with greater domestic room for manoeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biographical narratives generate a continuous sense of political community across the state’s past, present and future, and provide the state with ontological security. Building on growing International Relations scholarship that highlights the power of visuals in shaping global politics, our article proposes visual rhetorical analysis as a tool to interrogate how governments employ images to tell their biographical narratives. The rhetorical approach transcends the methodological divide in the current ‘visual turn’ literature between the cognitive psychological and poststructuralist perspectives. We illustrate the analytical value of the rhetorical approach through an empirical study of how the totalitarian regimes of China and North Korea communicate their biographical narratives – the ‘rightful great power’ narrative and the ‘family state’ narrative, respectively – through propaganda imagery of their leaders. To this end, we develop a close semiotic reading of selected photographs of Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un in different narrative settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies a method of narrative analysis to investigate the discursive contestation over the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ in the US. Specifically, it explores the struggle in the US Congress between narratives constituting the deal as a US foreign policy success or failure. The article argues that foreign policy successes and failures are socially constructed through narratives and suggests how narrative analysis as a discourse-analytical method can be employed to trace discursive contests about such constructions. Based on insights from literary studies and narratology, it shows that stories of failures and successes follow similar structures and include a number of key elements, including: a particular setting; a negative/positive characterization of individual and collective decision-makers; and an emplotment of success or failure through the attribution of credit/blame and responsibility. The article foregrounds the importance of how stories are told as an explanation for the dominance or marginality of narratives in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-party coalitions are an increasingly common type of government across different political regimes and world regions. Since they are the locus of national foreign-policy-making, the dynamics of coalition government have significant implications for International Relations. Despite this growing significance, the foreign-policy-making of coalition governments is only partly understood. This symposium advances the study of coalition foreign policy in three closely related ways. First, it brings together in one place the state of the art in research on coalition foreign policy. Second, the symposium pushes the boundaries of our knowledge on four dimensions that are key to a comprehensive research agenda on coalition foreign policy: the foreign-policy outputs of multi-party coalitions; the process of foreign-policy-making in different types of coalitions; coalition foreign policy in the 'Global South'; and coalition dynamics in non-democratic settings. Finally, the symposium puts forward promising avenues for further research by emphasising, for instance, the value of theory-guided comparative research that employs multi-method strategies and transcends the space of Western European parliamentary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores processes of coalition governance in foreign policy. Specifically, it argues that such processes are shaped by two interrelated dimensions of coalition set-up: first, the allocation of the foreign ministry to the senior or a junior coalition partner and, second, the degree of policy discretion which is delegated to that ministry. Bringing these two dimensions together, the article distinguishes four types of coalition arrangement for the making of foreign policy, which are expected to have predictable implications for the process of foreign policy-making and, ultimately, for the foreign policy outputs of multi-party coalitions and their quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative analysis of the salience of Germany's bilateral relations to the United States, France and Britain in the German media since the end of the cold war. It offers a media content frequency analysis which identifies long-term similarities and differences in media reporting across the three relationships as well as short-term upswings of media interest in each of them individually. This is relevant because the media salience of bilateral relations is a measure of their underpinnings in public discourse and speaks to the significance of domestic drivers in conducting such relationships. The article finds that media reporting on Germany's three bilateral relations under study has significantly increased in the post-9/11 period and that US–German and Franco–German relations attract far more attention in the German media than Anglo–German relations. Short-term upswings in media coverage are triggered by specific types of events, in particular crises in European integration and international military missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses public and foreign policy failures of Europe with specific reference to government decision making and national security compromise.

The contribution introduces narrative analysis as a discourse analytical method for investigating the social construction of foreign policy fiascos. Based on insights from literary studies and narratology it shows that stories of failure include a number of key elements, including a particular setting which defines appropriate behaviour; the negative characterization of agents; as well as an emplotment of the ‘fiasco’ through the attribution of cause and responsibility. The contribution illustrates this method through a narrative analysis of German media reporting on Germany's abstention in the United Nations Security Council vote on Resolution 1973 in March 2011 regarding the military intervention in Libya. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research Highlights and Abstract The main contribution of this article is that it: Introduces a distinction between different pathways for junior partner influence on the foreign policy of coalition governments;, Provides nuanced insights into the effects of coalition government on foreign policy as well as on the causal mechanisms behind these effects;, Contributes to the 'unpacking' of coalitions and the analysis of coalition governance more generally;, Features a comparative analysis of the current coalition governments in the United Kingdom and Germany., This article contributes to research on the foreign policy influence of junior partners in coalition governments. In particular, it takes up the call to pay greater attention to different patterns and pathways of such influence. To this purpose, this article distinguishes two types of coalition set-ups for foreign policy making. In the first type, junior partners hold one or more departments in the foreign policy executive, and their foreign policy influence rests on the powers that controlling ministries in the field brings. In the second type, junior partners do not hold any department in foreign affairs, and their influence comes from their ability to constrain the discretion of the senior partner in foreign policy. The article exemplifies its theoretical contentions in comparative case studies on the current coalition governments in Germany and the UK, which represent the first and second type respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]