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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]

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]

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]

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]

The European sovereign debt crisis is widely perceived by the German public as a dangerous threat and has great potential for domestic political mobilisation. The German Federal Government, therefore, faces particular pressures to explain and justify its crisis policy in the public arena. An important instrument for this purpose is the speeches of government representatives in the German Bundestag, which can be understood as a strategic discourse in order to affect the framing of government policy in the broader public debate. Against this background, this article examines the parliamentary discourse about the Euro zone crisis of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition government between 2009 and 2012. The analysis points to five basic lines of argument, which speak to the attempt of the Federal Government to maintain sufficient domestic leeway to pursue its preferred policy in the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]