German Defence Policy under the Second Merkel Chancellorship

The CDU/CSU/FDP coalition (2009–13) has witnessed the emergence of three important changes in the international security environment: the US ‘Asia Pivot’, the global financial crisis and the fallout from Germany's backseat role in the Libya crisis. This article examines how German defence policy has adapted to this changing context. It explores the reforms which have taken place to the Bundeswehr's structure and military capability procurement process under defence ministers Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Thomas de Mazière. The article also looks at German policy toward defence cooperation through CSDP and NATO. The article finds that while some important changes have been enacted to German defence policy, Germany is failing to properly adapt to the changing strategic environment. The article concludes by examining key defence policy challenges facing the government over the 2013–17 legislative period and the implications of the analysis for theoretical debates on German defence policy.     

State and society in Western Europe: A model for comparative analysis

This article represents an attempt to analyse the complex historical processes of political change in Western Europe in the context of an explicit frame of enquiry. It is concerned to establish not only that the past illuminates the present but also that conceptual rigour and the purposive use of analysis provided by a framework of general ideas is as much relevant to making sense of the past as of the present. The model is a deliberate simplification and, of course, open to refinement. Its virtue is parsimony; its purpose, to enable indentification of the predominant type of political organisation in a concrete political situation.     

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary.     

Vietnam,McNamara, and the fog of history

ABSTRACT

Scholars are increasingly exploring the links between the other worlds of science fiction and theorizations of our own reality. This article extends the scope of political science fiction studies by focusing on the Chinese author Liu Cixin's Three-Body novels, thus incorporating a key non-Western work. I interrogate the Three-Body series through the lens of Kenneth N. Waltz's three images of international relations, recovering the abundant homologies across the texts. Both writers represent human nature as malevolent, are skeptical of the importance of domestic politics, and place most weight on the logic of survival perpetuated by an international/interstellar system. They share meta-theoretical commitments too, each stating that global/galactic politics must be interpreted rather than observed. Yet the final pages of Liu's text destabilize the apparently copacetic relationship with Waltzian thought. Liu reveals his interstellar system to be created rather than given, and subject to positive transformation through the acts of agents. Liu's final move calls into question statist, positivist, and zero-sum premises about our contemporary world order by suggesting that they, too, are created by powerful actors rather than being scientific givens. The implications for our practice of politics are clear.     

"Stuff Happens": Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld exercised great influence over U.S. policies in the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The Secretary's leadership presents a puzzle—accounts agree that Rumsfeld was a masterful bureaucratic infighter who ruthlessly gained control over the major decisions and marginalized colleagues, yet, having secured that control, was remarkably blasé about events on the ground in Iraq. I argue that Rumsfeld's paradoxical performance was rooted in key aspects of his worldview—measured through systematic content analysis of his verbal output on the principle that the words individuals say are related to the way they see the world—and his bureaucratic style, identified through interviews with Bush administration insiders. Rumsfeld's worldview centers on a low perception of the control of self in relation to macro-political events, and a very high conceptual complexity, indicating a nuanced view of issues. This low perception of control and heavily contingent worldview is the discursive, "stuff happens" side of Rumsfeld which so frustrated critics of the U.S. occupation. His bureaucratic style, however, was controlling, suspicious, and overbearing. I suggest that this approach offers a more complete explanation of Rumsfeld's actions, and so contributes to understanding of the Iraq story, as it is rooted in consideration of the basic dispositions that condition how individuals approach their roles.     

The operational code approach to profiling political leaders: understanding Vladimir Putin

Content analytics applied to open source material can assist in understanding, predicting, and influencing the behavior of foreign political leaders. We provide evidence to this effect by profiling Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains a source of consternation to the academic, intelligence, and policy communities. We apply the operational code scheme to a corpus of over one million words spoken by Putin across his time in office, and use the results to adjudicate between the competing portraits of him in the extant literature. We find Putin to hold broadly mainstream beliefs about international politics, albeit qualified by hyper-aggressiveness toward terrorism and a startling preoccupation with political control. His approach is that of an opportunist rather than a strategist. These data represent a stream of information that must be combined with other sources and integrated, through policy judgment, into a comprehensive approach to a foreign political leader.     

The Franco‐German relationship and economic and monetary union: Using Europe to ‘Bind Leviathan’

This article explores the interaction between the institutional, strategic and cognitive dimensions of the Franco‐German relationship on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). It begins by spelling out its institutional setting and its context of structural power. These sections highlight the main informal rules that have shaped the relationship and help explain the choice of negotiating strategies to reconcile their objectives and secure influence on the design and content of EMU. The next section focuses on the cognitive dimension of the relationship, identifying the nature of Franco‐German objectives, their basis in differences of inherited beliefs and problems in reconciling them. In the final section the nature of the political theory underpinning EMU is clarified and explained and the kind of challenge that it poses for French policy makers as it tests the limits of the republican state tradition. More broadly, EMU is an attempt to redefine the relationship between state and Europe and state and society, bringing with it new political meanings.     

Europeanization, Whitehall Culture and the Treasury as Institutional Veto Player: A Constructivist Approach to Economic and Monetary Union

This article examines Europeanization in Whitehall, using EMU as a case study. It argues that how the EMU policy community has developed within Whitehall, and its outcomes, cannot be captured using a narrow, rationalist game-theoretic frame-work. Although strategic behaviour is important, as Dyson and Featherstone (1999) argue, the primary question is how Whitehall players have defined British interests, formed a collective identity and given a specific meaning to the EMU game. The article applies a cultural approach to Whitehall, focusing on the macro structures of belief within which EMU policy is made.     

The politics of corporate crises in West Germany

This article examines the experience of corporate crisis in the major industrial economy of Western Europe. West Germany's experience of corporate crisis is analysed by reference to its legal framework, political context and economic history. Particular attention is given to two modes of crisis management: ‘bank‐led’ rescue and ‘the crisis cartel’. Case studies include AEG, Grundig, the steel corporations of the Ruhr and the Saar, shipbuilding corporations and Krupp. The argument draws on the evidence of mounting problems of corporate crisis management to assess the prospects for the theory and practice of the social market economy in West Germany.     

Democracy and the demographic transition

This article addresses the role of demographic factors in contributing to the emergence of democracy. It maintains that, other things being equal, progress in the demographic transition promotes democratization. The argument is developed with reference to the effects of interrelated changes in mortality, natural increase (i.e. population growth), fertility, and population age structure. Suggestions are also made with respect to how demographic and democratic trends should be gauged. An analysis of data for the period 1970–2005 for 77 countries that were initially non-democratic provides substantial support for the argument. Some implications are discussed, as are future trends in democratization from a demographer’s perspective.