German Politics and Society

This article presents the conceptualization of fundamental foreign policy beliefs of 62 German decision-makers and experts from the executive branch, parliament, think tanks, media, and academia concerning the March 2011 un Security Council resolution on Libya. The actors’ perceptions were abductively inferred from qualitative interviews using the reconstructivist theoretical framework. Four types of respondents were identified: Realists, Normalizers, Traditionalists, and Pacifists. While they shared the general imperatives of military restraint, alliance solidarity, multilateralism, and upholding values, their specific partisan-ideological interpretation of the application of those rules for action in the case of Libya differed. Both Normalizers and Traditionalists perceived Germany's un vote abstention and non-participation in the nato-led intervention as a break with German foreign policy and a costly mistake, whereas the Realists and Pacifists were in support of the German center-right coalition government's policy of military restraint, although for very different reasons.

This article examines the Alternative für Deutschland's (AfD) racist, nationalist, and far-right discursive strategies in the lead-up to the 2017 federal election. Rather than taking the approach that this party constitutes a “new nationalism” that is out of touch with mainstream conceptions of German nationhood, the article depicts the ways in which the recognizability of the AfD's anti-Muslim racism was predicated on mainstream civilizationist discursive repertoires and the rise of the populist-nationalist right. To do so, I compare themes presented by legal experts and mainstream politicians in favor of banning veiling in the mid-2000s to the civilizationist claims made by the AfD between 2015 and 2017. This article thus extends case analyses of contemporary right-wing nationalist and populist movements to Germany. It also emphasizes the antecedents of the “new nationalism” classification applied to such movements.

This article presents an analysis of how think tanks of the German New Right have sought to expand the reach of the New Right into far-right electoral politics, specifically those embodied by the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party. Informed by social network analysis and document analysis, the research focuses on the years between 2013 and 2017, the period that saw the foundation of the AfD, its shift to the right toward embracing nationalist-volkisch positions, and its entry into the Bundestag. The data show that only a few New Right think tanks have strongly engaged with the AfD for the purpose of changing ideology, personnel, or policy. Most of these think tanks are well-networked with other actors, such as magazines and campaign groups from the wider far right.

The most significant World War II battle between Germans and Italians outside of Italy was the September 1943 battle for the Greek island of Cephalonia, ending in the post-battle execution by German Mountain Troops of thousands of Italian soldiers. The recent clash between two German groups over what happened illustrates ongoing disputes about guilt and responsibility—how governments, historians, and civilians mobilize facts to write history. The Mountain Troops’ Veterans Association, which has influenced official German memory of the war, used the Cephalonia case to reassert the myth of Wehrmacht innocence, contrary to opinion-shaping Wehrmacht exhibits of the 1990s. In 2010, the federal government, backing a German judicial decision, reasserted the Wehrmacht Myth, despite opposition from Rome, Athens, and an international association of activists, as reports on right-wing extremism in the German police, judiciary, and military have become increasingly prevalent.

Wolfgang Gründinger, Drivers of Energy Transition: How Interest Groups Influenced Energy Politics in Germany (Wiesbaden: Springer vs, 2017).

Thomas Unnerstall, The German Energy Transition: Design, Implementation, Cost and Lessons (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2017).

Jay Julian Rosellini, The German New Right: AfD, PEGIDA and the Re-imagining of National Identity (London: C. Hurst, 2019).

Simon Bulmer and William E. Paterson, Germany and the European Union: Europe's Reluctant Hegemon? (London: Red Globe Press, 2019).

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

Stephan Jaeger, The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).

Robert M. Jarvis, Gambling under the Swastika: Casinos, Horse Racing, Lotteries, and Other Forms of Betting in Nazi Germany (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2019).