Description
Germany has increasingly seized the opportunity in global politics to promote gender, race, and LGBTIQ+ equality in foreign policy. However, German society is marked by deeply entrenched patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative structures that are not conducive to such progressive foreign policy change. Building on the concept of gendered multilevel games (Aggestam and True 2021) and widening it to include race and sexuality, this paper explores how German foreign policy executives negotiate this domestic/international divide. It argues that actors harness power to effect change by claiming that Germany can only credibly make a more gender-, race- and LGBTIQ-equal foreign policy if it lives those values itself. Although this claim seems to translate more progressive values from the international realm to the less-than-equal German society, its scope remains severely limited. For, the argument only extends to the realm of the German Foreign Office: the interests of women, People of Colour, and LGBTIQ+ folks working for the Foreign Office are substituted for those of marginalised groups in the wider public. Consequently, the multilevel game works precisely because it is played at the organisational level of the Foreign Office, whereby it avoids pressing questions of societal reform and externalises gender, race, and LGBTIQ+ inequality.
