Description
The paper takes a role theoretical perspective to explore how the Biden administration’s expectations of German foreign and security policy under the new German coalition government interact with ongoing domestic contestation in Germany about the trajectory of German foreign policy. The starting points of the paper are twofold. On one side, the US is one of the most significant ‘others’ for German foreign policy outside the EU, and the shifting U.S. approach to Germany from the Trump to the Biden administration can therefore be expected to reverberate within the German debate. On the other side, German foreign policy has in recent years seen increasing contestation around Germany’s ‘civilian power’ role, which may at the same time feed into U.S. role expectations and be shaped by these expectations. Empirically, the paper builds on 25 recent expert interviews in Washington, D.C. about the Biden administration’s views on German foreign and security policy on a range of issue areas, including Germany’s relations to Russia and China as well as its approach to the EU and NATO. Theoretically, the paper contributes to efforts at conceptualising the dynamic interplay between international role expectations and domestic (vertical and horizontal) role contestation.
