Modern German Foreign and Security Policy - Dissertation Example

There is a commentators’ consensus on the opinion that the timing of the Gulf crisis couldn’t have been worse for the Federal Republic of Germany, which was midway through a crucial round of unification negotiations, including the Two-Plus-Four conferences, ministry- level talks with representatives of East on unification procedures, as well as the end-stage negotiations with occupation authorities still based in Germany after the end of World War II (Lantis 21). The oncoming – as of December 1990 – first all-German elections didn’t seem to make the situation easier; thus, being engaged in end-stage pursuit of what has been considered the chief foreign policy goal for many years, German politicians, like the then Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, admitted that the Gulf crisis was rather a ‘distraction’ from more exigent matters for Germany, or at least an issue to worry about only in terms of its impact on East-West relations with their vital importance for the German unification agreement.

While very few government agencies and research institutes ventured to consider the implications of German reunification for foreign policy, such concerns were generally missing at the level of Bundestag and cabinet discussions by that time (Lantis 21). Since the focal points of Germany’s foreign and security policy remained NATO and the European Union, some politicians, including Chancellor Kohl and Defense Minister Stoltenberg, sought to break through the paradigm of cold-war thinking and thus to reshape Germany’s foreign policy profile via broader interpretations of the Basic Law in regard to country’s obligations to collective security within both institutions.

Despite these efforts, which were seen by many commentators as an invitation the EU to take the initiative in order to provide German leadership with the necessary political justification for increased military involvement, the more conventional approach to foreign policy, personified by the stance of Foreign Minister Genscher, gained the upper hand.