Since the euro crisis began in 2010, Germany has found itself in a position that, like the crisis itself, is unprecedented in the history of the European Union. As the largest creditor in a single-currency area consisting of sovereign states, Germany has had extraordinary power during the crisis—so much so that during the last few years Europeans have been debating whether Germany is now a regional “hegemon” and even whether a “German empire” is emerging. Frustrated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s slow but unyielding approach to the crisis, Europe has looked to the Social Democrats—Germany’s largest opposition party—for an alternative, in particular the debt mutualization that many economists think is necessary.
In this paper I examine the use of the concept of "normality" in debates about German foreign policy since unification. In the early 1990s, left-wing intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas tended to criticize the idea of "normality" in favor of a form of German exceptionalism based on responsibility for the Nazi past. A foreign policy based on the idea of "normality" was associated above all with the greater use of military force, which the right advocated and the left opposed. Thus, "normality" became a synonym for Bündnisfähigkeit. Yet, from the mid 1990s onwards, some Social Democrats such as Egon Bahr began to use the concept of "normality" to refer instead to a foreign policy based on sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests. Although a consensus has now emerged in Germany around this realist definition of foreign-policy "normality," it is inadequate to capture the complex shift in the foreign policy of the Federal Republic since unification.
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