berlin brief

Herman van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, has delivered the first “The State of Europe” speech in Berlin on 9 November 2010.

The President that took office a year ago came to Berlin at a time when the European Union still struggles to get the euro currency back on track. Read the rest of this entry »

Then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer commissioned a study in 2005 on the role of the Auswärtiges Amt during National Socialism.

An independent commission of four renowned historians has now published a substantial report concluding that the wartime foreign ministry played an important role in the Nazi crimes and that the post WWII ministry continued to employ diplomats that were involved in them. “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik” is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of the Foreign Office under the Nazi regime based on the foreign office’s archives.

The findings that were presented at two events in Berlin last week – by the current Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in the Auswärtiges Amt as well as by his predecessors Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Joschka Foscher in a separate event -  have received wide attention in Berlin’s political elites as well as among the German public.

The book was released a week ago and is being reprinted already.

Here is the official position of the Federal Foreign Office acknowledging that “the Foreign Office was deeply involved in the crimes of the Third Reich”.

Also, take a look at Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s speech on the topic and at the head of the independent commission explaining his findings to Spiegel Online:

“Hitler’s Diplomats: Historian calls wartime ministry a ‘criminal organization’” (Interview with historian Eckart Conze, Spiegel Online International, 27 October 2010).

The European Union is still struggling to protect the euro currency against new turbulences. Member states agree that the current Stability and Growth Pact needs to be reformed to give the sanctions regime a stronger clout, and that the Union needs an ordered insolvency law. However the devil is in the detail and it has been difficult to conclude a deal among the 16 euro zone and 27 European Union members.

Like in the old days of the Franco-German motor, Germany and France came up with a proposal prior to the EU summit on 28/29 October, agreed during a beach walk at the French-German-Russian summit in Deauville on 18 October 2010. The deal provoked an outcry across the Union. Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after Minister of Defence Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg announced the end of conscription earlier this fall, an independent commission set up to review the practice of the Ministry of Defence suggested to cut the ministry’s staff by half.

The cross-party commission presided by Frank-Jürgen Weise, the head of the Federal Agency for Employment, presented its report on 26 October 2010, as governments across Europe are announcing cuts in defence spending.

If taken on, the reform proposal would mean another shake up of Germany’s defence establishment. Minister zu Guttenberg announced that he would carefully review the proposals. The spending policies of the Ministry of Finance already played in his hands when abolishing conscription. Looks like a few more sacred cows are being slaugthered in Berlin over the next months.

There is a debate going on in Berlin at the moment about whether the reforms of the armed forces and the MOD will eventually lead to a more efficient Bundeswehr able to deal with future threats.

Take a look at:

“German Committee Recommends Cutbacks in Defense Spending” (Judy Dempsey in the International Herald Tribune, 24 October 2010).

The German campaign for a seat among the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council succeeded on 12 October 2010.

128 of the 192 UN member states voted for Germany to take a seat in the Security Council for two years, starting in 2011.

Peter Wittig, the German UN Ambassador, played a key role in the campaign. He is said to have spoken to almost all UN members before the vote.

Take a look at reactions in the German media:

“Germany Joins ‘Vehement Supporters of Reform’ on Security Council” (Spiegel Online International, The World from Berlin, 13 October 2010)

The berlinbrief is drawing your attention to a recent paper by Benjamin Schreer, deputy director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, on Germany and Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

The piece has been published in the Australian journal “Security Challenges”.

Here is the paper’s abstract:

“This article examines the challenges for the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, to adapt to the counterinsurgency (COIN) challenge in the context of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. It argues that prevailing German strategic thought makes it very hard for the Bundeswehr to adjust for COIN in a comprehensive way. While adjustments have been made, these are largely on the operational and tactical level. The political and the strategic level of the armed forces are far from embracing COIN as a strategy and as a major task for the Bundeswehr. Germany’s allies and partners like Australia need to recognise the structural factors putting brakes to a rapid transformation of the Bundeswehr for COIN.”

Read the full text here.

Spiegel Online International reported on 11 October that the victims of a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan earlier this month have been identified.

The group of men targeted by U.S. forces included German citizens that were believed to have ties with the Hamburg cell of the 9/11 hijackers.

The incident coincided with a travel alert issued by the U.S., warning its citizens of the risk of terrorist attacks in Europe carried out by militant Islamists.

The German government reacted cautiously to the alert. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been ten years this month that the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 in which it calls for an increase in the participation of women at decision-making levels in conflict resolution and peace processes.

Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, the foundation affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the German chapter of Women in International Security (WIIS.de) jointly hosted a workshop and a public event on the issue in Berlin on 5 October 2010.

“Decision-Making in Security and Defence Policy: Men without Women?” included participants from both Europe and the United States working on foreign and security issues. Speakers at the public event moderated by Constanze Stelzenmüller, WIIS.de’s president, included Kathleen Hicks, U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Forces, Stefanie Babst, NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy Strategy as well as Major Paula D. Broadwell, a defense analyst and a member of the executive board of WIIS in the United States.

A decade on, there is still little knowledge about Resolution 1325 – many believe it is essentially about the protection of women and children in armed combat – and women are only slowly making it into senior positions in security and defense institutions. However, structural impediments are increasingly lifted so trends point toward a greater involvement of women.

In the workshop session that took place prior to the public event, 30 women discussed strategies to strengthen 1325.

IHT’s staff Katrin Bennhold wrote about the conference in a piece published 2 November 2010: “Waging War and Peace With Women.”

Following an interview with Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Westerwelle’s openness to Turkey becoming a member of the European Union puts him at odds with his coalition partners, Chancellor Merkel and the conservative parties CDU and CSU. (The Wall Street Journal, 23 September 2010)

The widely read European news platform EUobserver picked up on the issue.

While it is true that Turkey’s EU membership perspective has frequently put both CDU and CSU under stress (and the majority of their members are perhaps still against Turkish EU membership), the issue has become less controversial.  There are some indications:

1. When the British Prime Minister David Cameron recently visited Turkey he indirectly criticized both the French and German governments for being against Turkish accession. Germany’s conservative parties did not respond to this attack. In the past such remarks would have triggered immediate talk about the so called “privileged partnership” that the Conservatives prefer to membership status for Turkey. This discourse seems to have disappeared.

2. Ruprecht Polenz, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of Chancellor Merkel’s CDU, has recently published a book in which he makes a strong plea for Turkey’s EU membership. (see berlinbrief 1 August 2010) There has not been any controversy so far over this open dismissal of the “privileged partnership”.

3. Turkish accession is not likely to happen within the next decade anyway. This makes it a somewhat distant topic for any government.

I am not suggesting that the coalition government is making a shift in its policy toward Turkey. However, there seems to be room for different opinions again. However it likely that Westerwelle’s “openness” is based on the knowledge that for a number of reasons Turkish EU accession is not to be expected any time soon.

The current issue of the German Law Journal is looking at the Kosovo case, analyzing the July 2010 opinion of the International Court of Justice.

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the Court’s recent opinion. This month’s issue covers a wide range of topics related to the Kosovo case, including the role of the European Union.

The German Law Journal provides for a free download of the papers.

Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has just visited the Western Balkans, where he called the independence and territorial integrity of Kosovo a “reality”.