Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), Angela Merkel’s Minister of Finance, is planning to extend the ministry’s impact on the international media.
Bertrand Benoit, who has so far been the bureau chief of the Financial Times’ Berlin office, will head a new foreign media department within the ministry that will serve as a contact point predominantly for English and French media.
The Berlin branch of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) has just moved to a new office space.
Having left the Oranienburger Straße, Ulrike Guérot and her team now reside in Reinhardtstraße near the Bundestag, where lobbyists and think tanks such as the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) have already set up home.
On 21 January 2010, the new office was opened to the public. Werner Hoyer, Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gave a speech at the inauguration event.
ECFR supporters Joschka Fischer, Roland Berger and Wolfgang Ischinger; Angela Merkel’s advisor Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut and the head of the policy planning unit in the Foreign Ministry, Markus Ederer, were amongst the attendees.
In 2009, Berlin celebrated the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989.
Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of Germany’s reunification. In 1990, Germany stood on the international stage as a unified country embarking on a new journey to rediscover and redefine its role in international relations.
Twenty years later, this role is still to be found. berlinbrief will continue to monitor that journey.
In January 2010, berlinbrief will be back with news and analyses on German foreign policy.
berlinbrief wishes its Christian readers Merry Christmas and all readers a happy and peaceful New Year.
I want to write about an event at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) last week.
Cornelius Adebahr, a fellow on European foreign affairs at the Council, presented his book “Learning and Change in European Foreign Policy: The Role of the EU Special Representatives”. On this occasion DGAP hosted a timely event on current developments in European foreign policy.
Adebahr had a prominent commentator: Wolfgang Ischinger, the director of the Munich Security Conference and a former German ambassador to London and Washington DC. In 2007, Ischinger also served as the EU special envoy to the negotiations on the status of Kosovo. In his view, European foreign policy has developed at a remarkable speed over the last decade. (more…)
I attended an interesting event in Berlin yesterday on the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission’s “Report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress”. This is not quite a Foreign Policy topic, you might argue. But interestingly, the debate was a lot more about politics than about statistics.
The Bertelsmann Stiftung (Bertelsmann Foundation) invited Jacques Le Cacheux to present the findings of the report published in September at Bertelsmann’s Berlin representation “Unter den Linden 1″. Quite an address. Le Cacheux is one of the rapporteurs of the high-level Commission around Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen that was convened on the initiative of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy in January 2008 (i.e. well before the economic and financial crisis started). 
(more…)