Hegemony in the Making: Germany on the Way to Becoming a Political Giant

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Published on Tuesday, 12 May 2015 14:00

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1114 .... May 11, 2015
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Hegemony in the Making:
Germany on the Way to Becoming a Political Giant

Rainer Rilling
(Translation by Eric Canepa)

Germany is an economic giant but a political dwarf. Ever since the run-up to the First World War, this thesis has been firmly established in the conservative camp and it remains the basic assumption of a century of German foreign and security policy. In the end, it has come up against one problem in the tradition of the so-called realistic school of international politics: In the present world of states how does my state actually achieve more security and power? In the struggle to assert itself within capitalist competition and the anarchic, inhospitable international political order, how can it come out on top, how can it achieve, maintain, and extend hegemony or primacy?

In none of the capitalist centres are there significant alternatives to the crude business of power maximization -- at most ‘liberal imperialism’ or ‘liberal internationalism’ variants offer slight mitigation, but they have always tended to militarism. How will the political dwarf become a political giant playing in the ‘global players’ league, which is the way the paper Neue Macht, Neue Verantwortung (New Power, New Responsibility), published in September 2013 by the influential Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) jointly with the German Marshall Fund (GMF) put it? How is this ‘awkward problem of size’ (as former German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger put it in 1967) to be overcome? And what actually is a giant nowadays?

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