Benjamin Herborth

Since the end of the Cold War and re-unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union has undergone significant changes. Once a model "Europeanist", Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory and providing an in-depth analysis of both refugee and security policy, this book develops an innovative framework for analysis that is capable of accounting for incremental changes in Germany's EU policy, which, over time, amount to the image of a de-Europeanization by default.

The notion of 'the West' is commonly used in politics, the media, and in the academic world. To date, our idea of 'the West' has been largely assumed and effective, but has not been examined in detail from a theoretical perspective. Uses of 'the West' combines a range of original and topical approaches to evaluate what 'the West' really does, and how the idea is being used in everyday political practice. This book examines a range of uses of 'the West', and traces how 'the West' works in a broad array of conceptual and empirical contexts, ranging from the return of geopolitics - via a critical review of the debates surrounding Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilization thesis - to the question of the future of 'the West'. Analysis extends further to the repercussions of the war on terror on Western democracy and the processes of delineating the Western from the non-Western, as well as observations of the institutional transformations of Western order.

The primary objective of this article is to theorise transformations of Western order
in a manner that does not presuppose a fixed understanding of ‘the West’ as a preconstituted
political space, ready-made and waiting for social scientific enquiry. We
argue that the Copenhagen School’s understanding of securitisation dynamics
provides an adequate methodological starting point for such an endeavour. Rather
than taking for granted the existence of a Western ‘security community’, we thus
focus on the performative effects of a security semantics in which ‘the West’ figures
as the threatened, yet notoriously vague referent object that has to be defended
against alleged challenges. The empirical part of the article reconstructs such
securitisation dynamics in three different fields: the implications of representing
China’s rise as a challenge to Western order, the effects of the transformation of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards a global security actor, and
the consequences of extraordinary renditions and practices of torture for the
normative infrastructure of ‘the West’. We conclude that Western securitisation
dynamics can be understood as a discursive shift away from a legally enshrined
culture of restraint and towards more assertive forms of self-authorisation.

Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union (EU) has undergone significant changes. Once a model “Europeanist,” Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Neither an instance of a planned strategic change nor a result of an inevitable adaptation to structural shifts at the systemic level, these changes in German foreign policy, incremental yet significant as they are, evade both deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of foreign policy change. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory, the article develops an innovative framework for analysis that is applied to Germany's European asylum and refugee policy as well as its security and defense policy. The origins of both policy fields at the European level can be traced back to initiatives that were supported by or even originated in Germany. However, as the 1990s progressed Germany increasingly obstructed further institutionalization. While in the field of asylum and refugee policy the Amsterdam summit marks a clear turning point in Germany's position, the transformation of German policies on European security and defense proceeded rather as an incremental decrease in material support, aggravating substantive progress in the policy field more broadly. An unanticipated consequence of earlier initiatives, in both cases Germany has found it increasingly difficult to live up to the expectations it has helped to raise.

How can we observe social change beyond the confines of anarchy and its flip side of the world of sovereign states? This is the question that has informed much of constructivist theorizing in their attempt to come to terms with today’s global order. That an answer to this question is eminently important is almost common sense: whether we deal with the internationalization of criminal law, cybersecurity or even the Euro-Crisis, today’s problems do not fall the net of well-established categories. Rather we deal with situations where new social spaces have created new authorities and a set of new –what they perceive to be – legitimate practices. This creation of social spaces, distinct rationalities and their mutual clash with other rationalities call for an approach that takes these developments seriously and hence, treats the social, the ways of world making, as the site of political processes. This contribution argues that IR in general and constructivists in particular has not taken seriously a crucial distinction when it comes to questions of method and methodology: the logic of subsumption and the logic of reconstruction. This has crucial repercussions on how we conceptualise method or methodology – as well as critique, deliberation and thus the politics of social inquiry.