The lecture series at the University of Chicago had been announced before the start of the 1988-89 winter semester. In February 1989, the topic “The End of History” was on the agenda. Well before the first roundtable talks in Poland, the Pan-European Picnic in Sopron, or the mass demonstrations in Dresden and Leipzig in what was then communist East Germany, Francis Fukuyama, an expert on Soviet politics employed by the RAND Corporation, had concluded that communism, as a coherent ideological alternative to a Western-style liberal-democratic order, had failed internally and irrevocably.
Anyone with first-hand experience of the miraculous year of 1989-90 will be able to appreciate the exuberance associated with the confirmation of this early insight, which grew with such force at the time. The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s historic speech before the ruins of the Frauenkirche in Dresden on December 19, 1989, and newly-elected Czechoslovak President Václav Havel’s speech on February 21, 1990, to the US Congress, were powerfully driven by the promises and possibilities inherent in overcoming the division of Europe and embarking on an era of freedom and democratic self-determination.
These speeches still inspire people today. But we have known for a long time that the hoped-for global triumph of liberal democracy neither happens all by itself, nor can it be forced by either rhetorical assertions of moral superiority or neo-conservative-inspired regime change.
Nevertheless, this insight has not always shaped German foreign policy. Few have put it more bluntly than Thomas Bagger in his brilliant 2018 essay “The World According to Germany: Reassessing 1989.” It’s particularly ironic that, immediately following the publication of this important essay, German foreign policy once again committed itself with particular verve to the normative overstretch of the concept of a rules-based multilateral order.
This was, of a course, a clear counter-reaction to the shift away from normative aspirations that was already evident during the first Trump administration. And at the same time, it was also influenced by the Biden administration's effusive embrace of cooperation, with declarations of intent to work with "like-minded countries" being readily seized upon, while simultaneously overlooking the fact that the then US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s proclaimed “foreign policy for the middle class” was merely a more intellectually sophisticated version of an “America First” approach.
The End of the Idealistic Approach
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the massacre of October 7, 2023, and its regional and global political consequences, and in light of the second Trump administration’s offensive interventionism—backed by military superiority—we are probably finally facing the end of a global idealistic-normative approach to the international order. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was the most eloquent articulation of this assessment to date.
As sobering as this may be, there’s no reason to shift our thinking directly from the historically exaggerated hopes of a liberal global society, in the Kantian sense, to the cynical alternative of a hostile, warlike state of nature as understood by the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The field of international relations also recognizes the middle ground associated with the Dutch 17th-century political theorist Hugo Grotius. In the 20th century, the Australian political scientist and philosopher Hedley Bull, who taught at Oxford, translated this into the concept of an “anarchical society” in his most important work—an international “society” of states that exists through a corpus of mutually recognized rules, but without a superior power to enforce those rules as a last resort and without the normative aggrandizementof shared principles of belief, characterized neither by a total conflict of interests nor by a total alignment of interests.
Breaking a rule does not delegitimize the rule itself. To illustrate this with a striking example: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine can only serve to reaffirm the principle of the territorial integrity of states, rather than suggesting it should be cast aside. And this view is likely shared even by states that are far from decamping to a democratic, liberal global society of the Kantian variety. Therefore, even in an idealistically disenchanted world order, it is worthwhile advocating for rule-based multilateralism. But a clear-headed look at a more Grotian world order allows us to exercise greater restraint in deploying our own normative energies.
For there is obviously a strong case for leveraging a foundation of shared principles to expand the scope for action and influence through cooperation among like-minded nations in a world of international relations that has never been shaped solely by law, but also by power. This applies, of course, to the established institutions of the organized West, such as the European Union and NATO, but it must also extend beyond them. It is therefore entirely correct that German foreign policy has committed itself to strengthening cooperation within the “global West” (even if it will not use this term, which is cogent in terms of the history of ideas but prone to misunderstanding internationally).
Two Prerequisites
However, deeper cooperation with like-minded states in the Indo-Pacific or the Western Hemisphere must take two things into account:
First, such an approach must not be limited to mere rhetoric of goodwill and cooperation. “Strategic dialogues” that remain largely inconsequential—or at least do not lead to joint strategic action—have great potential to cause disappointment; the nature of relations with Latin America, in particular, bears eloquent witness to this. Before entering into strategic dialogues, therefore, there should be a solid understanding of what resources one is capable of mobilizing to support a shared strategic vision—whether in terms of foreign trade, security policy, defense industrial cooperation, scientific diplomacy, or academic and cultural exchange.
On the other hand, it must be clear that even a broad consensus on shared political values does not preclude conflicting interests. If, even within the EU—and beyond the usual veto players—there is, for example, little consensus on a common Middle East policy, and if there is also a North-South divide on the question of how extensive support for Ukraine should be, then the possibility of such divergences of interest certainly exists outside the established institutions of European-Western cooperation.
The shared commitment to free trade should not obscure the fact that companies based in EU or OECD member states compete with one another on global markets. And whether efforts to strengthen the EU’s competitiveness pay off from a citizens’ perspectiveis not determined by aggregated European performance data, but ultimately by national economic indicators.
As a result, the shifting dynamics of various coalitions of interests—which Mark Carney also cited in his speech as the organizing principle of proactive middle powers—are becoming a constant challenge for German foreign policy. This applies to international cooperation with like-minded partners both within and outside established organizations.
Losing the Competitive Advantage
Yet, this also applies to the shaping of relations with those countries whose systems of government do not meet the standards of liberal-democratic orders. In this respect, too, times have changed since 1989. Until then, the competitive advantage of liberal states had never been in question. Long before Fukuyama’s lecture in Chicago, it was clear to everyone that communist-style centrally planned economies had fallen dramatically behind the potential of free or largely free market economies in terms of their capacity for innovation and production, efficiency, and quality orientation. Given the impressive cutting-edge research, the enormous productive capacity, and the overwhelming pace of innovation with which the Chinese one-party dictatorship shines, it is no longer possible to claim that authoritarian systems continue to lag far behind per se the potential of democratic societies.
Powerful authoritarian regimes expand the options available to medium-sized and smaller powers that are not oriented toward liberal democracy. For, despite all the concerns about the ruthlessness with which China turns economic relations into dependencies, China invests, supplies, and builds, while the EU engages in strategic dialogues and emphasizes the need for improved connectivity. This somewhat caricatured and simplified observation is by no means new, but Germany cannot afford to take a careless view of this development if it simultaneously wishes to expand its own foreign policy influence.
In a world where the glory of days gone by is quickly fading, soft power is becoming a key resource for maintaining German influence. For when potential partners have other options, Germany will have to work even harder to promote the partnership. This requires a more ambitious integration of German foreign policy with the state-funded institutions that shape Germany’s image abroad—whether in academia, culture, or the media—not in the sense of content-driven control, but in the sense of stronger strategic coordination, as is customary in France, Italy, and other countries.
But it is even more important to look inwards. The paralysis of the state’s ability to deliver—caused by a bureaucracy that, in the spirit of the late American economist Mancur Olson, seeks to cater to the specific interests of the smallest coalitions or preemptively eliminate every theoretically conceivable risk through regulation—initially limits our country’s capacity for domestic policy action. However, precisely because, from the perspective of many middle powers, we are no longer engaged in a major conflict between ideologically closed systems, the output legitimacy of political systems—that is, the question of their effectiveness—gains in relative importance.
A Culture of Freedom
For German foreign policy, this means one thing above all else: It’s immediately apparent that a domestic reform agenda aimed at strengthening the state’s capacity to deliver also has a foreign policy dimension. Even the Prussian reforms of the administrative, military, and academic systems initiated following the crushing double defeat by Napoleon’s army at Jena and Auerstedt in the early 19th century had, according to Prussian statesman Karl August von Hardenberg, one of their most important proponents, the primary goal of regaining the capacity to shape foreign policy.
In an age of powerful autocracies, this remains true today. Without going into further detail here, the aim is not to imitate the ruthlessness with which autocratic systems know how to enforce decisions. Rather, the seeds of success lie in an internal revitalization of that culture of freedom which, unlike US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s retrospective, museum-like evocation of European civilization, constitutes the very core of the West’s political objective.
The realization of such an objective cannot be forced. It can only be made possible. Liberal-democratic systems are persuasive above all else because of their inner brightness. The professor of ancient history Christian Meier once put it this way, “But perhaps the legacy of antiquity also held something special, something fascinating, at least for those who had been opened up to it through Christian tradition. In any case, there was something underlying it (and still vibrating within it) for which we can find no other example in world history: freedom.”
—Translated from the German by Kate Brown
Mark Speich is secretary general of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
