Comparing Germany’s and Poland’s ESDPs: roles, path dependencies, learning, and socialization: Cornelia Frank

Abstract

Introduction Since the start of the twenty-first century, Germany’s and Poland’s European Security and Defense Policies (ESDPs) have converged with regard to the use of force, cooperation within the ESDP, and its geographical scope. Nevertheless, differences over the European Union’s finality and ambivalences in their respective ESDPs persist. This chapter argues that national role conceptions explain the German and Polish ESDPs. The following assumes that “how the policymaker imagines the milieu to be, not how it actually is” (Sprout and Sprout 1957: 328) is crucial to understanding a state’s foreign policy. It is argued that as an actor-centered approach, role theory is especially useful in explaining German and Polish decision makers’ role behavior: First, the observed convergence resulted from changes within role conceptions due to crisis learning from Kosovo and Iraq and socialization through EU institutions, especially the Political and Security Committee (PSC). Second, continuing differences between both states’ ESDPs can be traced back to their role-beholders’ divergent understandings of statehood, international institutions, and the use of force.2 Third, ambivalences in the German and Polish ESDPs are symptoms of unresolved tensions between different role elements within their overarching role conceptions. The analysis of Germany’s and Poland’s ESDPs will proceed as follows: The first section will define key concepts and introduce crisis learning and socialization as two mechanisms for role change. With few exceptions (Harnisch 2001, 2010; Maull 2000), role theory has so far neglected causal mechanisms for role change (Harnisch and Folz, this volume). Thus, I employ learning and socialization theories to fill these theoretical gaps. The second section will outline the foreign policy role conceptions of a civilian power and a transforming Atlanticist. In the third section, I will compare German and Polish role behavior in the ESDP with regard to transatlantic cleavages over ESDP realization. In the fourth section, I shall argue that the two role conceptions provide a convincing explanation for Germany’s and Poland’s positions towards the ESDP. Taking the convergence of their foreign policy roles as a starting point, the fifth and final section will discuss whether we can expect an increasing harmonization of both states’ positions towards the ESDP.