German Visions Research Articles

Towards green hydrogen? – A comparison of German and African visions and expectations in the context of the H2Atlas-Africa project

Green hydrogen promises to be critical in achieving a sustainable and renewable energy transition. As green hydrogen is produced with renewables, green hydrogen could become an energy storage medium of the future and even substitute the current unsustainable grey or blue hydrogen used in the industry. Bringing this transition into reality, for instance, in Germany, there are visions to rapidly build hydrogen facilities in Africa and export the produced green hydrogen to Europe. One problem, however, is that these visions presumably conflict with the visions of actors within Africa. Therefore, this study aims to provide an initial assessment of African stakeholders' visions for future energy exports and renewable energy expectations.By comparing visions from Germany and Africa, this assessment was conducted to identify differences in green energy and hydrogen visions that could lead to conflict and similarities that could be the basis for cooperation. The National Hydrogen Strategy outlines the German visions, which clarifies that Germany will have to import green hydrogen to meet its green transition target. In this context of future energy export demand, a partnership between German and African researchers on assessing green hydrogen potentials in Africa started. The African visions were explored by surveying the partners from different African countries working on the project.The results revealed that while both sides see the need for an immediate transition to renewable energy, the African side is not envisioning the immediate export of green hydrogen. Based on the responses, the partners are primarily concerned with improving the continent's still deficient energy access for both the population and industry. Nevertheless, this African perspective greatly emphasises cross-border cooperation, where both sides can realise their visions. In the case of Germany, that German investment could build infrastructure, which would benefit the receiving African country or countries and open up the possibility for the envisioned green hydrogen export to Europe.

Scribbling Toward Utopia

I first invoke Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Towards Jerusalem.” Her concern was to move away from the dystopia that parts of the United States had become through drug use and other temptations toward a more utopian state. My attempt uses a number of examples where utopias have been imagined and some where the main lesson is cautionary rather than optimistic. Even Sir Thomas More’s Utopia had its faults while the East German vision of a socialist utopia collapsed into tyranny and farce. My scribbles are modest attempts to promote a just society, a kind of utopia—maybe.

Amblyopie-Prävalenz in Europa

Purpose. The aim of the present study is to estimate the prev- alence of amblyopia in Europe. Amblyopia is one of the most common causes of visual impairment, especially in children. It is defined as any unilateral or bilateral decrease in the visual acuity in the absence of structural and pathologic disorders of the eye. Amblyopia is due to insufficient development of the visual system in early childhood. If amblyopia is not detected and treated in time, the visual acuity reduction will persist for life. Material and Methods. An extensive literature review was conducted using the PubMed database using search combi- nations of “amblyopia”, “amblyopia prevalence”, “amblyopia screening” and “amblyopia therapy”. European studies on amblyopia prevalence and meta-analyses were included. The results on amblyopia prevalence are summarized. The German vision screening program is presented in detail and compared with other European programs. Results. Studies on amblyopia prevalence showed high het- erogeneity. Meta-analyses revealed pool prevalences of 2.7 to 3.7 percent. Anisometropia was the most common cause of amblyopia. For Germany, the prevalence in adults was estimated at 5.6 percent, which is a high rate compared with other European countries. Data from a German child cohort showed a prevalence of 1.5 percent. This estimate is consistent with prevalence rates in other European countries. Conclusion. Amblyopia prevalence in Germany appears to be lower in children than in adults. However, studies on amblyo- pia prevalence are difficult to compare with each other. This is partly due to the use of different amblyopia definitions. In addition, there are still no uniform European standards for amblyopia screening. Keywords amblyopia, prevalence, children, anisometropia, strabismus, screening

Fighting Hate with Speech Law: Media and German Visions of Democracy

ABSTRACT In Germany, far-right groups have revived Nazi terminology like Lügenpresse (lying press) or Systempresse (system press) to decry the media today. German politicians, journalists, and the public have turned to numerous methods to try to combat the reinsertion of Nazi language into everyday German life. One key method is the law. Prior to the 2017 German election, the German parliament swiftly passed the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (Network Enforcement Law, NetzDG for short). While English-language press has often called this act a hate speech law, it actually enforces 22 statutes of extant German speech law online. Spearheaded by the SPD-led Justice Ministry, NetzDG represented the most public effort by the German government to push back against the AfD, the far right, and the rise of hate speech in Germany. NetzDG attracted huge global attention as the first major law to fine American-based social media companies for not adhering to national statutes. This article examines why German politicians turned to law as a way to combat the rise of the far right. I explore how NetzDG represented German political understandings of the relationship between freedom of expression and democracy and argue that NetzDG followed a longer historical pattern of German attempts to use media law to raise Germany's profile on the international stage. The article examines the irony that NetzDG was meant to defend democracy in Germany, but may have unintentionally undermined it elsewhere, as authoritarian regimes like Russia seized upon the law to justify their own curtailments of free expression. Finally, I explain the difficulties of measuring whether NetzDG has achieved its goals and showcase a few other approaches to the problems of information in democracies.

Dignity in transition: the constitutional and operational potential and limits of human dignity seen from the lens of post-conflict societies

ABSTRACT This article explores the meaning and status of human dignity in a post-conflict context through, primarily albeit not exclusively, an examination of Kosovo's experience. The content and contours of the 2008 Kosovo Constitution were most naturally shaped by its past, formed by a state of conflict and further non-consensual bloody dissolution of the remainder of the former Yugoslav federation, superseded by an interim UN-led territorial administration. Its core values have emerged from a violent and totalitarian past. Unsurprisingly, it contains an explicit standalone human dignity-provision much like the German and South African constitutional models, however, unlike the other recently-adopted constitutions in comparable post-conflict or transitional settings – from Bosnia and Herzegovina to South Sudan – that rather opt for non-operative and mostly preambular references. What this means in practice and how is this related to the German and Strasbourg Court visions of dignity? Overall, what is the legal nature and jurisprudential significance of human dignity in societies in transition? The inquiry is placed within the framework of plural, evolving and mutually-engaged constitutional narratives, aiming to shed light on multiple manifestations of singular constitutional concepts.

Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941. By James E. Casteel. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Edited by Jonathan Harris.Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. xii+252. $28.95 (paper).Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950. By Christian Bailey.New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Pp. xiv+260. $120.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

<i>Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941</i>. By James E. Casteel. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Edited by Jonathan Harris.Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. xii+252. $28.95 (paper).<i>Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950</i>. By Christian Bailey.New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Pp. xiv+260. $120.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

Niemiecka wizja miejsca Rosji w multipolarnym świecie

The commonly held truth is that the attitude of German society and the German elite to Russia is different to the attitude of Poland. This is not entirely true because due to Russian policy, the Germans have become more critical of Russia in the twenty-first century than before. Germany, however, pursues a more global policy than Poland. As Russia and Germany are of great significance in Polish politics, it is important to question the German vision of Russia’s place in today’s multipolar world. This is all the more important given that Germany, as the strongest country in Europe and the one that stabilized the euro zone, has difficulty in defining its role in the international arena. It is only as a result of the recent debate about the hybrid war, that Germany has overcome its unilateral geo-economic perception of the world. It is clear that the Germans are facing a new challenge, which they have not been prepared for.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950 by Christian Bailey

Reviewed by: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950 by Christian Bailey Steve Hochstadt Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950. By Christian Bailey. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Pp. xiv + 259. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1782381396. Christian Bailey believes that the historiography about the origins of European postwar integration is short-sighted and teleological, more a "foundational myth of integration as a linear and solely postwar process" than a complete history (2). So he has dug up some "lost Europes" (2) created by loose groupings of Germans of disparate political persuasions whose thinking began in Weimar, spanned the Nazi regime, and reappeared after 1945. He argues that the postwar integration of Europe owed much to ideas and plans proposed before 1933 and shows that conservatives, Catholics, and socialists all offered ideas for a united Europe during the Weimar [End Page 441] period, but blamed the republic's weaknesses and the Nazi takeover on the excesses of parliamentary democracy. The internationalist schemes that they proposed were therefore markedly less democratic in structure. It comes as no surprise that these ideas placed Germany in the center of a united Mitteleuropa, looking east as much as west, thereby conferring on a new Germany the dominant position. To demonstrate the breadth and significance of the interwar proponents of European unity, and their agreement about the dangers of mass democracy, Bailey focuses on three groups of intellectuals and political leaders. The first of these, the conservative Europäische Kulturbund, active between 1922 and 1933, was dedicated to working toward an aristocratic European community that would thwart both nationalism and the factionalism of party politics. Accordingly, many of its members, including its founder Karl Anton Rohan and figures such as Carl Schmitt, welcomed the potential for cultural renewal represented by fascism. After the war, some of these ideas were reinvigorated in the journal Merkur, where an early Ostpolitik was advanced from the political right. On the far left, the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, lodged uncomfortably between the SPD and KPD during Weimar, advocated an integrated Europe on the Marxist model with its center in central Europe, not the USSR. After persecution and exile during the Nazi period, Kampfbund leaders returned to Germany to advocate revolution against capitalism, while also demanding a period of political education for the German population before it was ready for sovereignty. Bailey seeks "to nuance" the common narrative that socialism in Germany was Westernized after 1945 by demonstrating that these socialists sought to create a "neutral, socialist and unified Europe" (116), unlike other SPD leaders like Kurt Schumacher. Finally, Bailey describes a group of centrist reformers, exiled in Switzerland, who formed Demokratisches Deutschland to promote more regional sovereignty for regions like Bavaria as a reaction to the excessive nationalism of the Prussian-led unification of 1871. Heinrich Ritzel typified their views of democracy by urging that the people who had "sacrificed the political democracy to a charlatan" could not be "trusted to exist independently in a renewed political democracy" (161). Only after perhaps thirty years of tutelage under the benevolent leadership of a council of "the most talented" leaders might full democracy return to Germany (163). For these men, European integration was a means of "redistributing power away from a national center" toward regions like Bavaria (173–174). Bailey labels the various organizations under discussion "civil society associations" (24), because they were not political parties in the strict sense. Yet the men who developed the plans he analyzes were well connected politically; their discourse was aimed at political leaders or at enabling them to attain political leadership for themselves. Civil society as we understand it in the twenty-first century does not inform his argument and was not directly addressed by such figures. These intellectuals and party [End Page 442] leaders, all of whom had authoritarian tendencies, assumed that they represented the working class or average Catholics, but they never explained why less democracy would be better for average Germans. Bailey's use of civil society as an interpretive theme (4–7) falls short, then, but by and large he succeeds in demonstrating that a "linear political history" from the European Coal and Steel Community to...

How not to build a world wireless network: German–British rivalry and visions of global communications in the early twentieth century

Edward Snowden’s revelations laid bare an unprecedented scale of state influence on communications technology. But government elites have frequently shaped technological development through their beliefs about potentially nefarious uses of communications. This article argues that beliefs about how other states or groups might use a technology can shape innovation. In particular, German visions about the British use of cables spurred German investment in developing wireless telegraphy. Germans imagined that the British were using cable technology to damage Germany’s reputation, spy on Germany and ‘poison’ neutral countries against the Central Powers. The German government and military at first created a colonial wireless network to bypass British cables. In World War I, however, they sought to establish a world wireless network. In the end, innovation was significantly shaped by how Germans imagined their enemies’ uses of communications technology.

Germany's world: power and followership in a crisis-ridden Europe

EUrope and Germany face unprecedented crises. Given its role as EUrope's “central power” the article explores how Germany looks at its environment and how the world looks back. I offer five cuts of Germany's world, that is, how its power, place and ambition might be described from different angles. First, I examine a “structural” interpretation of EUrope's setting which shows a certain affinity with German visions of a rules-governed world. Next I reconstruct how Germany's changing role is described from the outside and the inside. The stark contrast between images of overbearing “hegemony” and facilitating German “leadership” lay the ground for a third cut which examines how German leadership has fared in three recent EUropean crises. In a fourth cut I analyse Germany's leadership challenges against the foil of US leadership globally. The difficulties highlighted in Germany's world of “shaping powers” and tough love diplomacy, my fifth cut, leave it, and EUrope, in an unenviable position indeed.

Christian Bailey, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950

Christian Bailey, <i>Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950</i>

Perry Myers, German Visions of India, 1871–1918. Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2013

Perry Myers, German Visions of India, 1871–1918. Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2013

German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich. By PerryMyers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xiii + 258; illustrations. $100.00.

German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich. By PerryMyers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xiii + 258; illustrations. $100.00.

Uwarunkowania transformacji polityki energetycznej Francji. Między ekologiczną modernizacją a ekonomiczną kalkulacją

The project of ecological modernisation – widely integrating all aspects of economic trans- formation – is one of the flagship ideas of incumbent French President Francois Hollande and the French Socialists. The current energy policy of France, one of the largest global and European energy consumers, is focused on energy efficiency and technological safety standards in the nuclear industry, and to a lesser extent on the development of new green energy technologies. Approaching the German vision of energy transformation, the new French policy has proposed several initiatives for the development of renewable sources. France realised that the development of renewable energy is of strategic importance, not only to meet the energy needs of the country, but also – in the face of the stricter regime of GHG emissions reductions – to provide a competitive advantage for an innovative economy and an opportunity to create many new jobs. Ecological modernisation of the economy is supposed to ensure progress in achieving environmental goals, together with the progress of industrialisation and economic growth (sustainable development).

Dual Citizenship in Germany and what it Means for World Politics

The article is devoted to the new law on dual citizenship in Germany and analyzes its eventual impact on the international political system. Dual citizenship establishes political and legal connections between an individual and two states at the same time. Its admissibility has been a subject of various discussions since the very appearance of this institution and doubtful loyalty has always been the main argument against it. The adoption of a law permitting dual citizenship in Germany for those whose both parents are foreigners means passing another stage of liberalization. This decision is part of the idea of an open multicultural society officially praised all over Europe and that has silenced (at least for now) arguments on unreliability of those who hold two ID cards. The author focuses on Turkish diaspora that will benefit the most from the initiative, since it is the largest and the most influential foreign community on German territory. Thus, issues related to citizenship are closely connected with modern migration problems. Suggesting that migration flows from Turkey will grow and so will the proportion of German citizens of Turkish descent, the author attempts to predict how the new law can influence world politics. In these circumstances further changes are possible in integration processes, the relations between EU and its key partners and equally in international security architecture. The analysis is preceded by a short historical overview of Turkish diaspora formation in Germany and German vision of a national community that inevitably determines the State citizenship policies.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950, by Christian Bailey

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950, by Christian Bailey. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. xiv, 259 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). In his fascinating political history of German visions of Europe from the 1920s through to the 1950s, Christian Bailey sets out to complicate the history of European unity. Thanks to a large and growing body of scholarship, we know a great deal about how the European Union was formed. In recent years scholars have focused on the project's extensive intergovernmental negotiations. This includes the examination of how countries manoeuvred for the advantage, the defense of perceived national interests, and the balance of making sufficient concessions to its negotiating partners to prevent the project's collapse. Bailey brings a refreshing perspective to this hard-headed realist history. An example of this is his revival of the history of ideas approach that seriously considers how politically-active Europeans conceived of a united Europe before the political agreements that serve as historical milestones: the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the Schuman Plan, the European Coal and Steel Community, the failed European Defence Community, and the Rome Treaties. This history of ideas approach is best exemplified by the work of Walter Lipgens and his collaborators, who sought to trace the historical origins of European federalism. This method was largely abandoned because of its presumed inability to explain why European integration took the precise form it did when it did. As Bailey's study shows, there are good reasons to return to this earlier approach. Its value lies not so much in identifying the lineages of the European Union, as in making clear that Europe was not simply an instrument of international cooperation and progress for some of its most fervent proponents on both the political left and right. Perhaps the most intriguing argument in the book concerns attitudes toward parliamentary and majoritarian democracy. Bailey examines the case of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK), a splinter group founded in the 1920s and situated between the German socialist and communist parties. He argues that the ISK leaders, several of whom would assume prominent roles in the post-war German Social Democratic Party (SPD) (among them Willi Eichler), distrusted parliamentary democracy because of their belief that the masses could be too easily manipulated. This distrust was fuelled by the breakdown of the Weimar democracy, beginning in the late 1920s, followed by the experience of the Nazi regime with its popular/plebiscitary practices. Democracy might be judged preferable to dictatorship for Germany, but it had to be a democracy capable of curbing the masses. …

German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich by Perry Myers (review)

Reviewed by: German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich by Perry Myers John Phillip Short German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich. By Perry Myers. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Pp. xiii + 259. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1137299710. In Germany, wrote the Victorian Indologist Max Müller in India: What Can It Teach Us? (1892), “there is a vague charm connected with the name of India.” A scholar “who studies Sanskrit in Germany is supposed to be initiated in the deep and dark mysteries of ancient wisdom, and a man who has travelled in India … is listened to like another Marco Polo” (4). Perry Myers sets out to illuminate—perhaps demystify—something of that mysterious allure by tracing “German visions of India” from the 1870s to World War I. Like Müller, he is interested in the Indologists’ India: in the ways that German scholars construed India for themselves and one another. This chapter is one in a long history of German Indology reaching back to the Enlightenment and forward to the occult enchantment of Aryanism. Myers focuses on a handful of German men: Indologists like Leopold von Schroeder, Rudolf Seydel, Paul Deussen, and Hermann Oldenberg; missionaries in India; and theosophists like Franz Hartmann and Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden. The book, then, is concerned not so much with German ideas about late colonial India as with their attitudes toward the India of the Vedic texts and early Buddhism—the scholars’ India. Myers traces a form of transposition linking Germany and India in prismatic relation. These intellectuals treated ancient India as a mirror for thinking about [End Page 183] contemporary Germany; and Germany as the filter through which India is construed, or, indeed, obscured. Myers emphasizes how conditions in Germany determined Indological investigations, especially into early Buddhism. The scholars’ India turns out to be a map of Germany, its social divisions, its colonial fears and fantasies, its cultural and class anxieties. (No Indian, it seems, exerts the least influence or agency here.) Moving with the current of recent work on German orientalism, Myers rejects the monolithic sense of orientalist discourse attributed to Edward Said. Instead, citing Pierre Bourdieu, he introduces a sense of dynamism and conflict, a field of contestation in which Indologists negotiated for symbolic capital, legitimacy, and status. The heart of this competition was confessional, crystallizing in distinctions between Catholic and Protestant scholars during the Kulturkampf and after. Indology, especially as comparative religious studies, was shaped—or deformed—by confessional tensions bedeviling the new Reich. Myers falls into some conceptual slippage here. Catholic or Protestant Indologists or missionaries are made at times simply to stand for German Catholics or Protestants as a whole, while Myers offers little analysis of what India meant for the broader German laity. Nor is it always clear why we should understand, for example, the missionary competition between confessions as being essentially about Germany—the Catholic missionary “vision of India” as “a manifestation of confessional nation building intended to reconstitute the degraded symbolic capital of Jesuit intellectuals in the Kaiserreich” (67). Other factors might have contributed to Catholic missionary thinking: a cosmopolitan rather than fundamentally German and national church, institutional Catholicism in India, or even Indian Catholics themselves. When Catholic missionaries lamented the decline of the Portuguese in India, were they really suggesting that, “by the same token, the outlook for a Protestant-influenced Germany … had to be bleak” (71)? Did the Protestant engagement with Buddhism mean, above all, “reconfiguring the identity construct of the Wilhelmine Protestant intellectual as the keeper of the key to life’s spiritual riddle” (103)? As for the squabbling between Catholic and Protestant missionaries in Bengal, it appears here so absolutely a kind of displaced Kulturkampf that it hardly seemed to have anything to do with India at all. India itself seemed to matter little. Animating German “visions of India” was the specter of German crisis: of national identity and unity, of religion and spirit. “Spheres of national contention and cultural conflict … became intricately embedded in German visions of India” (5). But that sense of crisis is more often invoked than established, and the author never really...

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950

Joined at the hip, but pulling apart? Franco-German relations, the Eurozone crisis and the politics of austerity

This article situates analysis of French macroeconomic policy developments under Hollande’s presidency within a wider context of macroeconomic policy autonomy under conditions of capital mobility, and the political economy of European economic governance. It focuses on the crucial Franco-German relationship because of its centrality to the evolution of the euro since its inception. The analysis unearths different state traditions informing the distinct economic ideas about austerity, economic policy, economic governance and regulation that underpin French and German visions for future European economic integration and European economic policy. It establishes the historical and ideational conditions of German approaches to European integration and European Monetary Union, and how these have shaped continuities within French European economic strategy, and Hollande’s approach to the architecture of the euro, focusing in particular on fiscal policy dimensions and their recent evolutions. The discussion explores the foundations of German veto power within European agreements by ‘kicking the tyres’ of the German ordo-liberal political economic settlement and its social underpinnings, finding evidence of corrosive tendencies of declining mass party support linked to anaemic output and productivity growth, rising inequality and deficient demand undermining German export surpluses. Yet, time is an important factor in politics, and these corrosive tendencies are unlikely to generate a change in Franco-German relations during Hollande’s Presidential tenure.

Between yesterday and tomorrow: German visions of Europe, 1926-1950

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Making the Case for Europe: Transnational Organizations and Cultural Journals Chapter 2. The defence of Europe in Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Europaisches Denken Chapter 3. The Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund: From World Revolution to European Federalism Chapter 4. The Rise and Fall of a Socialist Europe: The ISK and the SPD in Opposition Chapter 5. An island surrounded by land: Das Demokratische Deutschland in Switzerland Chapter 6. 'Europe our Fatherland, Bavaria our Heimat!' Das Demokratische Deutschland and the Post-War Trajectories of European Federalism Conclusions Bibliography