The world's most popular power – a knack for diplomacy?

Jan Melissen,
Senior Research Fellow at Clingendael Institute of International Relations, The Hague

Co-author: Paul Sharp,
Senior Visiting Fellow at the Clingendael Institute, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth (US)

Co-author: Shaun Riordan,
Senior Visiting Fellow at the Clingendael Institute, Head of Economics and Theory of Knowledge at the "International College Spain" in Madrid

Co-author: Brian Hocking,
Senior Visiting Fellow at the Clingendael Institute, visiting professor at the "College of Europe" in Bruges

The world's most popular power – a knack for diplomacy?

Jun

Germany has a hard power problem!

The crisis in Ukraine and its aftershocks are making mincemeat of Germany's comfortable image as a trading nation. It is therefore important for Germany to invest in diplomatic renewal. There would be something really wrong with Europe's leading nation were it not to invest more into thinking about how the world should be run, rather than who should be running it.

Today Germany is at a particularly critical juncture and its diplomacy therefore cannot be business as usual.

Debating German foreign policy without discussing the requirements of its diplomacy is like discussing the performance features of a BMW without paying attention to what is under the bonnet.

Present and future Berlin governments need to continuously hone their diplomatic practices and skills to deal with ever changing domestic and international circumstances.

But today Germany is at a particularly critical juncture and its diplomacy therefore cannot be business as usual. Germany's rising influence and its emergence as a global player coincide with profound changes in the international environment, throwing up complex questions as to how German diplomacy should respond in terms of developing its role on the future world stage.

Whilst other European countries and the EU don't get tired of banging the drums of their soft or normative power and how to use it on the global stage, Germany has an equally testing hard power problem.

The challenge in the years ahead requires a comprehensive response that goes beyond increasing the effectiveness of Germany's network of over 200 missions, improvement of intra-departmental management processes and issues of bureaucratic reform.