Suchergebnisse

Katzenstein contends that a multilateral institutionalization of power is the most distinctive aspect of the relationship between Europe and Germany. Only the observer who is aware of this important fact can understand why Germany is willing to give up its new sovereign power. Although Germany is larger than any other member of the European Union and plays a crucial role in the economic and political life of Eastern Europe, its power is now funneled through the institutions of the European Union rather than erupting in a narrow, power-defined sense of national self-interest. The empirical chapters of this book explore the institutionalization of power relations between the European Union and Germany, as well as the relations of Germany and the European Union with most of the smaller European states

What will be the future of Germany? Will Germany remain a 'soft power', pursuing a 'bind me, love me'-policy or will we see a new Germany signalling strength and power based on nationalism and German identity? The book, written by well-known German, British, French, Russian, Danish and American scholars, attempts to present contrasting analyses on different levels of the general political dimension and position of the united Germany in Europe

Theprocess of European integration is posing a challenge to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to rethink their frames of analysis. The once dominant nation-state has lost relevance while transnational processes and exchanges are receiving greater attention. This is not only true for the social sciences and economics, but also for history. The closer the European states are integrated, the more questions about Europe's past are asked. But what is European history, and upon which methods and units of analysis can it be built? Is it the sum of national histories, just as the EU is a union of nation-states, or is it something more? Since no one subject of European history can possibly encompass all countries on the continent, it is clear that independent of the general topic there needs to be a certain selection of studies about more than one local or national case. If those studies, no matter whether they cover political, social, or cultural history, are to be synthesized on a European level, comparisons need to be made at a certain stage of any given work. The same holds true for the history of Central Europe, an area with a particularly high degree of internal differentiation.

In 1953 Hans Rothfels gave a definition of what he understood as contemporary history which rapidly became a classic: 'the era of those living and its treatment by academics'. In so doing he opened up a field of enquiry to historical scholarship in Germany which had had a long tradition, but which had been almost completely excluded from the discipline since the nineteenth century. In 1821 Wilhelm von Humboldt had declared that 'chronicling the present' furnished the 'necessary basis of history', but was not 'history itself'. This paved the way for criticism which, with Leopold von Ranke, increasingly excluded contemporary history from the sphere of academic consideration on the grounds that its typical 'lack of reliable knowledge' and 'conflicts between contemporaries' impeded objective judgement. Heinrich von Treitschke's dismissive assertion that the most recent past could only be looked at through the biased glasses of a 'dual partiality' was only confirmed by a new flourishing ofhistoria sui temporisafter 1914. Thus, as early as the third year of the First World War, theHistorische Zeitschrift(HZ) was talking about the 'pre-history of the World War', thereby justifying the verdict that 'it was practically patriotic rather than academically legitimate'. The same could be said of the notions the historical discipline put forward after 1918 against the 'Versailles lies about war guilt'.