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In 1999, ten years of heated debate about the EU's role in defense policy came to an end, when the EU decided to establish an autonomous security and defense policy. Germany and Britain had been key players in the years leading to this decision. But they played markedly different roles - the former endorsing the idea from the beginning, the latter dragging its heels and only reluctantly becoming a supporter. Nonetheless both British and German policies can be understood as responses to impulses from the international system. The end of the Cold War prompted both states to pursue a policy of balancing US power. Yet international institutions constrained their balancing efforts differently. To demonstrate this, this study builds on the theories of neo-realism and historical institutionalism and develops the approach of structure-based foreign policy analysis: a new mode of analyzing security policies as responses to the international environment.

Withdrawing from an organization through an orderly negotiation process would appear as a particularly unproblematic form of leaving international institutions. However, the example of Brexit shows that negotiated dissociations have significant potential to adversely affect relations between exiting and remaining states. This study, which contributes to a forum on the impact of dissociation processes on post-withdrawal relations, argues that the management of conflict during the Brexit process had profound implications for relations between the United Kingdom and European Union member states. The negotiations on the Northern Ireland Protocol were marked by increasingly fundamental accusations against each other regarding (non)compliance with basic norms of international conduct. This led to a deterioration of relations and eventually - despite the avoidance of full escalation - to deadlock when implementation problems arose. To demonstrate this and explore the particular features of negotiated dissociations, the study examines three episodes of conflict: the disputes over ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement, over the Internal Market Bill, and over implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Der Brexit ist da. Droht jetzt die Erosion, Implosion oder gar Explosion der EU, das Ende des Friedensprojekts Europa? Droht, wie Premierminister Cameron in seiner Kampagne gewarnt hatte, eine langfristige Gefährdung der britischen und europäischen Sicherheit?

What would constitute a legitimate global order? Dirk Peters argues that current research on this issue is one-sided: it takes Western democracy as a universal standard and focuses discussion on how aspects of democracy can be applied at the global level. But instead of promoting a universal standard, says Peters, research needs to listen to the actors involved in global governance. There can be no legitimate global order without taking into account what these actors regard as legitimate, and this will not necessarily be a model based on Western democracy. This point of view is endorsed by Frank Gadinger, who proposes a methodological technique from sociology to facilitate empirical research in this area. By reconstructing the arguments that 'ordinary actors' employ in the global political arena, we can reveal what they consider legitimate. Daniel Gaus, by contrast, takes issue with Peters's critique of democracy as a universal standard. Peters may well be correct in contending that Western democratic institutions are not suitable as a basis for legitimizing global politics, says Gaus, but the very act of listening to the governed, and making their conceptions of legitimacy the yardstick of legitimate governance, is itself a democratic endeavour.

"Nach wie vor steht der Kampf gegen den internationalen Terrorismus weit oben auf der Agenda der NATO. Der im November zu verabschiedenden neuen Strategie muss es gelingen, die Rolle von Streitkräften im Rahmen einer vernetzten Sicherheitsarchitektur zu bestimmen und den militärischen Beitrag für die Unterbindung des internationalen Terrorismus zu definieren. Eine Intensivierung des Dialogs mit Nicht-NATO-Staaten sowie die Harmonisierung mit wichtigen Akteuren, vorrangig der EU, im Sinne des Comprehensive Approach ist wünschenswert." (Autorenreferat)