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The politics of stem cell research poses a puzzle: the explanation of different national responses to the same scientific breakthroughs. Policy struggles across the major scientific powers have revolved around similar values—the protection of human life and solidarity with the sick—but generated very different regulatory outcomes. Bringing in historical and institutional legacies can shed light on those differences. The article develops an analytical framework around the path-dependent effects of state institutions on value-driven issues and applies it to the politics of stem cell research in the United Kingdom and Germany. Historical institutionalism, it argues, can be extended beyond the study of political economy and the welfare state to issues marked by sharp value conflict.

Although the structural constraints facing Germany shifted dramatically with the end of the Cold War and reunification, the direction of its European policy did not. The more powerful Federal Republic continued to press for deeper economic and political integration, eschewing a more independent or assertive foreign policy course. Neorealism, neoliberalism and liberalism cannot adequately explain this continuity in the face of structural change. This article sets out a constructivist account centered around the effects of German state identity. It develops a two-step analytical framework designed to pinpoint the content of state identity and establish its effects on state action, and then applies it to the German case. In the wake of reunification, German leaders across the political spectrum identified the Federal Republic as part of an emergent supranational community. This European identity, with roots in the postwar decades, drove Germany's unflagging support for deeper integration across the 1989-90 divide.

Reflection on the past and its implications shaped German policy towards the European Union during the early 1990s. Helmut Kohl's post-reunification foreign policy rhetoric reveals two prominent historical themes: that European integration is a 'question of war and peace', and that German unity and European unity represent 'two sides of the same coin'. In the post-Cold War context, both themes served to orient and legitimate his European policy. They informed Kohl's strong support for the realisation of the Maastricht Treaty. And they were central to his efforts to maintain domestic political support for deeper integration. (German Politics / FUB)