Constituting and changing forms of foreign policy

Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Andreas Fahrmeir, Prof. Dr. Gunther Hellmann and Dr. Miloš Vec

The project was based on a conceptual problem. The development of the understanding of “international politics” is closely linked to the establishment of what is commonly referred to in International Relations (IR) as the “Westphalian system of states”. However, if the historical consideration of “foreign policy” is related to the peculiarities of the Westphalian system, the history of foreign policy is reduced to the “early” and “late” modern period – i.e. to the era in which “states” can be identified without great difficulty and in which the modern vocabulary of describing foreign policy comes into use – a perspective that is both “presentist” and “Eurocentric”.

In contrast, the project was based on the hypothesis that a vocabulary for the description of foreign policy can be developed that focuses on the construction of a certain form of demarcation that can be observed in all epochs and that – regardless of the vocabulary used to describe them – can be treated as functional equivalents of foreign policy in the modern sense. Developing such a vocabulary was one of the aims of the project, which was carried out in cooperation between IB, history and legal history and which organized two international conferences (in Bologna in 2011 and in Frankfurt in 2012) for this purpose.

At the same time, three projects on the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were used to more precisely determine continuities and caesuras between different forms of conceptualizing and shaping “foreign policy”, which focused on multiple boundaries between “inside” and “outside”: on the “old” empire, on the “European concert” and on the mandate system after the First World War.

The results were published in a conference volume edited by the PIs (Hellmann, Gunther/Fahrmeir, Andreas/Vec, Miloš (2016): The Transformation of Foreign Policy, Oxford University Press) and have been included in another edited volume (Hellmann, Gunther; Jacobi, Daniel; Stark Urrestarazu, Ursula (ed.) (2015): “Earlier, more decisive and more substantial”? The new debate on Germany’s foreign policy Wiesbaden: Springer-VS).

The most important publications in the research project also include:
Hellmann, Gunther (2017): “Linking Foreign Policy and Systemic Transformation in Global Politics: Methodized Inquiry in a Deweyan Tradition”, in: Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 13, Issue 3.
Hellmann, Gunther/Stark Urrestarazu, Ursula (2013): “Theories of Foreign Policy”, in: David Armstrong (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stark Urrestarazu, Ursula (2010): Us and Them. Culture, identity and foreign policy (Forschungsberichte international Politik, vol. 41), Münster: LIT-Verlag.
Vec, Miloš (2010): “Intervention/ Nichtintervention. Verrechtlichung der Politik und Politisierung des Völkerrechts im 19. Jahrhundert”, in: Ullrich Lappenküper, Rainer Marcowicz (eds.): Power and law. International law in international relations Paderborn: Schöningh, 135-160.

The project included a workshop “The Emergence and Transformation of Foreign Policy” with Iver Neumann and Johannes Paulmann, December 16, 2010, Goethe University Frankfurt and two international conferences on “The Emergence and Transformation of Foreign Policy” in Bologna, June 10-12, 2011, Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center and May 25-27, 2012 at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main.