Gray on Stengel, 'The Politics of Military Force'


Frank A. Stengel. The Politics of Military Force. Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. xvi + 269 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-472-13221-8.

Reviewed by William G. Gray (Purdue University)
Published on H-War (March, 2023)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=57561

The old West Germany was deeply uncomfortable with military affairs, despite fielding one of continental Europe’s largest armies. A culture of restraint took hold that counseled against sending armed interventions into Cold War conflicts—or even UN peacekeeping missions—outside the territory of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. After unification in 1990, that consensus began to ebb, and slowly, reluctantly, the Federal Republic of Germany joined in several multilateral expeditions—in Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and beyond. Yet the political culture of the Bonn Republic remained largely intact, even after the move to Berlin; German leaders continued to speak of the Bundeswehr as an “army of peace.” How could this self-identity be reconciled with bombs over Kunduz?

Sociologist Frank A. Stengel seeks to explain this seeming contradiction through the lens of discourse analysis. He presents a qualitative study of debates in the Bundestag, covering a twenty-six-year stretch from 1987 to 2013. These keenly observed chapters trace subtle shifts in German security discourse, unfolding in three distinct stages. First, the end of the Cold War disrupted German assumptions about territorial defense: absent any direct threat from the Soviet Union, the Helmut Kohl government (1982-98) spoke about the “international responsibility” that Germany must now bear (p. 14). This stance justified pointillist regional interventions without introducing a new grand strategy. Second, under the Red/Green coalition led by Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005), a rhetoric of “comprehensive security” took hold that postulated a German interest in addressing “the causes of crises like hunger, underdevelopment, terror, and hatred between population groups,” as Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping noted in a debate on November 10, 1998 (pp. 182, 137). In effect, according to Stengel, the German government was blurring the distinction between addressing conflicts via peaceful means or military deployments. In official discourse, the development aid ministry and the defense ministry were both thought of as participants in the same project of combatting instability.

A third phase, “networked security,” set in following the 9/11 attacks on the United States—though it was only fully developed by the coalitions led by Angela Merkel from 2005 onward. Now German leaders spoke of “new threats” to the democratic order, above all terrorism. Interventions abroad were understood as a form of “forward defense,” and thus more immediately tied to “the West” and indeed Germany’s own security (pp. 178, 157). Stengel suggests that “networked security” became institutionalized as a new German grand strategy—as seen in numerous white papers, legislative projects, court rulings, and the transformation of the Bundeswehr into an all-volunteer army in 2011. In 2012, the inspector of the German army—previously an advisory position—was repositioned as “the commanding officer of all German soldiers relating to service in military line units” (p. 197).

For Stengel, this is all evidence of a dramatic transformation in German security thinking. And change there was. He underscores the shifts in official rhetoric by offering extensive and sympathetic coverage to the antimilitarist (and often quite polemical) critiques leveled by the left parliamentary group Die Linke. And yet there is plenty of countervailing evidence in these pages. Berlin took pains to characterize the Afghanistan deployment as a “peace mission,” not a war—a form of “discursive hedging” that revealed the ongoing salience of “deeply sedimented antimilitarist practices” (pp. 185-86). Every chapter conclusion indicates a great deal of conceptual continuity from one phase to the next. If Germans continued to underscore peace as the fundamental purpose of the Bundeswehr, was the Federal Republic truly prepared to unfold an active military role in the world? In hindsight, Berlin’s shocked response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine revealed just how ill-prepared Germans had been to consider military force as a significant factor in international life. When Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a “Zeitenwende” (epochal change) to the Bundestag on February 27, 2022, he was acknowledging that the past decades had been detrimental to Germany’s military readiness.

From a historian’s source-critical standpoint, Stengel’s sole reliance on Bundestag debates is rather unsatisfactory. He is right to note that “out-of-area” missions were highly contested and the subject of numerous parliamentary discussions—and necessarily so, since the Constitutional Court ruled in the 1990s that any overseas deployments must be approved by the Bundestag (p. 2). But whether the rhetoric reflected actual German policy is unclear. The Schröder government’s insistence on the root causes of conflicts might well have served as a convenient excuse for avoiding more extensive military involvement (since development aid was just as vital as the use of force). From the standpoint of discourse analysis, Stengel claims that it does not matter whether politicians meant what they said. But this can result in a detached, even naïve reading of the Bundestag debates, taking all positions at face value. Stengel is careful to acknowledge the limits of his study, granting that it “does not offer any explanation, much less a causal one, of why Germany increasingly participated in military operations after unification.” Discourse “does not cause policy actions” (p. 201). In short, documenting discursive change does not achieve a great deal in terms of concrete historical explanations, though the reader does come away with a useful review of national security debates over the span of a generation.

Stengel’s main contribution may lie in the realm of methodology. Half the book is devoted to a careful explication of the Essex school of discourse analysis, with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe featuring as the most pivotal theorists. Stengel indicates why he finds constructivist explanations—a favored political science model—to be inadequate: too often they interpret policy change as a response to external circumstances, whereas Stengel wants to problematize the very notion that “new threats” objectively existed, let alone required a new security paradigm. His extensive methodological chapters deliver a step-by-step primer of how to undertake rigorous analysis of political rhetoric. Taken on its own terms, Stengel’s book is carefully constructed and clearly reasoned, and it usefully demonstrates what a careful and systematic reading of rhetoric can—and can’t—accomplish.

Citation: William G. Gray. Review of Stengel, Frank A., The Politics of Military Force. H-War, H-Net Reviews. March, 2023.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57561

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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