Abstract
This chapter introduces an approach to study political friendship as a factor that can contribute to positive peace. This is done by drawing upon the works of Johan Galtung and Andrea Oelsner, through which friendship is established as an aspect of positive peace. Thereby, this chapter contributes to addressing current lacunae in positive peace research. Political friendship is conceptualized through five key elements; affect, grand projects, altruistic reciprocity, moral obligations, and equality, which are examined in the friendships of Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–1982), and Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand (1982–1995). Both the commonalities and differences discovered shed a revealing light on the role of friendship in politics and international relations, and help us to understand the crucial role close personal relations played in the European project, establishing a degree of positive peace through personal friendship.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Jaap de Wilde for first introducing me to this topic. He also kindly introduced me to Johan Galtung at the Past, present and future of peace research conference at the University of Groningen (2014). There, Johan Galtung graciously provided me with extensive feedback. Andrea Oelsner, through whose work I first became aware of the link between friendship studies and peace research, and with whom I would later actually get to collaborate, was crucial in further developing the ideas in this chapter. Finally, Rachel Rafferty’s insightful feedback has improved this chapter substantially.
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van Hoef, Y. (2021). Positive Peace Through Personal Friendship: Franco-German Reconciliation (1974–1995). In: Standish, K., Devere, H., Suazo, A., Rafferty, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3877-3_54-1
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