Abstract
Increasingly open conflict in the global political economy has triggered profound shifts in both policy and rhetoric around the intersection of economic openness and security. We propose to use ‘geoeconomics’ as a lens to analyze such shifts by integrating the study of four analytical domains: (1) national production regimes, (2) power relations in world markets and global order, (3) foreign economic policies, and (4) security policies. By applying this approach to Germany, an export–dependent and security-exposed middle power, we shed light on how the recalibration of Germany’s foreign policies and alliance politics submits to its accumulation regime under pressure. Against this background, the chapter suggests ways forward for cross-disciplinary engagement between IR and political economy approaches under the header of ‘geoeconomics’.
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Notes
- 1.
See: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS, last accessed January 15, 2022.
- 2.
For instance, in 2010 former German President (and prior head of IMF) Horst Köhler resigned from office after public outrage over him saying that Germany’s export dependence might require military deployment to ensuring free trade routes, given increased piracy off the Somalian coast.
- 3.
In terms of a gradually emerging consensus about shifting foreign policy, observers have especially pointed to a 2013 position paper coordinated by think tanks Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and the German Marshall Fund titled ‘New Power New Responsibility’ (SWP and GMF, 2013) that argued Germany should step up its geopolitical weight in line with its economic power (see, e.g., Kronauer, 2015).
- 4.
See, German-Russian Foreign Trade Chamber May 29, 2021 (https://russland.ahk.de/infothek/wirtschaftsdaten/detail?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=48545&cHash=dae8933ff885eddbae609e1474f01840).
- 5.
Embedded hegemony, according to Crawford, reflects the stance that instead of independence, German hegemony depends on the very institutions it helped to build and that require continued and robust economic power “to underwrite cooperation in Europe” (ibid., 176).
- 6.
See, FAZ report from November 16, 2020 (https://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/sewing-fordert-entlastung-fuer-europaeische-banken-17054833.html); and from January 17, 2021 (https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/die-deutsche-bank-ruft-nach-mehr-industriepolitik-17150593.html).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Milan Babić, Gunther Hellmann, Elsa Massoc, Etienne Schneider, Christoph Scherrer and participants at the ECPR and DVPW general conferences 2021 for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Koddenbrock, K., Mertens, D. (2022). Geoeconomics and National Production Regimes: On German Exportism and the Integration of Economic and Security Policy. In: Babić, M., Dixon, A.D., Liu, I.T. (eds) The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01968-5_6
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