Organised by Ulrich Krotz, Federico Romero, and Richard Maher

EVEN REUNIFIED GERMANY SEEKS STATUS

Nadav Kedem, Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow

Identifying states’ status-seeking policies is difficult, given the challenge in differentiating between status and other motivations, especially when status considerations are not reflected in the political discourse. As a solution, Nadav Kedem suggests that status-seeking will be identified via proxy: policies oriented at upgrading managerial rights, rights which are not directly relevant to any specific policy but to long-term ‘rules of the game’— enabling great powers to legitimately manage the system.

Nadav Kedem illustrated the usefulness of proxy by exploring German anti-American Iraq War policy and concluded that it was mostly motivated by status-seeking rather than domestic politics or normative concerns. By challenging the legitimacy of the US preventative war policy which bypassed UNSC approval while demanding co-decision, Germany tried to boost its managerial rights, achieving a ‘voice opportunity’ at the expense of the US. The research used complementary methods: Structural Focused Comparison (SFC), Process Tracing, and interviews with German decision-makers.

NATIONAL AND EUROPEAN AGENDAS OF MIDDLE EASTERN INTEREST GROUPS

Cynthia Salloum, Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow

Cynthia Salloum’s postdoctoral research identified a lack of comparison between national and European settings in the literature on lobbying and foreign policy making. The project aimsed to partially fill this gap by studying interest groups related to the Middle East – with specific agendas on the defence industry, counter-terrorism, or mediation in current conflicts – in Brussels, Berlin, London and Paris. If the institutionalization of interest groups is the condition sine qua non for their activity as collective actors and bodies, their effectiveness is often more related to their capacity to mobilize stakeholders of authority or power, be it moral, political or economic. Cynthia Salloum’s study sought first to examine the convergence of ethnic, religious, national or corporate networks and also to determine who wants to gain influence in Brussels and who seeks to influence national governments. She expected this research to highlight the moral and rational determinants of foreign policy lobbying on national and supranational levels.