Germany's Grand Strategy

Germany's grand strategy - historically associated with two world wars and several genocides - is one of the most impactful but difficult phenomena in the history of international relations. Given its geographical, military, and economic limitations, why did the country perceive military might as the most effective means to shape its environment and ensure its security until the mid-twentieth century? Why did its political elites often fail, as in the Weimar Republic, but sometimes succeed in changing grand strategy, including after 1945?

Eric Sangar answers these questions by tracing the major developments in Germany's grand strategy since the Napoleonic wars and examining the perceived lessons of its national history. In particular, he explores the impact the resonance between historical lessons at the elite level and memory discourses in society has had on Germany's grand strategy. He argues that the current fragmentation of German collective memory can explain the contemporary gap between the ambitions of universalist leadership and their hesitant and, at times isolationist, practices. As Germany faces an increasingly uncertain regional and international environment, (re)building domestic support for a clearly articulated grand strategy seems more difficult than ever.

The Oxford Studies in Grand Strategy is a major new series of cutting-edge monographs that examine the grand strategies of states, and those intergovernmental organizations and nonstate actors who credibly aspire to sovereignty. Books concentrate on the contemporary aspects of grand strategy, while paying due respect to the historical antecedents of a nation's grand strategy and their relevance for a leadership's current choices. The series is pluralistic in terms of theory and method, and maintains a broad view of the ways, means, and ends that undergird a grand strategy. Analytical and explanatory in contribution, books in the series feature a rigorous analysis of the interaction between domestic factors and global forces and provide a clear understanding of how that interaction shapes a grand strategy's formulation, codification, and implementation.

Series Editors: Thierry Balzacq (Sciences Po, Paris), Peter Dombrowski (US Naval War College), and Simon Reich (Rutgers University, Newark)