Germany Report

Strictly speaking, Germany’s coherence agenda and its government’s efforts to maintain and improve its capacities to respond to external crises and conflicts has developed as an elaborate method rather than a distinct policy or group of policies. Before diving into the documents that explicitly formulate this method, one should note that Germany’s overall approach is based on the supposition that the country will only keep pace with the increasingly complex and multidimensional security challenges and threats if two prerequisites are met: First, supra- and multinational cooperation must be intensified. And, second, a security policy structure must be developed at the national level that goes beyond the traditional (and traditionally separate) foreign, development and defence policy portfolios by integrating all the relevant policies.

In specific terms, the history of Germany’s networked approach begins with a one-pager in 2000. In that year, the governing coalition formed by the Social Democrats and the Green Party, which had taken on (federal) government responsibility for the first time, adopted the Comprehensive Concept of the Federal Government on Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Peace-Building (Federal Government of Germany 2000), which laid foundations for Germany’s approach that are still valid today. Based on a broad understanding of security that encompassed political, economic, ecological and social aspects, it committed Germany to the concept of “human security” (ibid.: 84).

It then took another four years before this approach was fleshed out even more with the Action Plan: Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Peace-Building (Federal Government of Germany 2004). The political goal of this plan was to strengthen the preventive orientation of Germany’s contributions to peace, security and development with a view to reducing the risks of crisis-prone developments and to thereby minimising the need to engage in military interventions – which was of paramount importance to Germany for the reasons discussed above. This was to be achieved in two ways: by establishing cross-departmental structures involving all ministries and by using their respective tools in a more harmonised way. The resulting policy approach encompasses conflict management before the outbreak of violence, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation (i.e. state-building). Notably, peace enforcement was not dealt with explicitly. Furthermore, the action plan calls also calls for improving strategies, structures and capabilities, particularly in response to inter-state conflicts, state disintegration and fragility, asymmetric wars with non-state actors, and terrorism. With a typically German kind of thoroughness, the paper formulated 163 different actions to develop the approach.

The subsequent development of Germany’s approach is consistently marked by a grappling with the question of how the country can reconcile its values-based peace orientation with the security policy requirements that have come to the fore. In the years that followed the 2004 action plan, the BMZ issued a series of strategy papers that elaborated on the nexus between peace, development and security in addition to highlighting the need to address the structural causes of conflict in the broadest sense. What’s more, guidelines and methods for conflict-sensitive development cooperation geared to local social, societal and economic conditions were adopted. The preliminary conclusion of this first phase was reached with the publication of the White Paper 2006 on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr (BMVg 2006), which should not be confused with a national security strategy. Section 1.4 of the paper, titled ‘Networked Security’, essentially repeats the points of the 2004 action plan, thereby underlining its importance for guiding Germany’s coherence policy.

The second phase of establishing the political and administrative framework for Germany’s policy-coherence ambitions starts in 2016 with the publication of the White Paper on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr (Federal Government of Germany 2016). The following year saw the publication of the German government’s 15th development policy report (BMZ 2017) and, more importantly, the Guidelines on Preventing Crises, Resolving Conflicts, Building Peace (Federal Government of Germany 2017), which replaced the action plan from 2004.

The new white paper (Federal Government of Germany 2016) includes a careful analysis of the security environment and identifies a broad spectrum of challenges and risks. The fact that most of them are non-military in nature and cannot be dealt with by force underlined the need to implement a coherence agenda, and the government renewed its pledge to further develop networked action and to optimise its implementation. To do so, the paper highlights four fields of action: strengthening the political working and decision-making structures of the federal government on the central issues of German foreign and security policy; expanding the government’s abilities to analyse and evaluate by networking situation centres; intensifying the exchange of personnel among ministries; and promoting the joint training of governmental and non-governmental actors for action in the entire crisis cycle.

The guidelines (Federal Government of Germany 2017) flesh out the areas of action identified in the 2016 white paper, particularly regarding the issues of joint analysis as well as strategic and operative planning. They are meant to provide additional guidance to the government in its efforts to promote peace while focusing on how best to implement the concrete policy objectives set out in the UN’s Agenda 2030. In particular, the guidelines spell out specific measures to promote economic development, employment and social security in Africa as well as in the host countries of refugees. In addition, the German government pledges to provide NATO and EU missions with capabilities across the entire spectrum – a commitment that the BMVg was presumably allowed to insert into the text – and to support the further development of the CSDP.

Like its predecessor, the 2004 action plan, the 2017 guidelines primarily focus on civilian fields of action and instruments for conflict prevention and post-conflict management, such as peace mediation, security-sector reform, strengthening the rule of law, and support for reconciliation. To this end, three interministerial working groups were established to draft sectoral strategies and to lay the conceptual foundations to be shared by all ministries. After completing their tasks, these three working groups published three strategy papers in autumn 2019 titled Interministerial Strategy to Support Security Sector Reform (SSR) in the Context of Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding (Federal Government of Germany 2019a), Strategy of the Federal Government for promoting the rule of law in the fields of crisis prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding (Federal Government of Germany 2019b), and Interministerial Strategy to Support ‘Dealing with the Past and Reconciliation (Transitional Justice)’ in the Context of Preventing Crisis, Resolving Conflicts and Building Peace (Federal Government of Germany 2019c).

The guidelines also aimed to more closely dovetail instruments for early warning, to improve knowledge management (particularly in the field of fragile statehood), and to introduce systematic monitoring and evaluation processes. Furthermore, it undertook to draw up practical guidelines for principles of action (e.g. the ‘do no harm’ principle) to ensure that international quality standards are applied in all ministries. Work on the practical guidelines was also completed in summer 2019, and was published in the autumn as Operations Manual: Interministerial Approach to Preventing Crises, Resolving Conflicts and Building Peace (Federal Government of Germany 2019d).

With the 2017 guidelines, the government once again set out a large number (60) of specific and far-reaching commitments. This is admittedly fewer than the 163 commitments in the 2004 action plan. However, it is now easier to verify whether the government is complying with its obligations, as the commitments are separately listed in a special annex rather than being scattered throughout the document. Given that the guidelines are fairly new, their testing still lies ahead. The first implementation review is expected after four years and should be presented by the government in 2021.