Germany and Israel have not succeeded in turning their historical connection into a shared project around which a true friendship can form.

Felix Berenskoetter argues that a shared commitment to the memory of the Holocaust and to Israel’s right to exist has not formed a true friendship between Germany and Israel. Disagreements about how Israel should handle its security in the face of potential threats from Iran show that a new debate about the nature of the relationship between the two countries and the shared project of Israel’s security is now needed

Approaches to Concept Analysis

This article takes as its point of departure Stefano Guzzini’s recent call for ‘ontological theorizing’ as a reflexive engagement with central concepts. In an attempt to advance this agenda, the article presents an accessible overview of different approaches to concept analysis to stake out the field for a discussion of what ontological theorising might entail. The article advances the notion of concepts as ‘basic’ and lays out the parameters through which they obtain meaning, followed by a discussion of three approaches, which tackle the multifaceted nature of basic concepts within and across different contexts. These approaches are labelled ‘historical’, ‘scientific’ and ‘political(critical)’ and presented through the work of Reinhart Koselleck, Giovanni Sartori and Michel Foucault, respectively. The article notes that concept analysis, as discussed here, stands in tension with modern forms of theory building yet is a creative source for theorising that accepts the unstable, political and context-bound nature of ontology

Anxiety, Time, and Agency

This article scrutinizes two concepts central to the ontological security framework, agency and anxiety. Its point of departure is the view that conceptions of agency are expressed in the attempt to become ontologically secure, which requires a more careful look at how humans try to satisfy the need for a ‘stable sense of Self’ by putting in place ‘anxiety controlling mechanisms’. This, in turn, raises the question what these mechanisms are supposed to control, which shifts attention to the concept of ‘anxiety’. Going back to Kierkegaard’s original treatment and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, the article reviews the emergence of anxiety as a core feature of the human condition and highlights what it calls the ‘anxiety paradox’: the tendency of reflexive humans facing the freedom of being in time to attach themselves to constructs that provide a sense of temporal continuity, or certainty. The article argues that the existing ontological security literature is trapped in this paradox and therefore cannot account for radical forms of agency

Friends in War: Sweden between Solidarity and Self-help, 1939-1945

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939-1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945

States of Ambivalence: Recovering the Concept of ‘the Stranger’ in International Relations

This article revisits and revives the concept of ‘the Stranger’ in theorizing international relations by discussing how this figure appears and what role it plays in the politics of (collective) identity. It shows that this concept is central to poststructuralist logic discussing the political production of discourses of danger and to scholarship on ontological security but remains subdued in their analytical narratives. Making the concept of the Stranger explicit is important, we argue, because it directs attention to ambivalence as a source of anxiety and grasps the unsettling experiences that political strategies of conquest or conversion, including practices of securitization, respond to. Against this backdrop, the article provides a nuanced reading of the Stranger as a form of otherness that captures ambiguity as a threat to modern conceptions of ‘identity’, and outlines three scenarios of how it may be encountered in interstate relations: the phenomenon of ‘rising powers’ from the perspective of the hegemon, the dissolution of enmity (overcoming an antagonistic relationship) and the dissolution of friendship (close allies drifting apart). Aware that recovering the concept is not simply an academic exercise but may feed into how the term is used in political discourse and how practitioners deal with strange encounters, we conclude by pointing to alternative readings of the Stranger/strangeness and the value of doing so

Welche Macht darf es denn Sein? Tracing ‘Power’ in German Foreign Policy Discourse

The relationship between ‘Germany’ and ‘power’ remains a sensitive issue. While observers tend to agree that Germany has regained the status of the most powerful country in Europe, there is debate whether that is to be welcomed or whether that is a problem. Underpinning this debate are views, both within Germany and amongst its neighbours, regarding the kind of power Germany has, or should (not) have. Against this backdrop, the article reviews the dominant role conceptions used in the expert discourse on German foreign policy since the Cold War that depict Germany as a particular type of ‘power’. Specifically, we sketch the evolution of three prominent conceptions (constrained power, civilian power, hegemonic power) and the recent emergence of a new one (shaping power). The article discusses how these labels have emerged to give meaning to Germany’s position in international relations, points to their normative and political function, and to the limited ability of such role images to tell us much about how Germany actually exercises power