German Hegemony Revisited: Between Misunderstanding and Myth

Many observers interpreted the role of Germany in European policy-making since the start of the Eurozone crisis by using the concepts of leadership or hegemony. A consensus emerged that the German “leadership avoidance reflex“ (William Paterson) of the 1990s largely belongs to the past. But the extent and nature of German leadership inside the EU remains a disputed issue. One the one hand, some authors (and politicians such as the former Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski) called for a more active and decisive German leadership role in the provision of public goods when dealing with the Eurocrisis (Matthias Matthijs and Marc Blyth); on the other hand, we find a number of authors considering Germany to represent the “de facto power of Europe” (Christian Lequesne), to be the „reluctant hegemon“ (Simon Bulmer and William Paterson; Christoph Schönberger), to “lead from the centre” (Josef Janning and Almut Möller; Herfried Münkler), to act as an “indispensable policy-broker” (Ulrich Krotz and Richard Maher) or to represent a case of an “embedded hegemony” in Europe (Beverly Crawford). These huge differences in interpreting Germany’s role partly stem from differing empirical assessments of how Berlin dealt with the Eurozone’s calamities and other manifestations of the EU’s ‘polycrisis’ (Jean-Claude Juncker). They also reflect, however, very divergent understandings of the related concepts of hegemony and leadership. Starting from these variegated views on German leadership, this contribution pursues three objectives: a) to identify the different understandings of Germanys role (or lack thereof) as a leader or hegemon; b) to provide a coherent conceptual framework for mapping Germany’s leadership and its limits; c) to show, by making use of this framework, that many observers tend to overestimate the extent of German leadership/hegemony and to underestimate the collective and collaborative nature of German leadership since 2010.