Speaking about international peacebuilding operations, a whole array of ingredients to success exists, with political will on top of them. Without political will of members of the international community to support peacebuilding efforts, no success can be reached. Recently, new hopes on this field have been sparked by a potential “European return” to United Nations peacekeeping: many European countries have undertaken a process of rethinking their commitment to UN peacekeeping operations and increased their contributions to UN peacekeeping operations.
In Germany – one of the most influential European powers – this process has been brought about by a wave of a “responsibility debate”, launched by seminal speeches of Federal President Joachim Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen at the Munich Security Conference in 2014. These top German political representatives unanimously called for Germany to take on “more responsibility in the world” and – among others – to increase German commitment to UN in general and UN peacekeeping in particular. Soon after, this intention materialized in the form of an exceptionally intensive German participation in UN peacekeeping operation in Mali (MINUSMA). In this sense, German willingness to boost its UN peacekeeping participation can be understood as an exemplary step towards demonstrating its political will to meet its international responsibilities and contribute to successful peacebuilding efforts. The proposed paper aims to 1) look in greater detail at the role “responsibility” plays in the motivation of Germany to contribute troops to Mali and to 2) sketch perspectives on increased German participation in UN peacekeeping.
