-
8. Germany's Response to 9/11: The Importance of Checks and Balances
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
- Additional Information
285 285 CHAPTER 8 GERMANY’S RESPONSE TO 9/11: THE IMPORTANCE OF CHECKS AND BALANCES GIOVANNI CAPOCCIA The Federal Government has devoted itself with the strongest determination to improving protection from terrorism, extremism and religious fundamentalism. We are conscious that these extreme forms of intolerance pose a new threat to the fundamental liberal-democratic order of the Republic. Therefore, we cannot afford any hesitation in implementing the new legal instruments against anti-constitutional and violent organizations with necessary firmness. Otto Schily, Social Democrat (SPD), Minister of Interior Affairs, January 16, 2003, Plenary Session of the Bundestag1 The post-9/11 counterterrorism policies enacted in different countries display important differences. In the United States, the emergence of an international terrorist threat on an unprecedented scale has led to a great increase in the power of the executive (see, for example, Heymann 2003; Ackerman 2004a, 2004b; Scheppele 2004). By contrast, other countries that are potentially exposed to the same threat and are certainly aware of the danger, such as Germany, have retained tighter limits on the power of the executive. What explains these differences? A large literature has emphasized that even in the presence of common external shocks such as 9/11, the foreign and domestic security policies of different countries are the result of the “filtering” of external shocks through the prism of the existing domestic political environment (see, for example, Katzenstein 1996a, 2003). These accounts generally criticize “realist” approaches in international relations, and rightly stress that the “domestic origins of state preferences and their perceptions of the international system . . . cannot be answered by perspectives that focus solely on a state’s position in the international system” (Berger 1996, 319). Special emphasis is generally placed on the failure of realist approaches to attribute the appropriate weight to the cultural norms (values, identities, ideologies) that shape the response of countries to security threats (Katzenstein 1996b, 1996c; Jepperson , Wendt, and Katzenstein 1996; Berger 1998). For example, in his interpretation of the changes in German and Japanese counterterrorism policy following 9/11, Peter Katzenstein maintains that a “situational” analysis focused on domestic and international material conditions—such as the number of Muslim immigrants in a country, its geopolitical position , and so on—should be strengthened by an appropriate analysis of the impact of the constitutive and regulatory norms that guide reactions to terrorist threats. According to this view, security policy operates in a normatively “deep” social environment as it ultimately confronts the state with the “enemy within.” Thus, in security policymaking , strategic action to pursue certain ends is embedded in thick layers of institutionalized norms (Katzenstein 2003). This position resonates with a large literature in sociological institutionalism: security policymaking is mostly shaped by cultural and social factors that influence the very identity of political actors and decisionmakers and that also define “appropriate” responses to external threats (see, for example, March and Olsen 1989, 2004; Powell and Di Maggio 1991). This chapter, which analyzes domestic security policymaking in Germany after 9/11, argues that the analysis of cultural norms should be integrated with the analysis of internal institutional dynamics.2 Domestic institutions—in particular “counter-majoritarian” ones such as federalism and the judiciary—can have an important impact on policy outcomes, in domestic security as well as other areas. In fact, as the literature emphasizes, even the most strongly embedded cultural norms are generally contested (Katzenstein 1996c). Such contestation is not always solved by public deliberation : on the contrary, in some cases it leads to institutional friction between the government and the counter-majoritarian institutions. Post9 /11 Germany offers an example of how a system of checks and balances 286 Consequences of Counterterrorism [54.147.0.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:31 GMT) can limit the expansion of national executive power in matters of internal security and counterterrorism. Of course, cultural norms inherited from recent history have informed the German public debate on national security. However, countermajoritarian institutions such as the federal system (and the prerogatives of the Länder in it) and the judicial system (in particular the Federal Constitutional Court) have exerted an important influence on which interpretation of the fundamental cultural norms underlying the 1949 Basic Law has ultimately prevailed in shaping security policy. This has happened even in areas where a different interpretation of inherited norms was accepted by the majority of the political elites and the population. In fact, the range of feasible initiatives in security policy may not be just limited and directed by norms that...