 Welcome, everyone. Once again, let's talk about politics and governance. And let's look today at the shift in German foreign and security policy after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So I have invited Patrick Mello from the Friede Universität Amsterdam in the Netherlands to explain to us on this episode how Chancellor Schultz's watershed declaration is actually transforming Germany's role in Europe, beyond Europe, and where this change is clear in defence spending to alliance commitments. Patrick, welcome to our episode. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Patrick, the Russian invasion influenced, of course, Europe's security architecture. It challenged international institutions. You mentioned this in your article and even made Germany, the focus of our talk today, increase military expenditure. So it's quite a shock that requires a dependent standing, right? Yes, absolutely. So often the question is, why is this relevant? And looking at this article, I think the topic is relevant. It couldn't be highlighted further. On this day, we're very close to in the second year of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. So the war has been ongoing for almost two years. And obviously it has implications for European security and also for German security. And therefore, German foreign and security policy is really important and it's important to analyse whether changes have happened and to which extent these changes reorient Germany and also European foreign security policy. Let's follow up on that. So new dynamics happen, such as the war in European soil, Germans increasing military expenditure. So we have some new elements on the political scene, but some others come a long way back. What was specifically missing in the research that you and your colleagues wanted to address? Yes. So in some sense it was a bit unusual because with this article, when I started working on it, it was apparent that there was change. At least there were some announced changes. You mentioned all of Schultz's Bundestag speech, which happened only three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the full scale invasion. And at that point Schultz had announced certain changes and we saw that some things apparently were changing. The question was to which extent these changes constituted what foreign policy analysis scholars call an international orientation change. So in the article I wanted to explore that further and to reconnect basically with the body of work that we have in the FPA foreign policy analysis on foreign policy change to assess what was happening in Germany. So what did you find? What are the main highlights of your study? Yeah, so basically three things. I looked into Chuck Herman's definition of international orientation change which involves change in an actor's role, its self-conception. So for that part I looked into German governmental actor's self-conception of Germany's role, of their own role in foreign policy. And clearly that had changed. You might argue that these changes have been small but I would say it's a redefinition of Germany's role. At least we see clear movement there away from a civilian power conception which was a traditional understanding of Germany towards a more robust understanding also towards being a guarantor of European security as Olaf Schultz framed it at some point. This was the first finding. The second finding was what was more obvious in a way that we saw program and goal changes as Chuck Herman calls it in the range of weapons deliveries. This was really a major change for those familiar with German foreign policy. They will know that weapons deliveries into conflict zones have also always been very controversial in Germany. And it has been a cross-party consensus also into the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that Germany would not send any weapons. And this changed with the full-scale invasion and then also Schultz's sight and vendor speech. We also saw changes with regards to the defence budget 100 billion euros additionally spent which required a constitutional change. This was another major change when you compare it across European countries. Nothing like that happened anywhere else basically. And finally in terms of deployments, Germany announced that it would deploy substantial forces to NATO's eastern flank especially in Lithuania which to some extent even went further than what NATO had requested. So these were major changes in terms of program and goal changes. So let us know a bit about potential policy implications of this German change in policy. The policy implications on the one hand are apparent for Ukraine. So clearly this has implications for what Ukraine can do, how Ukraine can defend itself against Russia and this clearly depends on the contributions from its western allies. Germany as being the foremost ally in Europe obviously also the United States. When we look at the broader picture clearly it's important to see whether Germany will stick to its policies that it has announced maybe also with an eye towards the upcoming elections in the US and the changing position over there. So clearly this is important to see whether Germany will continue its policies as it has announced. Sure, so let's again look now at the academic side and the two sides of this coin that you mentioned. So the conflict is still ongoing and the political process in Germany is also happening and might be adapted over time. See if they stick as you said. So what should researchers look at now? Yeah, it's a very dynamic topic. So this was maybe also one of the challenges that I encountered. These changes have been announced in 2020 and since then we saw some implementation. Researchers can look at that but the situation is constantly changing. So I also for this article I had to say this is the time frame that I can analyze and I can take into account anything that happens after that after a certain point in time and clearly there will be follow-up studies to this. So it might be worthwhile to take a longer range perspective at some point especially I think on the defence budget because now with current budget constraints due to the ruling by the Constitutional Court in Germany the situation has changed slightly and I will be curious to see how this plays out in the long term. Of course, this has been a very straight on the point episode about Germany's change in their policy when it comes to military expenditure and policies but if you had to sum up our episode in one or two sentences what would it be? That's a hard one. I don't know if I could summarize the episode. I think I will be happy if people would arrive at a more differentiated picture of the Zeitnwende and German foreign policy change. What I've been witnessing and now I'm going over the one or two sentences but is more or less of a black and white picture. So initially we saw very positive and optimistic uptakes on German foreign policy change and then at some point this all switched and the assessments were quite negative. I'm also discussing this in the article but I think it's more useful to have a differentiated and more realistic picture of German foreign policy change. If the article can contribute to that, I will be very happy. That would be well promising of course. Patrick, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. For everyone who are watching on YouTube you can find all the resources, all the materials especially the article that has been under discussion today in the Let's Talk about Polities and Governance website. And you can also listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter at Kojitatiu LTA.