Reforming Germany’s National Security Architecture

In 1998 Wolfgang Ischinger was appointed state secretary of the German Foreign Office. Along with Michael Steiner, foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Ischinger produced a proposal for a new decision-making setup for national security issues, ensuring closer coordination. As the story goes, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer did not approve and the paper disappeared — never to be seen again. 

Since 1998, despite the unceremonious dismissal of the Ischinger-Steiner paper, practitioners and analysts have continued to debate the pros and cons of a National Security Council (NSC). The limiting factors have always been clear: German governments are based on coalitions of several parties, and cabinet ministers have a constitutionally guaranteed level of autonomy in running their ministries. 

Proponents of the status quo have argued that an NSC-type structure would be problematic both in political and constitutional terms. Some have taken the view that the system works well enough and there is no need for increased coordination to begin with. Others maintain that Germany must do better, but that better foreign policy is a matter of political will rather than a function of better institutions. 

By contrast those calling for change have pointed to the increasing complexity of national security issues, now including energy, climate change, migration, and tech, and the need to coordinate an increasing number of government agencies above and beyond the ministries traditionally engaged on these matters. They have highlighted that new threats are shrinking time frames for crisis response, and also point to challenges experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the deadly European floods of July 2021, and the August 2021 events in Afghanistan. 

In its 2016 White Paper, the government announced that the (existing but underutilized) Federal Security Council would in the future address strategic issues "more consistently." In practice, this has not happened. Instead, the status quo in Berlin is marked by contradictions: Important portfolios have gravitated to the Federal Chancellery (as in the case of China and Russia policy). At the same time, coalition politics, the principle of ministerial autonomy, and bureaucratic silos have gotten in the way of coherent policy-making and effective crisis management. 

Over the years, Germany's allies have learned to navigate the system, but not without frustration. In 2019 Julie Smith (herself an alumna of the White House NSC) observed that Germany was "missing in action at a time of transformative change and disruption" and that this was partly due to the lack of a "body for strategic debates, prioritization, and coordination."

In October 2020, the MSC laid out the case for change identifying a more systematic use of the Federal Security Council supported by additional personnel and the creation of an entirely new coordination structure as options.

At the time of writing, in early September 2021, we don't know what Germany's next government coalition will look like. It is noteworthy that, in their respective election platforms, the CDU/CSU and FDP specifically call for the creation of a national security council while the Greens propose a "national council for peace, sustainability, and human rights" (the platform of the SPD is silent on the matter but calls for overcoming "silo thinking" between ministries). Whether a future coalition can agree on a new setup remains to be seen. Judging from the polls, it seems clear that one or several parties arguing in favor of new structures will be at the negotiating table. 

One additional element may come into play after the elections: the post-mortem of the August 2021 evacuation operation from Kabul. We cannot know whether an NSC-type structure would have delivered a better result. But by bringing key cabinet members to the table, an NSC would have provided for greater transparency within the government and hence accountability. 

Across party lines, members of the Bundestag may come to see this as a key argument in favor of change. Twenty years after Wolfgang Ischinger got the ball rolling, the German debate on its national security architecture is coming to a head. Whatever the outcome, it will tell us a great deal about Berlin’s level of ambition for German and European foreign policy in the twenty-first century. 

This article is a contribution to the book "The Art of Diplomacy". Well-known companions of Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, former Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, including several current and former heads of state and government reflect on basic questions of diplomacy. Taking the reader behind the scenes of diplomacy, they reveal their most astonishing experiences, successes, and failures on the diplomatic stage, or outline their ideas for the diplomatic handling of unresolved challenges.