Grand Strategy and Collective Memory: Lessons from Germany

“Grand strategy” is back in fashion, at least if we count on Google Scholar the number of publications using the term: From 8,470 in the period between 1990 and 2000, the number almost doubles to 16,700 results between 2000 and 2010, and raises to 27,400 in the period between 2010 and 2020. In the five years between 2020 and 2025 only, Google Scholar counts 19,300 new publications mentioning the term.

At the same time, the meaning of the term has become more elusive than ever. Whereas it was introduced in Anglo-Saxon strategic studies to capture the idea of some sort of “grand” rational design to keep the Soviet Union in check without risking nuclear escalation, the term is now used by a newer scholarship to designate more generally how a political community, including small and medium powers, perceives its external environment and how it wants to relate to it. Rather than having academics think about what they would do in the shoes of decision-makers, the concept is today more and more used as a heuristic tool to grasp the rather medium and long-term orientations of a country, often defined by its leadership, yet under the constraining effects of domestic society.

Germany is an extraordinary case to think about grand strategy. After all, Germany spent most of the nineteenth century trying to become a domestically united and externally feared power, perceiving the external world as one of existential struggle among nations. The First World War did not suffice to make Germany’s abandon these beliefs, and neither the one in the ultimate effectiveness of military power. Such change only became possible after 1945, enabling (West) Germany to enter a long period of peace and prosperity as the country stopped pursuing military revanche. Even after 1990, Germany was regularly criticised by its NATO allies for being ‘too pacifist’.

Many accounts of German foreign policy either stop in 1933 or start after 1945. These chronological decisions help circumvent the question, why did German grand strategy change after 1945 but not after 1918? Sure, West Germany was occupied until 1949, but why did the Federal Republic refrain from any return to revanchist policies even when the country had rebuilt its army after 1955?

To answer this puzzle, the premise of my book is the following: grand strategy is not just a result of whatever political leaders perceive as rational or appropriate. For change in grand strategy to work, societal support needs to be mobilised. Political elites use ‘strategic narratives’ to embed a grand strategy in a story about a nation’s past, present, and future. But to elicit popular support, these narratives need to achieve resonance, a concept defined by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa as a meaningful relationship of reciprocal interactions.

Societies have their own way of representing their past, and while these ways can be influenced by elites and institutions, they cannot be entirely controlled. These representations are generally called collective memories, they are transmitted by the social groups that compose a society, and only some of them are visible in public discourse. My argument is that strategic narratives only legitimate change in grand strategy when they resonate with lived collective memories circulating in society. After 1945, for example, a broad societal consensus, initiated by intellectual, writers, politicians, emerged, centred on the memory of national socialism as a ‘national catastrophe’. This memory frame of ‘never again’ enabled political elites to develop a grand strategy of ‘civilian power’, including the pursuit of military restraint, European integration and a strong commitment to multilateralism.

In other periods, including in the 1920, such a societal consensus over the interpretation of the recent and its lessons for the present was absent, and popular resistance formed against the reorientation of Grand Strategy attempted by the so-called Weimar Coalition. Germany may find itself again in a similar situation today: Since the 1980s, societal consent over the meaning and continuous relevance of lessons from the Nazi past has become more and more fragmented – as a consequence of reunification, but also revisionist memory entrepreneurs of intellectuals of the ‘New Right’ and right-wing movements, including the extreme right party AfD. While German elites attempted to reoriented German grand strategy after 1990 towards the idea of a global responsibility in defending liberal principles, German society has forced politicians from all political camps to refrain from the interventionist use of force in military interventions, but also from actively pursuing policies of international solidarity during the Eurocrisis and the so-called refugee crisis. As of today, Germany is seen abroad as one of the last stable defenders of liberal democracy, including in Ukraine; domestically, the dramatic electoral successes of the AfD party, which actively promotes a more nationalist foreign policy, as well as the abandonment of military and economic support to Ukraine, demonstrate that the fragmentation of German collective memory may rather sooner than later paralyse German foreign policy altogether.

Germany’s case, while particular in the scope often the radical changes in grand strategy, is not unique. Across the world, societies are losing a sense of a shared past as memory entrepreneurs, but also elites in power, favour exclusionary narratives of the national past to promote societal polarisation and weaken democratic deliberation. As many examples of ‘culture wars’ in both the Global North and the Global South may illustrate, such strategies may avoid dealing with difficult issues such as social equality, unemployment, or the climate crisis. But they do have a price, namely an inability to muster resources of collective action necessary for any meaningful implementation of grand strategy, except through coercion and intimidation. The apathy of contemporary Russian society, the deepening divisions in U.S. society, but also the increasing number of grassroot contestations in many South Asian countries may illustrate this argument.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.