Henry Kissinger once described the Federal Republic of Germany as "economically a giant, but politically a dwarf." While the first part of the description is still fairly accurate, the latter seems questionable today-over 10 years after reunification. Since Gerhard Schroeder became Chancellor in 1998, Germany has increasingly made itself heard on the world stake. It is no loner "American favorite colony" or the ever-compliant EU member that pays all of the bills. At the same time, there is no danger of Germany aspiring to be a "giant" once again. The "German question," which arose from the possibility of that aspiration coming true, has been resolved by European integration. The evidence for this phenomenon can be drawn from the seemingly incoherent foreign policy record of Schroeder's RedGreen coalition.

A Newfound Assertiveness

Although the stability created by European integration has been celebrated for decades, it was not until the current government rose to power that the strength of the integrative bonds were seriously tested. Until 1990, Western European countries had been held together by the common threat of communism from the East and hegemony from across the Atlantic. Moreover, unlike the aftermath of World War I, the post-1945 era in West Germany had seen a complete acknowledgment of the country's guilt for World War II. From this guilt arose a sense among political elites that it was only appropriate for Germans to be modest in their external relations. Furthermore, the goal and raison d'etre of the Federal Republic, according to its own constitution, had been the eventual achievement of reunification of the entire German people. As the victorious powers of World War II retained partial sovereignty over the whole of Germany until 1990, the goal of reunification necessitated German good will and moderation. In the years after reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl continued to be guided by a sense of history that prescribed a moderate and conciliatory attitude in the conduct of foreign affairs. However, when Schroeder rose to power, his administration was composed of men and women who had no recollection of the war and its immediate aftermath and who had grown up in an economically thriving liberal democracy. They were leading a country that was once again the largest in Europe in both population and economic output. It was soon clear that under these circumstances Germany would no longer settle for being a political "dwarf."

Instead, the country was finally beginning to exert its full political weight in the world. This emergence manifested itself in a variety of ways. In the spring of 1999, German troops saw battle for the first time since World War II in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) intervention in Kosovo. Unlike previous multinational interventions of the 1990s, Germany did not invoke its past to stay out of the fray. Instead, a sense that it was time for the country to take on greater responsibility in the international arena prevailed.

Along with this new sense of responsibility came a stronger demand for influence, as shown by the renewed demands for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and by German efforts to push its nationals into highlevel positions at international institutions. Schroeder's near-unilateral decision to make his chief of staff Bodo Hombach Special Coordinator of the EU Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe and his insistence on a German Managing Director for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are the most prominent examples.

Moreover, the Schroeder government early in its term aggressively demanded reductions in its contributions to the European Union's budget and made it clear that it would pursue its national interests within the institution much more vigorously than its predecessors. Unsurprisingly, this caused suspicion and resentment in the rest of Europe. It led the French daily Le Monde so far as to pronounce the "breakdown of the Franco-German motor of European integration" in March 1999.

In practice, Schroeder's government has been much more compromising than its early rhetoric might suggest. Nevertheless, its new assertiveness has continued to alienate Germany's neighbors. In the prelude to last year's Nice summit, for example, the German government circulated a plan to alter voting weights in the Council of Ministers, the European Union's main decision-making body, to reflect the size of Germany's population. After reunification it is 20 million people larger than Italy, France, and Britain. However, since the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the principle of equal weight for France and Germany had been fundamental to the process of European integration and was never questioned on either side. To France, ever fearful of German dominance, the idea was anathema, and French President Jacques Chirac struggled at Nice to keep it from materializing.

A Willingness to Integrate Thus, one might ask whether the "German Question" is back on the table. Did European integration ultimately fail to provide an answer to the problem of Germany's potential dominance? Should its neighbors worry that the Germans are trying to be a political giant once again? Not quite. There is another striking feature about recent German foreign policy that suggests that despite its newfound political assertiveness, it has continued to champion European integration. The country has been more willing than most others to cede sovereignty to European supranational authority. At the Nice conference, it advocated expansion of majority decision-making in more policy areas than any of its partners were willing to accept. In the ongoing debate about the European Union's enlargement into Eastern Europe, Germany has continually advocated a formula of "deepening and widening" integration at the same time. The German parliament also altered a constitutional provision barring women from service in the military at the order of the European Court ofJustice in late 1999. This marked the first time in recent history that a sovereign country altered its constitution to comply with the judgment of a supranational judicial body.

On May 12, 2000, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer gave a speech in Berlin speculating about the "finality" of European integration. He outlined his version of a final and permanent structure of the European Union, which involved a bicameral legislative body and a directly elected President of the European Commission as head of the executive branch. This would be encoded in a constitution that would delineate the division of responsibilities between the European institutions and the member states' national governments. Fischer gave this speech in his capacity as a "private citizen," not as foreign minister, but at the same time, he acknowledged "that that is not really possible." As both Schroeder and German President Johannes Rau have reiterated the need for a European Constitution, Fischer's speech can be considered a semiofficial statement of government policy. It sparked debates throughout the continent about the question of where European integration is headed, prompting Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to outline their own visions of the continent's future. Both Chirac's and Blair's conceptions of Europe contained a much stronger national element and revealed their countries' greater reluctance to cede additional sovereignty to the European Union.