Research

Research Project

(Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kießling), sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation in 2022 and 2023.

Brief Description:
The project is investigating the Federal German UNESCO policy, with its main focus on the UNESCO crisis from a historical perspective. The trouble of UNESCO became widely visible by the withdrawal of the USA from the UNESCO in 1983, followed by Great Britain and Singapore.

UNESCO is the only specialized agency of the United Nations, which has strong national elements in its structure, because of its national commissions and permanent representations. Therefore the UNESCO offers beside international cooperation opportunities for setting national priorities and their internal discussion. For the Federal Republic of Germany, it was of particular importance, that it had already early a framework for action in the UNESCO. The Federal German accession took place in 1951 and for a long time was one of the few possibilities for multilateral partnership and an important step out of the foreign policy isolation after the Second World War. With this the UNESCO represented at the beginning of the 1970s, a long-established multilateral framework for Bonn's foreign policy.

The withdrawal of member countries, such as the U.S. and the U.K., confronted the Federal Republic with a new situation and exposed it to new expectations. German actors were surprised to find out, that their role in the international context of UNESCO were changed and had grown. Therefore the research project is about determining the position of individual actors involved, such as the Foreign Office, the Federal Chancellery and the Ministries of Culture of the federal states, the German Commission for UNESCO, as well as the political parties, their negotiation processes of an outward attitude, respectively about the positioning between the European and transatlantic partners and the definition of their own role.

Next to a focus on various actors, the approach of international role concepts developed in political science will be methodically used. The time period of the 1970s and 1980s is located in between the first both decades of the Federal Republic of Germany predominately described within historical science as "Haltung der Zurückhaltung" (Johannes Paulmann), as well as the ideas of a Federal German "Zivilmacht" (Hanns W. Maull), so far worked out above all within political science, especially for the time after 1989.