From the War in Ukraine to an Ever-Closer Union? German Foreign Policy as a Case Study on the Integratory Force of Crises within the European Union

Abstract

This study analyses the integratory effect of crises on EU foreign policy, utilizing Germany and the war in Ukraine of 2022 as a case study. The underlying logic stemming from the EU crisis literature is that crises are a driving force for European integration. To investigate this issue for the EU Member State Germany, quantitative tools of sentiment analysis and topic modelling are employed on a data set of parliamentary speeches and press releases. This discourse analysis is supplemented by a qualitative investigation of selected speech acts. The results show that German policymakers acknowledged the issue salience of integration in EU CFSP and voice willingness for integratory steps as a reaction to the crisis in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the analysis also uncovered a contradictory relationship between such acknowledgment and the usage of committing language by the German executive. The results of this study, therefore, highlight the historically complicated relationship between the European Union and its Member States in questions of sovereignty and accordingly point towards more general questions of how political integration in EU Member States is communicated to its citizens.