Identity and anxiety: Germany’s struggle to lead

Abstract:

At a time when calls for German leadership abound, we need to ask what kind of leadership Berlin is likely to offer. This paper builds on scholarship that presumes identity as an essential precondition for orderly social life. My focus is on how identity is secured through ontological security-seeking.

Ontological security theory reveals how Germany is responding to rising calls for leadership in Europe and beyond and traces these responses to an increasingly stressed identity narrative. It explains both Germany’s reluctance to lead and, being pressed to lead, how leadership is legitimated through discursive adaptation. Whether “leading from the center” or exercising “servant leadership”, ontological security theory exposes the specific interactions between a national self-narrative and a rapidly changing environment.

I show how these interactions challenge Germany’s identity and its ability to adapt; how they cause ontological anxiety, and how the scope and direction of adaptation to structural change account for the kind of leadership Germany is able to offer. What we observe is a determined effort to position the country between a traditional culture of restraint that can no longer meet Germany’s responsibilities and a position of hegemony that speaks of self-serving behaviour and dominance.