We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Waffen aus Deutschland?
- Authors
Gray, William Glenn
- Abstract
To the authors of West Germany’s Basic Law, the moral imperative was clear: Germans must refrain from stoking wars of aggression, whether in Europe or overseas. During the 1960s, however, the Federal Republic emerged as an arms merchant and supplier of military aid on a global scale. This article examines efforts by the Bundestag to block the export of weapons to non-Western or non-democratic regimes. It shows that successive German cabinets eluded tight parliamentary constraints, choosing instead to adopt administrative principles that sounded severe but proved to be quite elastic in practice. When confronted in the mid-1970s with high unemployment, Helmut Schmidt’s cabinet actively courted customers in the Third World – though adverse publicity and pressure from SPD party organizations kept government ambitions in check. Decades later, however, the lax administrative system for granting export permits has been exploited by Angela Merkel’s government, resulting in a steep surge in German arms exports.
- Subjects
GERMANY (West); WEAPONS industry; MILITARY weapons; MILITARY weapons exports &; imports; ECONOMIC sanctions; TWENTIETH century; MILITARY relations; HISTORY; GOVERNMENT policy
- Publication
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2016, Vol 64, Issue 2, p327
- ISSN
0042-5702
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/vfzg-2016-0016