Vol. 20 · No. 3 · Issue 64 · Fall 2002

James Ryan Anderson

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Abstract

In a little more than a decade, Germany's role in international affairs-particularly from a military perspective-has radically changed. Where-as German participation during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was basically limited to providing financial support to the international coalition led by the United States, by the end of 2001, German soldiers were operating under combat conditions in the United Nations peace-keeping mission to Afghanistan. During (and even before) this transition, little attention has been devoted to the German Bundestag's constitutional role as overseer of executive foreign affairs activities.

In the past, this topic-parliamentary control over foreign affairs in Germany-has focused almost solely on the theoretical debate surrounding the Bundestag's legal competency to participate in forming foreign policy.1 Only one study, Parlamentarische Kontrolle der Außenpolitik, examines the Bundestag's control over foreign policy entirely from a practical perspective.2 This study looks at a small number of foreign policy decisions from the 1950s and 1960s, and, while reconstructing the events surrounding them, attempts to discern patterns of interaction between the Bundestag's political fractions and the administration. There has been, however, no attempt to systematically evaluate the Bundestag's role in controlling the administration in foreign policy matters.