Foreign Policy
Fall 1998

Editing in the Emerging Berlin Republic

By Reimund Krämer, Managing Editor, WeltTrends

 

As Managing Editor of the journal WeltTrends, I would like to thank you very much for the invitation to take part in this roundtable. My special thanks go to the sponsors, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the German Marshall Fund, and to the organizers of this seminar, the Center for Applied Policy Research in Munich and FOREIGN POLICY.

I came to Washington (it is my first stay here) above all to learn from academically acknowledged journals with vast experience in dealing with international policy and proven mastery of the landscape of international relations (IR), with its jungles, deserts, and rocky mountains. And I am sure that I will return with great intellectual and social benefit.

But I think at the same time there is a chance for me to contribute actively to this brainstorming session by highlighting some experiences of a new journal for international and comparative politics, which has survived the typical childhood illnesses of journals and  is now, after five years, ready to participate in a global debate. For Martin Wight, the English master in IR, international theory was the theory of survival, and with all academic modesty, we have the intellectual and moral will to offer our experiences and our ideas to the debate on a changed world and how to face the different challenges it poses—how to survive in the “global village”. It is not only the lack of a name for our time: We still use the Cold War as a reference point and speak of the “post–Cold War era”. Certainly, the dust from the fallen Berlin Wall has settled by now—and it is hard to find some remains of it in the center of Berlin today—but our analytical instruments, the terms and approaches are still from the ruins of bipolarity and the Cold War. What does power mean today? Who acts in the international arena? What are IR at the end of the twentieth century, if we look, for example, at the case of the European Union (EU)? Does EU policy still belong to IR or is it part of domestic policy? “What is domestic in Euro-land?” headlined the International Herald Tribune last Saturday. A huge number of actors—from central states to noncentral governments, such as the German Länder or the Spanish Comunidades Autónomas and transborder regions, to Green Peace activists—are lobbying, acting and making policy in this multilevel network called the EU. What is the nature of this beast? And it is truly not the only beast we have to analyze now. The classic reading of international politics does not explain this reality. Its intellectual capacity is limited, without underestimating it. (I think that essays by Hans Morgenthau, Hedley Bull, and Stanley Hoffmann should remain on the agenda of IR students in the future, too.) But for me the year 1989 not only meant the fall of walls and state boundaries. It also meant that the intellectual border guards had to open the doors for exchange, strive to get to know each other, and include one another in a common debate.

This was exactly the point of departure for some political scientists in Potsdam, including myself, mainly at the University of Potsdam, and in Poland, from the West Institute in Poznan, to create a journal for international politics in September 1993. We called it WeltTrends, (World Trends), with a soft postmodernistic writing.

What is WeltTrends?

Let me start with some short facts: WeltTrends is a German-language quarterly of around 200 pages. It also features English and Polish tables of contents and English abstracts. Its circulation is 800, with around 400 subscribers—just about all university political-science departments in Germany get the journal—and the rest sold on newsstands.

What makes WeltTrends unique is that it is edited by two institutions: the German WeltTrends association and the Polish Instytut Zachodni, the West Institute, in Poznan. German and Polish universities, especially the University of Potsdam, support this joint project as well. The editorial and advisory boards are also mixed. Three Polish editors belong to the editorial board and five Polish scholars from Poznan, Krakow, and Warsaw belong to the advisory board of the journal.

WeltTrends is meant to be an academic journal, politically independent and with no special academic preferences concerning the approaches or the methods. On the contrary, we are encouraging different schools of thought!

How is WeltTrends structured?

Every issue has a special featured topic—for instance, the (needed) reform of the United Nations, the growing role of regions in Western Europe, integration in the Pacific Rim. or “Geopolitics”. The topic is usually addressed by about five articles (about 100 pages). In addition, every issue has articles on other topics, always one polemic or controversial piece in a special place, called Streitplatz (“dispute corner”). There, for instance, the German writer Joachim Seyppel discussed the vision of Eurasia and Yale Ferguson strongly criticized the realistic approach in IR.

We accept articles with a length of around 7,000 words. They are generally reviewed by two scholars in a double-blind procedure. In addition, every issue presents new books (about 30 pages for reviews) and conferences, especially from the Berlin region. That is the personal and formal structure of WeltTrends.

Then what is the intellectual structure of the journal?

Let me sketch this structure out. The term border crossing could be used to describe the Leitmotiv of this journal. Border crossing or transborder cooperation in the geographical and political sense as well as in the academic and intellectual meaning. Moving from the West of the East to the East of the West we, the Eastern parts of Germany, remain border land to Western Europe and Eastern Europe as well. Maintaining academic contacts with the East, not only with Poland, but with our next-door neighbor, requires special attention and was one motive for creating a transborder academic network. The other reason was to include the ideas, concepts, and considerations of our Central and Eastern European colleagues in the German debate on international politics. Therefore, in all issues we present articles by authors from these regions. In this way, the German debate—so we hope—gets input from the East.

But not only from the East. For us, crossing borders also means getting in contact with colleagues from the West, the North, and the South. We have been publishing such outstanding French scholars as the “geopolitician” Ives Lacoste, the leading French IR thinker Zaki Laidi, and the historian Pierre Hassner, who are seldom published in German. Other authors have come from Chile (such as IR expert Luciano Tomassini), China, Finland, Japan, South Africa, and—last but not least—from the United States (including Daniel Hamilton with his conceptually innovative article entitled “Wanted: A compass for the new international landscape” in our first issue).

In this way, we are trying to enrich the German debate on international politics, offering other views and approaches. (By the way, a great part of our personal and financial resources are spent on translations. From time to time, we publish an article in English.)

A “globalized authorship” is WeltTrends’ trademark, and we will keep it as such. Border crossing also means passing over the borders of the traditional IR departments and getting in touch with other disciplines  such as history, geography, psychology, or sociology.

Our bestseller up until now was the issue on geopolitics. In it, we did not declare a new ideology, but tested an approach that was taboo during the last 50 years in German political science. We contacted academics from abroad, especially England, France, and Russia, and geographers from Germany. Interestingly, some West German intellectual guardians heavily criticized this sacrilege committed by Eastern academics. Other issues addressed topics of “Identities in Europe,” “Violence and Politics,” and “Cities as Space and Actor” and were produced in close contact with sociologists. The issues on the state in Africa and the Middle East issue were the result of cooperation with area study departments, and the issue on the breakdown of Empires was made together with historians.

We are also trying to bring together two subfields of political science, IR and comparative politics, to make their relations more interactive. WeltTrends offers not only case studies on special countries, but also comparative studies. For example, the latest issue focuses on “Technocracy, the power of experts”—a subject that was not much talked about in recent years in the German political debate.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

WeltTrends was launched in the third year after German unification. It started in the East of Germany, in Berlin. WeltTrends is not an East German journal, but it is a new and innovative journal for international politics in a changing Germany and transforming Europe. (As a geopolitical footnote—it is still the only one on the right side of the river Rhine.)

In the stormy and rough tide of events in Germany, Europe, and the world, the journal WeltTrends could set sail. With its firm will and open mind to cross borders, it has found its way and does belong to the academic and intellectual landscape of the emerging Berlin Republic.