The pragmatism of Annalena Baerbock

The planned big hit begins with a small disenchantment. Annalena Baerbock writes about her guidelines that feminist foreign policy has no magic formula ready to deal with immediate security policy threats. A sentence from which a lot can be made if you want to be spiteful. But it actually says a lot about a concept that has not only been understood as a battlefield term for months, but has also been used as a battleground term.

The astonishing thing is that since a feminist foreign policy was negotiated as a goal in the coalition agreement, it has been celebrated or ridiculed, requested or questioned, depending on political color – but until now it has not been entirely clear what exactly is meant by that.

As early as 2000, a UN resolution called for the three Rs: more attention to representation, rights and resources for women. A demand that nobody in large parts of the western world has any serious objection to, and which Sweden and then other countries took up in their foreign policy.

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Source: WORLD

Among other things, these leitmotifs are quite pragmatic, because it has long been proven that peace negotiations are more successful when women sit at the table. And they are important because women are often the first to suffer from violence and tyranny, as is currently being painfully seen in Afghanistan, Iran and Ukraine, among other places.

Feminist foreign policy, on the other hand, became a battle cry, above all by representatives who loudly have much more radical, theoretical ideas: It’s about a “rethinking” of the concept of security, about an end to weapons and global armament, sometimes also about destroying a patriarchy and set up a fairer system. So far, so far from reality, or also: naive. That became clear with a look at the war in Ukraine.

Annalena Baerbock, who has proven to be a pragmatist often enough in recent months, knows this too. Your guidelines contain no surprises. In large parts, what should be self-evident, but definitely requires constant repetition, is repeated: safety and participation for all.

Other parts read more like Asta papers from the 1990s, with their instructions on how to act in a gender-sensitive or gender-transformative manner in foreign policy and in many other areas of life and politics, or how to develop a “feminist reflex”.

But the biggest problem remains: Not only does this very long document contain no magic formula, but hardly any indication of how feminist foreign policy offers new answers in challenging situations where it is most needed. Not only women in Iran and Afghanistan are waiting for this answer.