The European Council on Foreign Relations

The Scorecard tour: Berlin

Date: 16th February 2012  |  Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: Europe and the world, Germany in Europe,
Tags: , ecfr scorecard, foreign policy , foreign policy, germany, berlin

Hans Kundnani is one of the lead authors of the ECFR's Foreign Policy Scorecard. He's writing this series of blog posts as he attends a series of Scorecard events across Europe and beyond.

When ECFR published the first edition of the Foreign Policy Scorecard last year, Justin Vaïsse and I were looking forward to having lots of discussions about the methodology. Having had long internal discussions between ourselves, with other ECFR staff and other experts, and having made difficult choices, we were interested to see what other people thought. We were even hoping for criticism because we thought it might help us improve the Scorecard the following year.

Surprisingly, however, we didn't didn't end up having many discussions about the methodology at all. Whether because people found it convincing or just because they wanted to focus instead on the substantial issues the Scorecard threw up, we didn't get much criticism of it  - except, that is, in Germany. At a presentation I gave at our Berlin office for German think tanks last year, several people were worried that the Scorecard was insufficiently "wissenschaftlich", or "scientific". Germans seem to find the concept of informed judgement deeply problematic.

Yesterday afternoon I made the first of two presentations of this year's Scorecard in Berlin at the Free University (where I spent a lovely year as student in the 1990s - it was nice to be back). Although I said at the beginning that we did not claim to be "wissenschaftlich", it was the same as last year: the two-hour discussion was interesting but focused almost exclusively on methodological questions. In other words, we mainly discussed not whether Europe was performing well in foreign policy but the theoretical difficulties of measuring foreign-policy performance.

Above all, the discussion centred on what Justin and I, in our internal discussions, had called the "normative question". How, one student asked immediately when I had finished my presentation, did we define European objectives in each case? Did this not involve a normative judgement? The short answer was yes: we collectively made a judgement in each case about the European interest. But why was it in the European interest to intervene in Libya or even to give development aid?

Another participant began by saying how valuable the Scorecard was but argued that there was a disconnect between the overall grades for the six issues - which are broadly similar to those we gave for foreign-policy performance in 2011 - and our assessment in the introduction that Europe had been "diminished" by the second year of the euro crisis. This showed, he said, that the methodology was flawed: we were making claims that were not supported by the data. It was thus not judgement but "prejudice". I argued - though I'm not sure I convinced him - that it was justified to speak of a "diminished" Europe because of the loss of soft power and budget cuts that threatened future foreign-policy performance even though performance in 2011 was not dramatically worse than in 2010.

In some ways, it was a thought-provoking discussion. In particular, our host, Professor Ingo Peters, made some very interesting and constructive points about the idea of "outcome". But after the event was over I realised we hadn't discussed important substantial issues - above all the role of Germany in European foreign policy - at all (the contrast was particularly striking because I'd just been in Rome, where everyone wanted to talk about Germany). Hopefully we'll talk about this as well as about methodology at our second Berlin event today.

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