Gebhardt Weiss

Gebhardt Weiss (born May 14, 1946 in Beuel ) is a German diplomat . He was last from July 2007 to July 2010 Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Minsk , Belarus and then went on to serve as Ambassador a. D. retired.

biography

After studying history, Slavic studies, philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Bonn , he received a one-year scholarship from the German Research Foundation at the Lomonossow University in Moscow in 1972 to prepare for his dissertation. 1977 the doctorate to Dr. phil. at the University of Bonn (topic of the doctoral thesis: The Russian city between contract management and self-government - On the history of the Russian urban reform of 1870 ).

After joining the Foreign Service in 1975, he was initially employed in the Foreign Office (Political Department for the Soviet Union, Planning Staff - responsible, among other things, for the Soviet Union and East-West relations and as a speechwriter for Foreign Minister Genscher on these topics and the process of German unity ). In addition, there were uses at the German embassies in the former Soviet Union , in Kenya , in the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

After a one-year research stay at Harvard / Boston-USA (see below for further activities), Weiss was briefly on duty in autumn 1995 as head of the German peace contingent as part of the EU observer mission in the Balkans. Subsequently, until 2000 he was head of a department in Department 2A (“Disarmament and Arms Control”) of the Federal Foreign Office on questions of conventional disarmament. At the same time, he was a special envoy for the negotiations on the CFE Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe . In this context, Weiss has significantly developed the concept of the Europe-wide adaptation of the original CFE contract, which was agreed in the agreement of November 19, 1999 (negotiated in Istanbul). The aim of this novel adaptation was to replace the military equilibrium between the former Warsaw Pact and NATO, originally stipulated in the CFE Treaty, with a defensive pan-European system of regional and subregional stability and strictly controllable arms limitation for all contracting states.

From 2000 to September 2004 Weiss was the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Republic of Croatia . During this phase, he focused on a realistic EU perspective for the host country. From August 2004 to July 2007 he acted as ambassador in Almaty and Astana (since 2019 Nur-Sultan) , Kazakhstan and placed a special focus on the gradual democratization and improved legal certainty as core conditions for a modernization of the country and the like. a. through western investments. At the end of his professional career, he worked in Belarus from 2007 to 2010 for the gradual liberalization of the host country as a prerequisite for a substantial improvement in relations between Minsk and the EU. It was in this context that he successfully contributed to the complete liberation of the political prisoners there in the course of 2008.

further activities

Between 1994 and 1995 Weiss was a visiting scholar at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in the USA and published during this time on the foreign and security policy of the Russian Federation (see for details - including the earlier Soviet foreign and security policy - the online Catalog of the library of the German Bundestag). Furthermore, the history of ideas of the current Russian elite is one of his areas of interest, see z. B. Sources of national identity - Putin designs the future with utopias from Russian intellectual history (in: Internationale Politik, No. 2, March – April 2015, pp. 67–75).