Cabbage Doctrine

The Kohl Doctrine is a foreign and security policy maxim of the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl , which he put forward after the end of the East-West conflict in 1989/90. It said that in those countries that were occupied by the Wehrmacht during the Nazi era , German soldiers were no longer allowed to be present.

This will to show military restraint on the part of reunified Germany in the beginning Yugoslavia conflict reflected on the one hand Germany's historical burden of the crimes of the National Socialist occupation and on the other hand corresponded to domestic political skepticism against Germany's military participation. The NATO partners Germany this position faced resistance and the Federal Republic brought an accusation of the security policy "free-riding".

In the course of the Bosnian War , however, the Federal Republic increasingly took part in the measures adopted by the United Nations and implemented by NATO for air surveillance ( Operation Maritime Monitor , Operation Deny Flight , Operation Deliberate Force ) and for peacekeeping ( IFOR , SFOR ), so that the Kohl doctrine became obsolete. By the end of the 1990s, Kohl's stipulation was gradually reinterpreted as an obligation to intervene in regions in which genocide is threatened or is being carried out.

literature

• Wolfram Hilz: Continuity and Change in German Foreign Policy after 1990. In: Federal Center for Political Education (Ed.): German Foreign Policy (= Information on Political Education 304), pp. 33–51.
• Brendan Simms: From the Kohl to the Fischer Doctrine: Germany and the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, 1991–1999. In: German History 21 (3/2003), pp. 393-414.