Abstract

"'A First-Class Partner?' Making and Contesting the Atlantic Order in 1970s Hamburg"

Jack Guenther, Yale University (jack.guenther@yale.edu)

In late 1974, at the end of his first year as West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt returned to his home city of Hamburg to give an interview to Der Spiegel in which the Chancellor argued that West Germany must adopt a greater role in global affairs. The country must become “a first-class partner.” Amid the crisis years of the 1970s, Schmidt steered the Federal Republic toward new international leadership, co-founding the summits that would become the Group of Seven and inaugurating a German foreign policy defined by economic might. Schmidt’s mental maps of the world and commitment to reinvigorating an Atlantic liberal economic order drew on his time working among the merchants and economists in Hamburg, Germany’s largest port city. Yet Hamburg, since the 1890s, had housed Germany’s largest socialist movement and by the 1960s was home to countercultural associations skeptical of Schmidt’s conciliatory stance toward the United States and his German brand of neoliberalism. The city’s centuries-old commercial traditions had long existed in concert with a robust working-class movement. This paper asks how West Germany’s new role in global affairs was made not only by Schmidt and the liberalism he represented, but also by the tension between the Federal Republic’s liberal center and its more utopian left-wing institutions and political culture. It argues that municipal contests over what internationalism meant would spill out into national politics and foreshadow contemporary debates about the direction of Germany’s economic policies and its role in Europe and the World.