FRG’s foreign policy has been facing the shifting the balance between two groups of factors to the second one. The groups are the historical responsibility of Germany as the key aggressor in the Second World War and German’s interest to ensure the widest possible military-strategic presence on the world stage. The growing importance of the second factor stimulates the growing of geopolitical determination in the usage of the Bundeswehr outside the NATO’s zone of responsibility. In this regard the article tries to explore the ratio between the geopolitical and integration reasons. The scientific paper bases on the usage of the documents of the Bundestag, Office of the Federal Chancellor, Ministry of Defence and also NATO. The author uses the neoliberalism and neorealism theories, the method of comparative analysis. The article explores the importance of geopolitical reasons in Germany’s military activity in the Balkans, in Somali (the Horn of Africa), Afghanistan (the Middle East), in the Near East and in the northern parts of Africa. The author shows the opportunities for camouflage of geopolitical reasons under integration in FRG’s military activity. FRG has been increasing noticeably the contribution to and role in the system of confrontations between the “liberal democracies” and key non-Western actors (Russia, China and Iran). The tendency is de-facto accompanied by increasing importance of geopolitical reasons in German military activity at the global level. It will lead to removal of informal taboos, open discussion about the role of geopolitical factors in German socio-political and scientific discourse in the future. The scientific paper stresses the importance of geopolitical factors for the usage of the Bundeswehr outside the NATO’s zone of responsibility, especially for the key cases (in Afghanistan and Mali).
Key words: Germany, Bundeswehr, military presence, global level, integration, association, geopolitics.
DOI: 10.56429/2414-4894-2024-47-1-96-110