On Wednesday, March 1, 2023, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock launched new Feminist Foreign Policy guidelines that seek to make gender equality and women’s rights central objectives of Germany’s external relations. In parallel, Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development Svenja Schulze also announced a new strategy on feminist development assistance. Germany thereby joins a growing group of liberal democracies that have adopted feminist foreign policies in recent years, including Canada, France, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, and, until recently, Sweden.
The new guidelines, developed by Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition government after consultations with civil society advocates and other stakeholders, lay out a broad framework for anchoring women’s rights and gender equality in different areas of German foreign policy, from peace negotiations and humanitarian aid delivery to climate policy. But they also raise hard questions about what it means to put these principles into practice—how to assess progress on implementation, how to navigate political resistance, and, most importantly, how to reconcile the feminist foreign policy framework with the German governments’ shift toward a much more security-oriented foreign policy in light of the war in Ukraine.
What Is a Feminist Foreign Policy?
The concept of a feminist foreign policy, articulated and advanced by gender equality advocates within and outside of various governments over the past several years, builds on decades of feminist engagement with questions of international peace and justice. At a basic level, it seeks to address the reality that foreign policy has long been the domain of elite men—and that as a result, decisionmaking on peace, security, trade, and other issues has often ignored women’s interests and perspectives and perpetuated rather than addressed global gender inequities.
In the eyes of many advocates, however, a feminist approach to foreign policy goes beyond simply integrating women into foreign policy processes or adding a greater focus on gender equality to the long list of global policy priorities. Instead, they argue for a more radical rethinking of international engagement. According to this view, a feminist approach to foreign policy would center human security over state and national security, and focus on dismantling the global economic and political structures that reproduce gender inequality as well as other forms of exclusion, discrimination, and injustice.
Of course, feminist movements are far from politically homogeneous, and not all advocates and thinkers agree on what such structural transformation would entail. However, central to feminist foreign policy thinking is a strong skepticism toward military solutions to security challenges, a prioritization of human rights and civil society engagement, and an overarching focus on demilitarization, multilateralism, and diplomatic engagement. As a conceptual and political framework, feminist foreign policy thus builds and draws on other strands of progressive foreign policy thought and practice, including the “human security” agenda that gained traction in the 1990s.
What Do Germany’s New Feminist Foreign Policy Guidelines Entail?
Germany’s new feminist foreign policy builds on the framework pioneered by Sweden under Margot Wallström’s leadership in 2014. Mirroring Sweden’s approach, Germany’s guidelines focus on three overarching objectives: equal rights for women and girls, the equitable representation of women in all areas of society, and equal access to resources for women and girls (in short: rights, representation, and resources).
To advance these objectives, the guidelines highlight three main areas of action: gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting, and internal diversity. First, in terms of mainstreaming, the guidelines note that Germany will integrate a focus on gender equality and women’s rights across different areas of external engagement, including peace and security, humanitarian response, human rights policy, climate diplomacy and external energy policy, foreign trade and investment, and cultural and public diplomacy (international democracy support is curiously absent from the list). What this will mean concretely depends on the issue area, though the guidelines lay out some entry points and projects. They also announce the appointment of a woman ambassador for feminist foreign policy to help spearhead the implementation process.
Beyond these policy objectives, the document spells out funding targets for the Federal Foreign Office. Specifically, the office commits to allocating 85 percent of aid funding to projects that include gender equality as a secondary goal, and at least 8 percent to projects that count gender equality as their primary goal by 2025. This is a significant increase in commitments: as of 2019–2020, less than half of German assistance went to projects that counted gender equality as either a primary or secondary goal.
Finally, several of the guidelines propose internal changes within the German foreign policy apparatus, with a focus on increasing the share of women in senior positions, promoting nondiscrimination, and cultivating internal expertise on gender and diversity issues. This is an area where the Scholz government has already achieved some changes: between 2020 and 2022, the share of women among directors general in the Federal Foreign Office increased from 21.9 percent to 36.4 percent, and among heads of missions abroad from 19.4 percent to 27.1 percent.
How Does Germany’s Feminist Foreign Policy Compare to Others?
Countries have pursued a diversity of strategies under the feminist foreign policy label, some of which are much wider in scope and ambition than others. For instance, whereas Sweden’s and Luxembourg’s policies explicitly cover(ed) development cooperation and trade, as well as foreign and security policy, Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy focuses more narrowly on development aid. France’s 2019 launch of a “feminist diplomacy,” on the other hand, consisted primarily of rebranding the country’s existing strategy on gender equality rather than presenting a clear alternative policy framework.
Viewed comparatively, Germany’s framework appears to be ambitious: rather than focusing only on development, it covers various areas of foreign engagement, including security policy, trade, and climate policy. Appointing an ambassador for feminist foreign policy will likely improve the policy’s political visibility and, if backed up by a strong mandate, may advance cross-sectoral coordination. At the same time, the new guidelines are not a whole-of-government strategy that includes the Ministry of Defense and other entities; instead, they are focused on the Federal Foreign Office (with the parallel development strategy from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development). Moreover, the chancellery’s role is not mentioned in the entire document, which raises questions about whether the agenda will be implemented at the highest level.
Another point of difference is whether feminist foreign policies focus primarily on gender equality and women’s rights or center on inclusion and diversity more broadly. The Spanish government’s framework, for example, emphasizes the need to tackle gender inequality together with intersecting forms of discrimination, including due to ethnic or racial origin, sexual orientation and gender identity, and economic status. Germany’s guidelines similarly describe an “intersectional approach,” noting the need to stand up “for everyone who is pushed to societies’ margins because of their gender identity, origin, religion, age, disability or sexual orientation or for other reasons.” At the same time, the document clearly centers on women’s rights and representation. The more comprehensive “3R+D” framework (meaning “rights, resources, representation, and diversity”), which was anchored in the German government’s coalition agreement, did not make it into the final guidelines.
Finally, existing feminist foreign policies vary in the funding commitments and targets they set out. Here, Germany appears to sit in the middle: its funding targets are more ambitious than those articulated by France, but less ambitious than those set by the Canadian government. However, given Germany’s larger aid budget, the targets set out are monetarily significant: in 2021, Germany was the second-largest provider of development aid globally behind the United States, spending $32.2 billion in total.
What Challenges Lie Ahead?
This new Feminist Foreign Policy represents a welcome step to increase attention to gender equality issues in Germany’s international engagement. The fact that the guidelines were developed in close consultation with civil society, parliamentarians, and academics also points to a growing recognition that more diverse voices should help shape Germany’s international engagement.
Yet as Baerbock and her team begin implementing the new guidelines, they will inevitably have to grapple with several tensions and challenges that mark the feminist foreign policy agenda, made perhaps more acute by Germany’s current geopolitical positioning.
Measuring progress
First, there is the challenge of defining and measuring progress in implementation. Looking at other countries that have adopted feminist foreign policies in recent years, the gap between rhetorical and policy commitments and meaningful implementation has been a recurring point of critique. Part of the problem is that these policies are still new. But many governments have also fallen short in setting clear targets and accountability frameworks and in reporting on their implementation in a transparent manner.
Most easily measurable are governments’ spending practices. Existing research suggests that the announcement of a feminist foreign policy and/or development policy is often—but not always—accompanied by increased funding commitments for gender equality. In Canada, for example, funding for projects with gender equality as their primary goal increased significantly after the adoption of its Feminist International Assistance Policy in 2017, from $60 million in 2014 to $873 million in 2019. Yet this pattern has not been universal. For instance, Sweden’s funding commitments to gender equality fluctuated while its Feminist Foreign Policy was in place.
Progress beyond aid spending is much more difficult to assess. In some cases, governments that have adopted feminist foreign policies have taken on clear leadership roles in advocating for gender equality norms and frameworks at the multilateral level. Canada and France, for example, have both used their G7 presidencies to advance new gender equality commitments; Sweden played an active role on the UN Security Council in 2017–2018. But examples of inconsistency abound. Feminist advocates have criticized Mexico for failing to use its tenure on the Security Council in 2021–2022 to advance women’s rights concerns. Sweden, Canada, France, and others have also come under fire for not systematically applying their feminist commitments to their trade and security policies, including with respect to arms exports to autocratic regimes.
Given these challenges, it is promising that the German guidelines include specific spending targets. Efforts to advance diversity within the Federal Foreign Office can also be easily monitored and tracked. But when it comes to encouraging a “feminist reflex” in all areas of foreign policy, or integrating gender considerations into bilateral dialogues with partner countries, benchmarks for progress will be more difficult to define. The guidelines rightly emphasize the need to continuously “monitor progress.” To aid this process, the Federal Foreign Office should work toward establishing more specific policy goals wherever possible. It could also look to the French example and task an independent agency with regularly evaluating the implementation process, as the High Council for Gender Equality does in France.
Navigating resistance
The second challenge relates to navigating political resistance, both within the foreign policy apparatus and within German politics more broadly. Not surprisingly, debates about Germany’s feminist foreign policy have led to political pushback, particularly from conservative political actors who frame the “feminist” label alternatively as either divisive and radical or utopian and naive. For instance, Markus Söder, the regional premier of Bavaria and head of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, has called Baerbock’s plan “incomprehensible,” telling a German media company that “traveling the world and telling everyone else what they should and should not do is doomed to failure.”
Resistance is likely to extend to the ranks of the German Federal Foreign Office and the wider foreign policy establishment, particularly to those circles that have not traditionally worked on women’s rights and gender issues. Efforts to restructure the office’s internal recruitment and promotion processes may also encounter bureaucratic inertia and pushback: the ministry is not known for its agility and reform-mindedness. In the immediate future, one clear challenge is thus increasing internal buy-in for the agenda, which will require strong political commitment and leadership, professional incentives for career diplomats and bureaucrats, and significant investments in developing and building internal gender expertise. The general public also needs to be brought along: a recent representative survey showed that 46 percent of Germans had still never heard of the term “feminist foreign policy”; a further 16 percent had heard of it but did not know what it meant.
Looking to the future, however, there is a deeper tension facing advocates for a feminist foreign policy both within government and in civil society. The concept has gained traction precisely at a time when feminism itself is increasingly being vilified, particularly by right-wing populist actors. This pushback is evident in Sweden, where a new coalition government that relies on the support of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats formally abandoned the country’s feminist foreign policy in 2022 (while still claiming to uphold Sweden’s gender equality commitments). One could easily imagine a similar reversal under a future conservative German government.
For advocates, this dynamic raises broader strategic questions. Is the ultimate goal to institutionalize feminist foreign policy, and make the framework as bipartisan, noncontroversial, and politically sustainable as possible? Or would such an approach dilute the concept’s inherently progressive and radical ambitions? And if the goal is to broaden reform coalitions, does the “feminist” label enable new alliances and open up more transformative, creative ways of working—or does it potentially increase resistance against policy goals that would not necessarily be deemed controversial if framed differently?
Reconciling interests and values
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the much bigger question of how a feminist foreign policy fits into broader shifts in German foreign policy over the past year, particularly the move toward higher defense spending and deterrence politics in light of the threat of Russian aggression and the war in Ukraine. Even though not all feminist advocates subscribe to pacifist political commitments, most place a strong emphasis on disarmament, military restraint, and multilateral conflict resolution, viewing militarism as inherently linked to patriarchal power structures. This line of thinking in many ways echoes the intellectual roots of Baerbock’s own Green Party, which emerged from Germany’s environmental, pacifist, and anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Yet over the course of the past year, German foreign policy in some ways has moved in the opposite direction. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken up the German political landscape after years of limited military investments, prioritization of economic power, and disengagement from international security debates. Under Scholz, the government has set up a new 100-billion-euro special defense fund to modernize the military; in December 2022, German lawmakers approved several major procurement projects, including new purchases of F-35 fighter jets. Germany also announced a permanent increase in defense expenditure to 2 percent of Germany’s GDP (although it still failed to meet that target last year). In 2022, the country spent 2.24 billion euros on military aid to Ukraine; earlier this year, Scholz (following intense international pressure) also agreed to send state-of-the-art Leopard 2 tanks. Although some analysts still doubt whether German foreign policy thinking has fundamentally changed, it is clear that the debate has shifted. Importantly, the Green Party has in many ways been in the foreign policy driving seat, pushing the more reluctant Social Democratic Party along.
How does Germany’s feminist foreign policy, also initiated by Baerbock and the Green Party, fit within these shifts? Baerbock has argued that she sees no tension between a feminist approach and increased military spending or a deterrence-oriented stance. In her view, a commitment to values-driven foreign policy justifies a more proactive stance in Ukraine, in light of Russia’s war of aggression and its widespread abuses against civilians. Her take is emblematic of a broader evolution within the Green Party that began when it backed the NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999 and now manifests in the party’s embrace of military power to counter Russia and a more hawkish stance vis-à-vis China. In the debate between those who view feminism as inherently tied to anti-militarism and anti-deterrence politics and those advocating for a more “pragmatic” approach, the German government has clearly aligned itself with the latter camp.
However, the new Feminist Foreign Policy guidelines fail to articulate this strategic vision more clearly. The document references pragmatism, noting that “feminist foreign policy is not synonymous with pacifism” but “considers both the values and the interests of German foreign policy.” Yet it offers little guidance on how short-term responses to Russian aggression should be balanced against a longer-term strategy to address the root causes of global insecurity and peacefully manage global geopolitical competition, and how a feminist approach might reshape what this broader vision entails or how it is to be realized. Nor does it offer any real clarity on how trade-offs between value commitments—including commitments to gender equality—and geostrategic priorities will be handled. Denying that such trade-offs exist seems ill-advised: claims that Western aid to Ukraine is driven by democratic and rights commitments alone will ring hollow to countless civilians living in countries ridden by violence and rights abuses that attract little international attention, or in autocracies that enjoy friendly relations with Western democracies.
Germany is thus both an important and an interesting test case of what exactly it means to reconcile a progressive feminist foreign policy commitment with a shift toward a more security- and deterrence-oriented foreign policy in the face of a heightened geopolitical threat. As more and more countries consider adopting feminist foreign policies, the current moment offers an opportunity for civil society advocates and their political allies to articulate and debate the different strategic visions and tactics put forward under the feminist foreign policy umbrella, moving beyond a simple dichotomy between anti-militarism and pragmatism. Without such a debate, there is a risk that these policies remain narrowly focused on advancing women’s rights and representation—an important goal, but one that may not be deserving of the feminist foreign policy label.
