On 7 September, the Department of German & Russian and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies will be hosting Dr. William Gray for a public lecture on his recently published book, entitled “TRADING POWER: How Germany Learned to Wield Global Influence (for a time)”.
How did postwar Germans find a role in European and global affairs? TRADING POWER examines a learning process as a generation of leaders (from Adenauer to Schmidt) discovered the limits of German military potential while wielding economic and monetary levers with increasing levels of sophistication.
Exhaustive in its research and precise in its analysis, Gray’s work makes important contributions to our understanding of West German foreign policy in the Cold War. It casts new light on contemporary Germany’s strategic culture.