Karl Kaiser and His Success Formula
Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, DGAP-Director
What approach would Karl Kaiser take today? If he were still in office as director of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), a post he held for a full 30 years of his currently 90 years of life, how would Karl Kaiser approach the foreign policy challenges of our time? What about the problem of designing a long-term strategy for dealing with a neo-imperial Russia? Or the challenge of finding the right degree of closeness to an increasingly unpredictable United States, led by Donald Trump?
The answer is easy to guess. Without doubt, Kaiser would set up a study group. He would bring together everyone with a good grasp on some aspects of the topic, whether from parliament, government, business, academia, journalism, or what is now called civil society. He would establish a relationship of equals and absolute confidentiality. Thus, those who squabble heartily in parliament and in public would find themselves understanding each other, or at least striving for joint solutions. Kaiser would create a space enabling conceptual alignment. The result would be a memorandum, a white paper – perhaps confidential, but probably public. Not stopping at analysis, the text would provide concrete and practical guidance. To put it somewhat more solemnly: it would propose a strategy. And that strategy would not be buried between book covers or on a hard-to-find website; no, it would be personally introduced into the relevant offices and to the relevant people.
The Kaiser approach became the DGAP approach. Through decades of innovative, yet tedious work on the foreign policy advisory front, Karl Kaiser made DGAP what it became during his tenure: one of the leading foreign policy think tanks. Rarely has a single person left such a lasting mark on an institution.
The success of the Kaiser approach is inextricably linked with the man himself. Three traits stand out: Karl Kaiser is a people person in the truest sense of the word. Everyone knows Kaiser, and Kaiser knows everyone. Students, colleagues, friends: his network is huge and ultimately also an instrument of influence. For decades, he was a one-man mentoring powerhouse. How many job placements was he involved in, sometimes behind the scenes? How many organizations, circles, and informal clubs may he have founded? How many academic lectures were followed by a dinner with the most important participants (after all, as we all know, the way to wisdom is through the stomach)? Sure, Karl Kaiser was also a CEO and a chairman, and he is a professor to this day, but first and foremost he is someone who has a way with people.
And then there is Karl Kaiser’s non-partisan stance. Yes, he has been a committed Social Democrat for decades, advising Social Democratic ministers and chancellors. But rarely has a party member so consistently practiced his non-partisanship in the leadership of an institution as Karl Kaiser. He saw bipartisanship, a term he sometimes used untranslated in German, as that one overwhelmingly important principle that had to be defended fiercely if DGAP was to be successful.
Lastly, Karl Kaiser is a rather unusual professor. Far from residing in an ivory tower, he is a practitioner with a theoretical education. For him, scholarship is a method, not the goal; the goal is always relevance. Only by adhering to this principle has he become an icon in the art of policy advice in Germany. When he left his DGAP post in 2003 to accept a professorship at Harvard, he was admiringly called a “patriarch” and a “lodestar in the cosmos of international relations.”
Today, some 20 years after Kaiser left DGAP, we may ask if his approach is still suitable or if it has become outdated, tied as it is to a particular era and person. The enormous influence of the study groups in the early years was perhaps partially a side effect of the Bonn Republic, which was governed from a kind of federal village. Everything was smaller, more manageable, tiny even. Hardly anyone needed to retain lobbyists. People knew each other and met anyway, whether at the tennis club or at their favorite bar. Institutional competition was largely unheard of; there was only one of everything. And thus the Deutschland AG, the intertwining of business and banks, found its foreign policy equivalent in Kaiser’s DGAP.
Are we to conclude that it is not only inevitable but perhaps even fortunate that a platform as powerful as that under Karl Kaiser is no longer to be found in the Berlin Republic?
Objection! The opposite is closer to the truth. It is precisely our time that calls for a return to the Kaiser approach. The strategic openness of our day creates disorientation, even confusion, and therefore requires a roundtable approach to finding solutions.
Never in the past decades has foreign policy been as polarizing as it is today; never have the principles of Germany’s international relations been so hotly debated. It is all too easy for groups – even those who are or by rights should be powerful – to feel unheard, marginalized, excluded. Here, building bridges can be as helpful as ever. Today, a Karl-Kaiser-style study group would be called a “multi-stakeholder task force.” And there would probably be more than one, if only because Berlin is not a federal village. The number of players and institutions is larger, but so is the tendency to retreat into ever smaller bubbles of like-minded peers. These bubbles need to burst.
Karl Kaiser is turning 90; DGAP is turning 70. What Kaiser has given DGAP and the Federal Republic is a toolbox that can be used, adapted, modernized, and made newly relevant for the future. An ideal legacy for this era of Zeitenwende.
DGAP offers its warmest congratulations to Karl Kaiser on his birthday – this publication is one way to show our appreciation. In it, associates and successors from both sides of the Atlantic honor his lifetime achievements and show that he was among the first to recognize major global policy trends, including the then-underappreciated challenges such as the power of digitalization and the danger of global warming.
The authors explore these and other topics, taking a look at the future. Their contributions deal with democracy, peace, and global order; with technological spheres of influence, geopolitical sovereignty, and the global security risks posed by climate change.
They highlight what makes Karl Kaiser’s work so unique, beyond his approach: his extraordinary foresight.
