Open Access

This foresight project focuses on a key question for the future of Germany’s foreign policy: Given changing geopolitical and economic relationships among major powers, what possible futures can be foreseen soft power approaches or external cultural policy (ECP) in terms of narratives, strategies, goals, policies, and programmatic activities? To address this question, we place Germany in a comparative framework of international relations that considers soft power approaches in the context of prevailing geopolitical and economic relations between the European Union, the United States of America, and the People’s Republic of China as well as other global players. In each case, we consider soft power approaches relative to hard and sharp power options. The time frame for the future scenarios is the year 2030, anticipating likely and potential developments and events from 2022 onward. The scenarios are based on a series of brainstorming and validation sessions, literature reviews, personal interviews, and an online survey fielded among experts and representatives of leading institutions. We identified two major drivers of future developments: the state of the world economy and the state of the world’s security situation. Exploring the interaction between these two drivers yielded four distinct scenarios.