pent-up emotions were being released — emotions arising from the "poor-rich debate" long
carried out in Germany and the emotions of Government representatives of one country
directed at the system of an (almost) neighboring country.
The consistent, sometimes unusual communication measures carried out over the preceding
six years in the Principality of Liechtenstein — close cooperation with national stakeholders in
the field of external communication as part of the Image Liechtenstein Foundation public-
private partnership, creation of the Liechtenstein brand, measures in public diplomacy and
nation branding, development of suitable information materials, etc. — were helpful in the case
at hand, but had not prepared Liechtenstein for the current crisis. The perspective had been
too lopsided inside-out (from Liechtenstein out into the world) and had failed to take weak
warning signals sufficiently seriously.
This master's thesis therefore analyzes the case "Liechtenstein and the German tax affair" on
the basis of the German media reports through the lens of the two closely linked concepts of
agenda setting and issue management, in order to identify the underlying structures and
processes from a communication perspective. The author believes this analysis is a sensible
foundation on which to establish a new, comprehensive communication concept for the
Principality of Liechtenstein. Moreover, questions must be answered such as "What must an
early-warning system pay attention to in future?" and "Which different levels and publics
must be taken into account?"
More precisely, the present work thus has two objectives or areas of responsibility that it aims
to examine and clanfy:
First, the analysis of what actually happened, with the help of the "social framing of issues"
model developed by Wolfgang Eichhorn within the framework of agenda setting theory; and
second, an examination of whether the Eichhorn model is applicable to communication
between States, or in other words, whether it can be expanded into a "transnational framing of
issues" model. The case of "Liechtenstein and the German tax affair" thus serves as a concrete
example to examine whether Eichhorn's theory (Eichhorn as a representative of the agenda
setting theory), which he applied to social 1ssues and issue framing processes within a society
or State, is also suitable to communication between States and can also be applied to
transnational issues and issue framing processes.
In Chapter 2, the concepts of agenda setting and issue management — and accordingly also the
topic of crisis communication — will be introduced and the "social framing of issues" model
developed by Wolfgang Eichhorn will be discussed in more detail.
Chapter 3 summarizes the overarching question, the thesis underlying this paper, and the goal
of the paper. A context is provided for the thesis with a brief overview of the development of
communication between States over the course of the decades and a derivation of why
communication approaches that previously had been used exclusively in the private sector are
now increasingly being applied to States and their Governments.
Chapter 4 discusses the methodology, especially document analysis on the basis of media
reports in German news agencies and print media, which are representative of the target
groups of Liechtenstein's communication. For this purpose, the time period from 1 January to