Germany really likes to see itself as the greatest champion of Europe the European Union1 there ever was. Over the years it’s done an impressive job convincing others of that, too.
“What’s good for Europe was and is good for us.” Angela Merkel’s interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung during the first round in the ring with COVID-19 is a pretty good summary of the story German Officialdom tells itself: There is no difference between German and European interests.
The claim is laughably ahistorical, however much it may feel correct, at least in a contemporary context. The EU is a post-war peace project designed to prevent another devastating conflict on the so-called continent. German officials readily acknowledge that kissing the supernational ring in Brussels is an important restraint on their own imperial impulses. Belief, regardless how true or accurate, in German subservience to a Greater Liberal Democratic Europe is essential for keeping the machinery of the Union going — and Margaret Thatcher’s worst fears of a reunified Germany at bay.
Adding to this sense is the performative act that every German political party, except the far-right AfD and elements of the far-left Die Linke, must commit itself to. They trip over each other to be the first to the microphone to express how pro-European they are. Anything less risks raising the spectre of a dormant sense of national greatness that can unsettle allies and poke at the edges of Erinnerungskultur.
One explanation for why Germany, more than any other EU member, was so convinced of the power of Wandel Durch Handel with Russia is — beyond that it made German business a lot of money — that it worked so well on them. The EU is built on the idea that countries that trade with each other, get rich off each other, and are dependent on each other — underwritten by American security guarantees — will not fight with each other. That is a pretty vanilla argument for globalization more broadly; in the European context, if once-fascist and expansionist Germany could be convinced of that, surely a Russia with similar inclinations could be, too.
Or so went the thinking and/or hope. Unfortunately, proponents overlooked a few factors. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was never really defeated and forced to reform like Germany was. It was only humiliated, left to oligarchs to pick apart from within and without, which in the post-everything 1990s was confused for “liberalization.”
We know from Germany itself, after World War One, that a humiliated former empire is a dangerous former empire. After World War Two, instead of being punished and ostracized, (West) Germany was brought into the paternalistic fold of American Cold War hegemony, its imperial urges and economic prowess retooled to serve everything from U.S. nuclear deterrence, to NATO war plans and physical distancing from the Soviet sphere, to the economic recovery of western Europe.
The relationship was symbiotic: a happy, secure and successful United States was a happy, secure and successful Germany. A win-win, and a very clever act of high-stakes diplomacy. When the USSR went down, no such symbiosis was on the table — for reasons and events now, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, getting hotly revised and re-litigated in the what-if small-talk of political science dinner parties and from the armchairs of historians.
Even in a unipolar world, brief as it was2, a zero-sum outlook towards Russia persisted. Our victory was their destruction. My childhood in suburban America took place in a parallel universe to that of my Russian contemporaries.
For my German ones, many of whom are older than their country’s current iteration, war was the past’s problem for which Europe was the present solution, built on an assumption that now was forever. This is what victory looks like. Everyone got what they wished for and no one had to fire a shot to get it. If Germany’s self-portrait as a power in purely economic terms3 frustrates U.S. policymaking today, it only has itself to blame.
Or congratulate; they got the Germany they reared: an obedient child, free within the parameters its parent set out. And as most thinking adults will tell you, it takes a long time — and usually a lot of therapy — to slip the bonds of one’s childhood confines. That’s what Zeitenwende is all about.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most pressing, but hardly the first challenge to German programming, which is pulled between national interest and the higher purpose of post-power politics. Both officials and watchers of the EU like to say that the bloc is forged in crisis, and in these moments Germany’s expression of friendship has been often the fair-weather sort than the in-the-trenches kind.
The weather, in recent memory, has hardly been fair. To highlight just a few storms:
Financial and euro crises, 2008 - 2018: Germany was a big fan of expanding both the bloc and the euro area. When you’re the largest (export) economy in a single market and single currency, adding more customers to those circles can only be a boon. Unfortunately, the early eu(ro)phoria glossed over some glaring shortcomings — or incompatibilities, at least — in the region, and the fundamentals fell out when financial crisis shattered new millennium vibes.
Germany, which pays a lot for but also profits handsomely from European integration, was not in such a generous mood when that integration threatened its pristine balance sheet. Greece and others got their bailouts, but on the condition that they signed up to punishing — and largely unproven — austerity measures. The resulting economic pain inflicted on ordinary citizens of these countries, who paid the price for the greed and blunders of banks, creditors, credit agencies, and other financial and regulatory bodies often far beyond the reach of, and more powerful than, their own national institutions, helped breed resentment and political instability.
What better way to feed nativist and populist sentiment than with a fast-food diet of financial hardship, foreign-power condescension, and a dovetailing wave of migrants from outside Christian Europe perceived to be getting the very funds that austerity was denying suffering taxpayers? The rise of scary parties in the aftermath of the euro crisis is hardly a coincidence.
For all its gripes, Germany made out pretty well from years of lecturing others. Low-interest rates benefitted highly attractive German bonds; Greek and other’s repayments, with interest, made for a healthy line-item in Germany’s public finances; and all that without breaking much of a sweat.
Ukraine (Pt. 1), 2014: Germany’s pipeline follies with Russia have been well picked apart by now. Recall that Germany pushed ahead with Nord Stream 2 after Russia invaded Ukraine with its little green men and despite its EU partners — who, ideally, should have first dibs on the bockwurst buffet, before Moscow does — regularly begging Berlin not to. Then Chancellor Angela Merkel also leaned on then President Barack Obama not to send weapons to Ukraine. Deliveries started under Donald Trump4.
Migration, 2014 - 2016: Germany gets high marks for not letting a million or so people starve and die on the EU’s external borders, but do take care not to trip over the bar you’ve set by considering that fact.
Let’s not forget that just weeks before Merkel had her famous, “wir schaffen das” moment, she literally said the exact opposite and made a little Palestinian girl cry. Only when confronted with an imminent and massive humanitarian catastrophe that couldn’t be conveniently swept under the MENA rug did Merkel act, except without coordinating a whole lot with her EU counterparts. Cue more instability and resentment.
Thereafter, Merkel took nearly every opportunity she could to make clear that her decision in 2015 was by no means official policy, but a one-off exception, grounded in holding together the most basic semblance of international law and human rights (not to mention decency) in the face of emergency, to safeguard the EU and Germany’s sense of do-gooderism from the appearance of being a sideshow to distract from history.
The EU has never really gotten itself together on refugees and migration — as the response to the debacle of American military adventurism in Afghanistan again demonstrated — and Germany has not had much constructive to add to the conversation. On the home front, German migration policy has become increasingly restrictive and is
arbitrarilyunevenly implemented, largely at state level. Otherwise well-educated and qualified people from Syria and elsewhere stand to get lost in the system, fueling the self-fulfilling, far-right prophecy that these people are just a drag.Never mind that Germany in particular, as the EU more broadly, desperately needs immigrants to fill labor shortages across the economy.
Instead, the focus has been much more on how to keep migrants out of Fortress Europe5, at almost any cost. We know the EU "solved" the refugee "crisis" basically by paying off Turkey and Libya, and making rescues in the Mediterannean harder. Moral and humanitarian arguments aside, that move makes sense, seeing that the "problem" was foremost a political one, and here was a political solution for it. Taking a page from the War On Terror playbook, better to keep them there than have to deal with them here. For most voters, and therefore their elected officials, a problem out of sight is one out of mind.
To that end, the EU border agency, Frontex, has seen a seven-fold increase in its budget since 2015, with rights groups accusing it of abetting violent pushbacks and working with, at best, questionable authorities in places like Libya. The cost of keeping the “jungle” out of the “garden” has been steep6. The United Nations migration agency estimates that about 29,000 people have died on their way to the EU since 2014.
Pandemic, 2020: Speaking of low bars, with the United States and United Kingdom under less-than confidence-inspiring management, Germany was looking enviable at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back then, it seemed like everyone had their silly version of a '“Merkel scientist” think piece, and other hand-wringing about “why the Germans do it better.”
In terms of policy response, Germany deserves some credit here for addressing its long-held debt pathology, by not only borrowing for itself despite constitutional rules to the contrary, but also paving the way to let the EU do so, too. The Bundesbank wasn’t thrilled with the idea7, and Germany’s Constitutional Court delayed it for a bit. German pols, who were OK with the EU’s debt plans that they themselves helped negotiate, used the judicial independence defense to wipe the egg off their face. That’s true — we’re not Poland, after all! — though as a matter of perception and political communication, a German court temporarily blocking an agreement among 27 countries erodes the image of a humbled Germany on bended knee before the Confederated States of Europe.
Ukraine (Pt. 2), 2022 - ?: How far we’ve come since 5,000 helmets. Still, Germany has dragged its feet on sanctions, especially energy-related ones. It has also shown a special talent for making matters of life-and-death of others about itself. A favorite of mine was, earlier in the war, when German officials and media raised some highly theoretical and obtusely jurisprudential questions about just how much Germany could support Ukraine without itself becoming a direct party to the conflict, and therefore serve as a legitimate target or escalatory taunt. Because surely that is one aspect of international law playing into President Vladimir Putin’s warmongering.
Now it’s winter. For a country of penny-pinching sweater-wearers who are also so sensitive to the cold I sometimes wonder if people here forget they live in a northern European country, the next few months of darkness will test the resolve of those liberal values we’re told we hold dear.
It will also test the Lineker theory, which posits that “at the end, the Germans win.”
Despite EU solidarity towards Russia, there are a number of ways Germany is still irking its allies — whether lack of coordination on China, or looking to buy American, not European (that is, French) weapons with the pile of cash it’s borrowing over the next five years to modernize its military.
In December, Germany will drop a €200-billion rock into EU waters, which will effectively serve as the gas price cap for itself that it’s opposed at the EU level. That has members crying hypocrisy, and worried about what the ripple effects may be.
Granted, Germany is a huge economy. So while that is a big-sounding number — and it is big! — it also needs to be big to have any chance of making a dent in commercial, residential and private energy bills. To say, as some EU members have, that Germany’s €200 billion relief plan will distort the single market is to say Germany as it is distorts the single market. Given its purchasing and borrowing power, in absolute terms and compared to its much smaller neighbors, how could it not?
Still, as a matter of political communication and diplomatic niceties, which is at least half the battle in matters like this, Germany has come off looking rather amateurish.
When it comes to military moves, Germany loves avoiding “Alleingänge” (going it alone). On money matters, however, it seems much more in the mood of Jedermann for himself. And that is hardly the only area in which Germany is at odds with its stated values — and recent history. The country that lectured Greece on living within its means a decade ago is the one that, in the last several months, has pissed off partners for gobbling up gas supplies to make sure its gas-heavy economy keeps on ticking.
Thanks to a mild fall — and a little bit of that Lineker logic — Germany’s gas reserves are full. It may even get to sell some of the excess. Go figure! The good news has, for now, taken the political focus somewhat off looming existential implosion and lowered the flame on intra-EU discontent. But winter, like the war itself, is long and unpredictable. And it won’t be the last one of energy woes.
For as tone-deaf as the German government may have appeared at the EU level, its €200 billion8 “defensive umbrella” — the efficacy and unintended consequences of which we will not know for some time9— is the inevitable Endstation of months of truly curious policymaking. The domestic political environment is an important prism through which to view Germany beyond its borders.
The government proposed, and its parliamentary majority passed, a succession of one-off and piecemeal aid packages that even a non-economist could see were insufficient for the monster task of confronting spiraling inflation and energy costs. The summertime bailout of Uniper, a German gas giant, was obviously not going to cut it; in September, the government bought the company outright.
The nuclear neurosis — easily as pathological as German thrift — was probably strangest of all to watch unfold. The Greens, who have already compromised nearly every one of their core values in the name of pragmatism, put up little more than a symbolic fight to save the climate agenda, and went along with a reversion to gas and coal. The get-out clause is that all this is meant to be temporary, in light of an unprecedented emergency, but given the long-term commitment required for that kind of energy infrastructure, the promise of short-term might be hard to keep.
Gas as a “bridge” to our clean, renewable future just got a lot longer.
The hill, however, that the Greens were ready to die on was the one with three nuclear power plants on it. For months it was rather clear that Germany’s highly anticipated Atomausstieg was not going to happen at the stroke of midnight on New Years. No matter what your position on nuclear power, in the long run, is, you can’t say “every kilowatt hour counts,” as Economy Minister and Greens Godfather Robert Habeck has this year, and then try to snuff out the nuclear ones. Though that didn’t stop him, and his party, from trying.
Ultimately, the party agreed to an extension — to April 2023, but let’s talk again then — but was still bickering over details with its coalition partner, the Free Democrats. Papa Olaf had to step in with his “Machtwort,” which to be honest, I didn’t even know was a thing. After 16 years of merkeln, a pandemic defined by late-night non-agreements between the feds and 16 states, and a political system built on coalitions, whose decisions emerge from long stretches of mostly back-room debate and compromise, who knew the chancellor had the constitutional authority to make unilateral decisions?
That such an extreme, and rare, tool of executive power got used for, proportionally speaking, a pretty small aspect within a much larger crisis may provide some helpful context when trying to place Germany in the bigger world around it. That is, a giant that does not know how to wield its power.
When you don’t understand your strength, and think you’re doing good because you mean well, you run the risk of freaking out those around you. A superiority complex hiding within an inferiority complex, Germany is a dubious mix of big-power hubris and historiographical reservation.
That makes leading difficult, and following even harder. Poland about a decade ago feared “German power less than German inaction,” but it may have failed to consider a more dangerous possibility: an EU with a Germany that exhibits both.
Europe is a big and ill-defined space, which includes the United Kingdom and at least some of Russia, and is certainly larger than the European Union. It is cringy how many officials, pundits and journalists use “Europe” as a synonym for the EU — as if there’s such a thing as “European values” and, even if there were, they would be universally agreed upon. For politicians, the conflation is often intentional, as a means of claiming “Europe” for themselves. For journalists, it’s usually just lazy.
… but denial can linger so much longer.
The same broadly holds true for the European Union as a whole, which defines itself as a “single market” more than anything. “Values union” is a solid runner-up, though no one has been able to provide a satisfying explanation for what that might mean.
While this is largely an EU-level issue, Germany being its biggest and richest member bears significant responsibility in how the bloc acts. It can help set an agenda, if it wants to. Instead, state and federal leaders are routinely quoted on the importance of closing off migration routes.
I can only imagine the record inflation we are experiencing now is at least some schadenfreude for the debt hawks, who warned that too much money sloshing around would lead to it. Of course, inflation is complicated and its sources manifold, including supply-demand mismatches brought on by the pandemic. Inflation is also unsurprising if you take governments’ pandemic war-fighting rhetoric literally. Inflation often results in and after wartime, and the kind of public money spent to address the pandemic isn’t far off from what governments might spend to fight a war. Add to that war-like posture an actual, literal war in Ukraine, and it might be helpful if we all start understanding we are at war, even if it doesn’t look or feel the way we were all told it would.
For comparison, Germany’s annual federal budget clocks in at around €500 billion.
A lot of details are still getting worked out. And since the German government has acknowledged its lacks the technical infrastructure and policy framework to put money directly in hands of taxpayers, it’s an open question how the bailout will trickle down into individuals’ pockets.