The Great Return of the German Matter

Ronald Reagan attempted to convince Germany to restrict gas imports from the USSR time and again in the 1980 s, the United States then engaged in an ersatz war with Moscow in Afghanistan. Yet to no avail: by 1989, Eastern gas would cover a massive third of German demand. And that is but a piece in the bilateral Berlin-Moscow relations puzzle, culminating, as it were, in a green light for reunification during the legendary Two Plus Four Conference (1990).

Consequently, here we have over half a century of economic interdependencies developing, the process not greatly impacted by the watershed of 1989; nay, it had even, in a sense, served to bolster it. Furthermore, Christian democrats had joined social democrats in aspiring to a potentially favourable partnership with Moscow. New documents came to light in 2022, clearly proving that back in 1991, Helmut Kohl had been speaking out against the independence of the Baltic States and Ukraine, been adverse to NATO expansion, and seen the collapse of USSR as a historical calamity. What’s more, Kohl tried to persuade François Mitterrand to subscribe to his point of view - yet Mitterrand hesitated. It is common knowledge that George Bush Sr - and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher before him - had an entirely different take on the matter.

Yet given the context, it does not come as much of a surprise that Kohl’s political child Angela Merkel blocked the roadmap of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, both countries later attacked by Russia. Radosław Sikorski, contemporaneous head of Polish diplomacy, had had no doubt: such actions could have only arisen from a special relationship with Moscow. In all actuality, these relations had been undermined - literally and metaphorically - by war in Ukraine, and the never-fully-clarified damage to gas pipelines on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Beforehand, the schema had been somewhat habitual: the United States and Great Britain pushing to expand boundaries of Western political structures; France not saying “NO” immediately, yet always wanting to negotiate something in return. Germany sticking to the policy of prevalent zones of influence in Europe, especially in the Russian context, unless pressure from Washington resulted in other measures, well-nigh by force. Can Germany’s Eastern policy, thus defined and deeply rooted, finally come to an end?

Shortly after the war broke out, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a radical change to Germany’s political course and an increase in the armaments budget, his exposé swiftly declared a true Zeitenwende, historical breakthrough. It is by no chance that in the German language, that particular word, last heard in the context of German reunification of 1990, is reserved for epochal events. The problem is, such mission would require a large-format politician in modern times - and while a lot can be said about Olaf Scholz, calling him an eminent statesman would be a stretch. While an efficient party politician and excellent organiser, he spent most of his career in the shadow of other players with more distinct leadership qualities. He was mainly known for long and boring speeches, and a curious and conceited way of communicating with the media. Expert for German affairs at the Centre for Eastern Studies Anna Kwiatkowska also points to his youthful left-wing radicalism and anti-Americanism.

Failed Exam in History

Prior to war in Ukraine, German relations with Russia were founded on a triad: firstly, on seeking sources of cheap energy in order to salvage the competitiveness of an otherwise poorly innovative economy built up on so-called mid-tech ‒ the manufacturing of very high-quality yet not terribly advanced industrial goods; secondly, on gratitude for facilitating unification, Moscow being seen as a guarantor of stability across the region; and possibly most reprehensible for Germans themselves, the third pillar may actually be the most realistic one, involving something that could - in international relations theory vernacular - be referred to as balance of power‒ gradual liberation from under Anglo-Saxon influences, followed by equipoise and subsequent evolvement of a continental alternative.

Continental tendencies were evident in the case of Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, and - obviously - Nazi Germany. Yet when unravelled today, writings by the father of German geopolitics Karl Haushofer (1869‒1946) are deeply striking in their contemporaneity: Haushofer was aware of the tremendous potential of Russia and China, the latter somewhat surprising and not necessarily evident at the time. He saw Germany’s future in the development of a continental axis through to Peking. Such ideas became an inspiration for German politicians of multiple generations and many factions, including Haushofer’s own student Rudolf Hess who would go on to become deputy chairman of the NSDAP. Hess’ celebrated flight to England, Haushofer’s son’s involvement in an attempt to overthrow Hitler, and his wife’s Jewish roots all caused the thinker to fall into disfavour after 1941. Briefly imprisoned, he was even interrogated by the Allies with the intent to disclose his potential liability for war crimes - yet the investigating officer ultimately ruled the suspicion out. Haushofer ended his life by committing suicide with his wife in 1946, the circumstances never fully clarified.

I am discussing this particular individual at length for the following reason: while the very notion of geopolitics had been harshly censored in Germany for years, whenever I encounter confessions by most avid Putinversteher (those who comprehend Putin), they veritably exude Haushoferism. The Kremlin’s notorious golden boy and minister-president of Saxony Michael Kretschmer wrote some time ago in Die Welt of the need to develop economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Kretschmer is a CDU politician. And the number of such Putinversteher is even greater in the SPD, the ruling party. Gerhard Schröder has been portraying continental economic space in similar terms for years, both as chancellor and Putin’s paid lobbyist. Minister-president of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Manuela Schwessig went as far as to establish a special-purpose vehicle foundation Gazprom has been using to transfer dozens of millions of euros - all to the end of avoiding American sanctions.

The situation was similar in China’s case. During the final weeks of its Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Germany was pushing with all it had to approve the trade agreement with Beijing. Also, after war in Ukraine had broken out, Olaf Scholz acted to preserve good relations with Beijing by allowing China to purchase a terminal in the Hamburg sea harbour.

Hans Kundnani is a contemporary scholar evidently aware of Haushoferism revisited, as it were, blended with Berlin’s more ambitious perception of its role in the European Union and an upsurge of anti-Americanism. According to multiple assessments of German politics, Kundnani’s brilliant 2014 book The Paradox of German Power proved prophetic. Pursuant to the main proposition, while Germany is visibly making an effort to remain part of the collective West, the “German matter” is returning in practice before our very eyes as the issue of a country that - to quote Henry Kissinger - is “too large for Europe, yet too small for the world”. In other words, unable to reconcile its former global aspirations with its true status of a de jure rank and file EU and NATO member, Germany has trouble fitting into the global order. As a result, German politics has become inconsistent and destabilising, especially for peripheries of the current geopolitical West - countries such as Poland or Ukraine. On the one hand, Germany is economically benefitting from the shift of Western structures to the east; on the other, it fears that such developments will upset the balance of power across Europe in the long run and weaken its influence, placing “Trojan horses of the US” (to quote a European Commission official referencing Poland) on the geopolitical chessboard. The same thing goes for Ukraine; fearing geopolitical consequences of unconditional Russian defeat, Berlin is not in favour of Kyiv’s overwhelming victory.

In the olden days, German decision-makers - suffice to mention Helmut Kohl in times of the perestroika - would have kept such thoughts to themselves, harmonising their actions with policies represented by other vital players. Today, however, as Kundnani rather judiciously points out, Brexit and the Greek crisis have caused certain processes to pick up tempo. Having boosted the German sense of agency in the European Union, both developments have encouraged the tendency to focus on oneself and one’s own vantage point as a result.

It goes without saying that German politicians and numerous mainstream commentators stand in fierce opposition to the above narrative - support for the West is embedded in German political DNA. It has become something of a paradox for contemporary Germany that even when Berlin’s elites take action to challenge the European Union or NATO’s coherence, they find themselves unable to clearly articulate the fact, save the extreme left and right. Heiko Maas, at the helm of German diplomacy at the time, may have taken the matter the furthest of all the leading decision-makers, having penned a 2018 piece for Handelsblatt wherein he claims a need for emancipation from US influence, a need more profound and older than the dislike for Donald Trump. Incidentally, Maas was later credited with a rather curious statement after the former president’s supporters had stormed the Capitol in January 2021, proposing that Germany offer aid in rebuilding American democracy “along the lines of a new Marshall Plan”. He is also famous for having ostentatiously mocked Trump in wake of the latter reviling German dependence on Russian natural resources in the UN.

Yet nothing about Maas’ reactions should raise eyebrows, after all. During Trump’s presidency, the German ego had been rather casually caressed by some of America’s liberal circles repulsed by their president’s shenanigans. In an interview with Politico, Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration James P. Rubin went as far as to call Angela Merkel 'the leader of the free world'.

Pursuant to a rather uniquely bifurcated mindset, Germany considers itself an archetypal Western democracy (greater than the US) on the one hand - yet on the other, it has to build its geopolitical position based on two powerful authoritarianisms - Moscow and Beijing. This goes beyond purely cynical hypocrisy. I have seen this many times: countless Germans are in a genuine quandary, incapable of reconciling their declared identity with their country’s hardline interests or aspirations to the position of a global player. As a result, German elites are torn between what is referred to in the international relations theory vernacular as constructivism, and so-called structural realism. Indignant when presented with inconvenient historical analogies, they accuse opponents of unjustified Germanophobia or chauvinism, pointing fingers at Poles as blind supporters of Jarosław Kaczyński. Anything - just to avoid admitting that Germany had made a certain “bet with history” and has just lost it, as aptly put in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by eminent historian Professor Martin Schulze Wessel.

In an optimistic scenario, the aforementioned bet boiled down to the following statement, more or less: “Just like Fukuyama, we believed in the end of history, so doing good business with Russia or China would no longer be an issue, as we are all travelling in the same direction, speed the only difference”. At the end of the day, Germany is beating its chest today, as if confessing, “We were mistaken, so sorry, but it was you Americans after all who inspired us with that end of history concept”. Olaf Scholz himself has recently offered such a version of the aforementioned bet, more or less, along with its consequences, in the magazine Foreign Affairs. Yet if interpreted pessimistically, the bet might read roughly along the lines of “We may have renounced open violence, but not our geopolitical dreams; we intended to resort to other methods to turn Germany into a world power, even at the expense of a pact with Xi and Putin”. Today we know that be as it may, that bet has been lost. Let me just add that Joseph Nye, the man behind the “soft power” phrase, did not believe that particular realm to include strictly economic measures. Akin to military action, energy resources, technology exports, trade barriers - or the lack thereof - are all distinct “hard power” area components. Heedless ventures into such territory will ultimately result in bloodshed.

At this juncture, we have reached another truth Germans may find unpleasant. Mass repressions; cult of the individual; a system wherein two-thirds of the people are, in all actuality, employed by the state; full vassalisation of the media; omnipresent violence; and making any actions of the powers that be dependent on the despotic will of a single man - all that takes contemporary Russia beyond authoritarianism, making it truly totalitarian. Meanwhile, Germany, not least in the words of its present-day chancellor, continues stressing that what we are all facing is “Putin’s war” average Russians cannot be blamed for. This is something of a carbon copy of Hitler being demonised at the expense of whitewashing “regular Germans” - as if our western-flank neighbours were incapable of grasping that while developed legal cultures do not stipulate collective responsibility, phenomena such as totalitarianism cannot be considered the product of a single sick individual. Just one step separates such belief from a claim that if that individual were removed, the situation would remedy itself. It would similarly take very little to conclude that the individual in question is a freak of nature, that similar events had already occurred in the past under blatantly unique circumstances, that they are not entirely real, and that they most certainly cannot be repeated.

As it is, totalitarianism is a disease of the whole of society; to regain international trust, that society will have to process its disease in full. Waiting for Putin to be replaced with another personage before returning to business as usual would resemble leaving Admiral Karl Dönitz in office as President of the Reich in 1945, complete with the Nazi legal system, the Nuremberg Laws, repressions and terror, just to avoid further bloodshed and political instability in a Europe that Hitler had rather efficiently organised. That said, even the extraordinarily impressive effort post-war Germany had made in working on its identity does not necessarily mean that desired fruit shall be brought forth.

Waiting for a German Churchill

Something has obviously ruptured in German-Russian relations. As pointed out by Sebastian Płóciennik of the Centre for Eastern Studies, the trade exchange between Germany and Russia took a sharp downturn in December 2022 (the export and import values dropped by 60 and 56 percent, respectively, in comparison with December 2021). This may be a harbinger of a successful decoupling of the German and Russian economies. Yet as a political scientist, I fear that decoupling will not be followed by political deputinisation. Schröder and Kretschmer continue declaring that business with Russia will have to be revisited. The CEO of Germany’s largest energy corporation (RWE) Markus Krebber, on the other hand, has been referring to nuclear energy as redundant and appealing for the construction of new power plants, fired mainly with natural gas. Yet Krebber fails to offer any suggestions as to cheap gas sources. Germans have not even been discouraged by Putin having (according to unofficial reports) rejected the American proposal to re-establish the state borders of February 2022, Russia keeping the Kremlin and avoiding liability for war crimes. Chancellor Scholz is focused on diplomacy, Berlin shilly-shallying as usual when deciding whether to offer any military assistance to Ukraine, doing so only under humongous pressure and well-nigh shaking a fist at its adversaries. Such was even the response of Germany’s former ambassador to Warsaw, the relatively fondly remembered Rolf Nikel, who said that Poland’s five minutes to rearrange its relations with Berlin would soon be over. No wonder voters are confused, given the attitude of their leaders. According to a recent Ipsos survey of all larger European countries, Germany has the highest number of respondents declaring that war in Ukraine is a purely Ukrainian problem.

All of the above suggests that critics of present-day Germany are perhaps expecting too much of it. Without strong connections to Russia and China, Germany has no chance of preserving its position of an economic power. Consequently, one cannot demand of a country under regular clerical leadership to engage voluntarily and full-heartedly in a clash with the Chinese-Russian bloc to save Ukrainians, Balts or Poles. This would require a visionary leader, capable of understanding that one cannot remain on the political fence for all eternity. Be that as it may, Germany will be weaker in the new post-war world, either facing a stronger Central and Eastern Europe, or a neo-imperial predatory Russia who has lost trust in its former partner. Under present circumstances, with former glory reinstatement not an option, choosing the lesser of the two evils and saving one’s reputation would ostensibly be merited.

Winston Churchill, the leader of a vast yet visibly crumbling empire, had faced a similar choice during World War II. Anyone concerned could plainly see that the ultimate outcome of the giant global conflict notwithstanding, the British Empire would lose, as the post-war world would either be American and thus anti-colonial, or Axis Power-dominated and thus marginalising the British. The Nazis were well aware of the situation, which is why they intended to offer the United Kingdom a deal: in exchange for support or relative neutrality, Berlin would, in all likelihood, let London keep some of its overseas colonies. This is exactly why the aforementioned Hess had travelled to Great Britain: in something of an act of desperation, he attempted to re-engage in peace negotiations with Churchill. Hitler having disassociated himself from Hess, with rumours spreading about his mental disorder, seems to have been nothing but a diplomatic ploy.

Just like England joining World War II, Germany is now in need of a leader with the capacity to deconstruct its dreams of power, economic power included, all in order to preserve its Western identity. Otherwise, it will have to face the nightmare of revisiting the so-called isolated German path. War in Ukraine affects the German matter in a similar way to World War II having affected the United Kingdom. Not a full-blooded global player, Germany cannot afford to treat the EU as a springboard to such status. History makes it one of the many European states who have to accept that the European Union is evolving and changing before their very eyes. And Scholz is most definitely not, and never will be, Churchill. He is too deeply rooted in the current post-Merkel arrangement. Friedrich Merz looks hopeful - owing to his pro-Atlanticism, nonconformism and dislike of old deals in Germany’s politics rather than any remarkable charisma. Yet Merz would also need a partner with a more progressive and youthful profile, though equally anti-Putinist and pro-Atlantic. The only party who had filed a motion with the Bundestag to withdraw from the Nord Stream 2 project prior to Russian invasion, the Greens could become such exact partner for the reformed CDU. I would be very happy to see a CDU-Greens coalition in the wake of the next elections. It would also be the most promising alliance in terms of Germany, NATO and the EU’s future.

I am also afraid that the SPD will have to undergo profound internal change. In all actuality, the whole country will be forced to face deputinisation and long-term reflection. It goes without saying that Germany has already once made a genuine effort to process its past, the attempt deserving high praise with no mockery or downplaying. Yet something went very wrong there. For some reason, paying no heed to alarm bells ringing, Berlin contributed - economically and politically - to the development of a new, strong, oppressive regime in Europe, visibly totalitarian in nature. While where are no direct perpetrators this time, Germany is unquestionably complicit. Such is the painful truth nobody can dilute with words or cover up with diplomatic gambits or ploys, uncoincidentally referred to recently as scholzing. ©℗