THE GERMAN PARADOX
THE UKRAINE CRISIS HAS SHOWN THAT GERMANY IS BOTH TOO POWERFUL AND TOO WEAK
Rewind 32 years to one of those moments of great euphoria in European affairs — the reunification of West and East Germany. The celebrations were by no means confined to Germany. There was rejoicing too in the United States and much of the rest of the West, for Germany’s rebirth as a single country seemed powerfully symbolic of the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism.
Both these two latter outcomes had long been the primary foreign policy goal of Britain’s then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. But German reunification? This was regarded in No. 10 with great suspicion and foreboding.
Thatcher’s doubts have in many ways proved prophetic, no more so than in Germany’s deeply ambivalent attitude to today’s war in Ukraine, where Berlin seems, Janus-like, to face both ways.
On the one hand it stands shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. and Britain in condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, but on the other continues to buy his oil, gas and coal, and refuses to supply the Ukrainian government with the heavy weaponry it needs to defend itself.
Nominally part of the western alliance, there is a strong element of Russlandversteher or Putinversteher (one who at least understands where Russia and Putin are coming from) in Germany’s position. Germans have always taken Russia far more seriously than anyone else in the West; there’s an almost mystical sense of connection, bound up as it is with history, culture and longing for the awesome expanse of the Russian hinterland.
If the purpose of NATO is “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down,” as articulated by NATO’S first secretary general Lord Ismay, then despite the atrocities they visited on each other during the Second World War, there is a certain sense of pariah comradeship between these two great nations. In any case, regime change is not in Berlin’s thinking; rather its preferred solution is a deal that would satisfy Putin’s concerns and restore relations to the ex ante position of supposedly benign engagement.
This undoubtedly would have horrified Thatcher, and frankly at this stage looks unrealistic anyway. It is hard to imagine things returning to the way they were. The biggest loser from today’s now seemingly irreversible divorce is likely to be the German economy. Nor is it just about the loss of access to cheap Russian gas.
Of greater long-term significance are the risks of fragmentation in the world economy into different blocs, each with its own technological standards, cross-border payments systems and reserve currencies. This would be little short of disastrous for the industrial heartlands of the Rhine, grown rich as they have on 30 years of globalization and international integration.
Berlin hoped for Wandel durch Handel — that alien systems of governance such as China and Russia could be civilized into western ways through commerce. It’s not turning out that way. German alarm bells are ringing as rarely before.
My reading of Charles Moore’s masterful biography of Thatcher is that her objections to German reunification were three-fold. First, that it would make Germany too powerful a force in Europe, but secondly, it would also be an enfeebling influence that gave low priority to defence — too powerful in other words to be easily contained by the rest of Europe, but too weak, resented, peace-loving and riddled with war guilt to act as a unifying force, let alone a meaningful superpower.
Third, she thought that monetary union — the price that France and others demanded for agreeing to reunification — would be a disaster both for the European Union and Britain’s position within it. On all counts, she was proved largely correct.
An economically all-powerful Germany has not, on the whole, been good for the rest of Europe, where competing interests are routinely subjugated to those of Germany.
Refusal on Germany’s part to take the economic pain of immediate disengagement from Russian energy is contrasted with the harsh austerity imposed by Berlin on feckless smaller nations during the eurozone debt crisis.
The degree of economic damage that would be inflicted on Germany by an immediate embargo on Russian oil and gas is impossible to know until it is tried, but even if at the extreme high end of the range of forecasts — a six per cent hit to output — it would be as nothing compared to what Greece suffered a decade ago at the hands of the high priests of monetary union; the longest and deepest recession ever recorded in an advanced economy.
German officials excuse their failure to act by insisting that an immediate boycott of Russian gas is likely to have destabilizing economic effects both on Germany and Europe more widely. The longterm social, political and geostrategic consequences could therefore be far worse than the moral disgrace of lending continued succour to Putin’s war.
It’s all history now, but how different Europe might have looked had it pursued Thatcher’s favoured alternative when the Berlin Wall came down of a separate, but democratic East Germany. Trapped by its history, Germany is again proving to be Europe’s shameful undoing.
THIS UNDOUBTEDLY WOULD HAVE HORRIFIED THATCHER.