Berlin hesitates on almost all issues due to identity problems within the ruling party
Four years ago, in June 2018, I (the author of the article James Hawes) spoke in Berlin alongside the then-finance minister from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Peter Altmaier, to discuss whether Germany's chosen policy of being "world champions at saving" – "Sparweltmeister" – both regarding its citizens and the government, is compatible with a successful European Union.
The question was how to place this into a longer perspective. My book "The Shortest History of Germany: From Julius Caesar to Angela Merkel" concludes with a call for Germany to understand its history correctly and to be confident that it can act as a "mighty land at the centre of the West." Four years ago, it seemed that the talk was about eurobonds, common debt, and similar expressions of economic solidarity, and my argument seemed urgent enough: during the question-and-answer session, P. Altmaier received a text message and left, gloomily explaining that "Italy might exit the eurozone." Yes, that seemed very, very bad!
A lot has changed in four years. Now the question is not whether Germany will implement policies to promote cohesion, but whether it will take the lead – or at least not be a hindrance – in decisive action to confront the most brutal military aggression directed at a neighbouring European country that openly wishes to embrace Western values. Otherwise, the very concept of Western values is at stake.
What is Germany's problem, which was serious even four years ago, but has now, let's say, brought the country to a life-or-death crossroads? Simply put, it is the timidity of Germany and, more specifically, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is now the senior partner in the government. This is a cultural phenomenon that has turned into a political problem.
The most obvious sign of this timidity is in the financial sphere. Why should citizens in a country with excellent health, education, and social security systems need to keep more in the bank than almost anyone else in Europe? Why must a country that in recent years has always been able to borrow at a rate equal to or less than 0.5% (or even at a negative rate) have finance ministers obsessed with the famous "black zero" (a balanced national budget without new borrowing), until COVID-19 finally forced them to come to their senses in 2020? The fear or obsession that a rainy financial day might come is just the visible tip of a deep psychological iceberg.
French voters and the government seemed and still seem unshaken by the Japanese nuclear accident in Fukushima; in Germany, it immediately led to the abandonment of a perfectly functioning nuclear programme. Perhaps no one else is particularly worried about "chlorinated chickens" (chickens washed with chlorine to preserve them); in Germany, consumers are completely terrified of them. I do not know of any studies suggesting that Germans more often than, for example, the Spanish, do things on the internet that could expose them to criminal prosecution or blackmail, yet Germans are surprisingly obsessed with their online data protection. Other countries' governments are supplying Ukraine with weapons, limiting them only to the extent that they might cause direct confrontation between their own forces and the Russians; Germany, which is the fifth-largest arms exporter in the world, seems unable to bring itself to follow this example. The German press widely reports that iodine tablets are being sold across the country, supposedly to protect against nuclear fallout, even though Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, and Balts, who, logically speaking, would be more directly threatened if events really did go nuclear, do not seem interested in preventive radiation therapy. And then there is the idea that perhaps a 3% drop in GDP – about as much as British politicians seem happy to accept as the price of Brexit – is too frightening a price for Germany to pay for cutting off Russian President Vladimir Putin's gas supply and destroying his economy.
Of course, one does not need a doctorate in psychology to conclude that a nation which seems so afraid of everything is essentially afraid of itself. To prove this, look at what the Germans are not afraid of. Compare the reactions of Germany and Great Britain to Ukrainian refugees. The British government acts as if it is afraid that it could trigger uncontrollable xenophobia in its voters. In Germany, there is no such fear. There, politicians clearly assume that Germans will fearlessly welcome desperate fellow humans. The German national timidity is not xenophobic, but rather Germanophobic: "They – or rather, a specific, large group of them – are afraid that the moment they stop being in a state of absolute vigilance, terrible things will happen." To put it polemically: "Germans seem afraid (or at least their politicians assume they are) that if they do not insist on being the most careful savers, the most careful consumers, the most ecologically responsible, the most pacifist, the least nationally patriotic people in Europe, they will suddenly turn back into Nazis."
Who is this group? On this point, it is important for foreign readers to understand that German politics is as geographically divided as US politics – and always has been. From 1871 to 1933, the country was divided into three parts in terms of voter choice. East German voters (of course, East Germany was much larger then) consistently voted for hard-line authoritarian parties: first for the Prussian Conservatives, then for the German National People's Party (DNVP), then for the Nazi Party. (Today, the East is a stronghold of the 'Alternative for Germany' party.) Catholic Germans from the Rhineland and Southern Germany, secure in their ancient identity, stuck to the Centre Party. Identity problems belonged to the North German Protestants. They were certainly not feudal, militarist, Prussian 'Junkers' (to use the economist Max Weber's phrase), who after 1871 laid claim to a German national identity. But just as clearly, they were not Rhineland/southern Catholics either, firmly convinced of their ancient belonging to the European continuity. So, what were they?
Since the late 19th century, the SPD provided these voters with a whole set of state identities based on the notion that: "This was the land of the philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the driving force and leader of the new, millennial universalism." The young Lenin, for example, was quite clear that Germany's SPD would lead the way to the international socialist utopia. This is the cultural precursor to those uncritically internationalist, morally high-ground-taking, 'pro-peace' movements that are so well known in Germany today.
Germany has never been a pacifist superpower
Contrary to the popular historical narrative, this country has always been ready for war.
In North German industrial areas, where there were strong trade union structures, the SPD was indeed able to secure this identity. But in small towns and industries not connected to unions, such as transport, and especially in the so-called Protestant islands in the Catholic south, the lack of a strong cultural affiliation made Protestant voters much more vulnerable than Catholics to the highly modern sentiments and the appeals of the Nazi opposition. When, in 1930, the supporters of the Prussian, Protestant, monarchist, militarist DNVP moved en masse to the Nazi party, it was precisely the North German Protestant votes that allowed Adolf Hitler to overcome the three-party split and break out of the old, eastern authoritarian stronghold to national status.
As the dream of a world socialist utopia was hopelessly compromised after the Second World War by the reality of the Soviet Union, the SPD returned to power in Germany only in 1969. It did so by silently appealing to other great, ancient fears among those Germans who were otherwise unsure of their identity: the fear of "Americanisation."
Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt's "Ostpolitik" ("Eastern Policy") was not explicitly anti-American, but it clearly indicated that an SPD-led Germany would not be (as the CDU has always been) uncritically pro-American. Since then, a semi-open anti-American stance has been useful for the SPD: in 2002, the then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who is famous for well-paid positions at Rosneft and Gazprom, won his second term only by a minimum margin after he refused to get involved in the Iraq war. More recently, in 2021, SPD leader Olaf Scholz (Olaf Scholz) carefully addressed the left-wing Die Linke voter – despite the fact that its leaders clearly wish to abolish NATO, O. Scholz always refused to rule out this party as a coalition partner. Its voters took the hint: approximately 820,000 of them switched to the SPD, which is the largest coalition gain compared to 2017 – almost 2% of the votes that allowed Scholz to become the leader of the largest party. The SPD had long been committed to being the party that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called "a common European home, including Russia."
To be clear: I am not saying that SPD voters switched to the Nazis (very few did) or that they supported the Soviet Union (they certainly did not) or Putin (they certainly do not). However, the social environment that provides the SPD with the majority of its voters is North Germans with Protestant cultural traditions. They suffer from the great German fear of many things, but above all from a specific degree of Americanisation, because they suffer from a lack of a firm identity. It is no wonder that Scholz's SPD insists that Germany cannot take any unilateral actions, and seems to doubt that its homeland will be able to socially cope with the small economic shock that would be caused by stopping gas imports and the bankruptcy of Putin's Russia within a month or two.
Therefore, it is no surprise that the politicians leading the growing calls for Germany to get involved are from other parties whose understanding of themselves and their voters is completely firm. The leading role is taken by Norbert Röttgen, one of last year's CDU leadership candidates, whose party has always been completely confident in its identity as a champion of Western politics and culture. The Greens are also confident in their essence as a movement whose concerns are inherently international, and this requires them to take a firm stance regarding obviously real and existing threats to the world, such as Putin's invasion.
What was true in June 2018 is even truer now: "The time has come for modern Germany – and above all the SPD – to stop being afraid of the shadow of the Nazis, which has mostly long been dead and gone." For today's Germany, correctly understood history not only allows it to be a strong geopolitical player, but also demands that it be one. Judy Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe, was right when she tweeted: "Why don't @Bundeskanzler and many from the @Bundestag go to Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol to see what is happening?".
Germany has been saving hard for many years. If not now, then when? If not for this situation, then when?