(...)
The ultimate reason for this may be that the necessary anchor point of any such discussion—a concept of a national interest, and the best way to pursue it—was and still is absent in Germany. “Ideology” is considered obsolete, too; what counts is “pragmatism,” and under Merkel what pragmatism required from case to case was best left to the great pragmatist in office.4 Looking at Merkel’s political legacy, one feels reminded of Max Weber’s 1918 critique of Bismarck, the founder of the German state whom he otherwise admired. Bismarck, according to Weber, had left behind “a nation without any political will of its own, accustomed to the idea that the great statesman at the helm would make the necessary political decisions . . . a nation accustomed to fatalistic sufferance of all decisions” made on its behalf. Furthermore, wrote Weber, with remarkable parallels to today:
The great statesman did not leave behind any political tradition. He neither attracted nor even suffered independent political minds, not to speak of strong political personalities. . . . A completely powerless parliament was the purely negative result of his enormous prestige. . . . This powerlessness of parliament also meant that its intellectual level was greatly depressed. . . . The level of parliament depends on whether it does not merely discuss great issues but decisively influences them; in other words, its quality depends on whether what happens there matters, or whether parliament is nothing but the unwillingly tolerated rubber stamp of a ruling bureaucracy [emphasis in the original].5
(...)
In the following, I will offer a few selected points on what the Ukraine war is likely to mean for Germany as a country:
(1) Semi-sovereignty restored.14 Seen from Germany, the war in Ukraine is part of a long history of mostly covert trials of strength with the United States over the extent to which the German state should be entitled to something like national sovereignty, after its unconditional surrender in 1945. This includes the German signature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1969, immediately after Willy Brandt took office; ratified in 1975 under Helmut Schmidt) and, associated with it, the American assurance that it would defend Germany with nuclear weapons if necessary, despite doubts on the German side that were never entirely overcome; American suspicion of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and possible West German ambitions for greater national independence that might have been associated with it; the American mobilization against “Genscherism,”15 believed to be playing the United States and the Soviet Union against each other, in the years before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc; the Federal Republic’s agreement, in return for unification in 1990, to the permanent stationing of American troops on German territory, notwithstanding the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War; the American demand that a reunited Germany participate in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, especially the bombing of Belgrade (Operation Allied Force in May 1999) and the separation of Kosovo from Serbia; the expansion of NATO’s jurisdiction in 1999 beyond the territory of the alliance to include so-called out-of-area missions, etc.
The war in Ukraine offered the United States an opportunity to further tighten the reins on Germany (and the Europeans following the German lead) and to rule out Schröder- and Merkel-style insubordination for the foreseeable future, if not forever. Since 2014, at the latest, NATO had been working under U.S. leadership to transform Ukraine’s military so as to achieve interoperability between NATO and Ukrainian forces; in 2020, Ukraine officially became an associate member of NATO’s Multilateral Interoperability Program.16 What weapons in particular Germany was to supply to Ukraine—whose military had been upgraded by the United States faster than any other country’s in the years leading up to 202117—and for what purpose, was determined not by the (initially reluctant) German government, but by the United States. The fact that the gradual transition to so-called heavy weapons, which took place in the course of 2022, was conspicuously not the idea of the SPD, the party of Chancellor Scholz, demonstrated that the United States, working with the Greens and the FDP, was calling the shots in German defense policy. The SPD, in particular, had long been suspected of a lingering postwar pacifism. And as the Ukraine war continued, party leaders found themselves under apparently irresistible pressure to undertake an unending series of public confessions of mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, to make forgotten their collaboration with Merkel’s silent sabotage of the 2 percent of GDP defense spending target and of the extension of NATO to Ukraine.
(2) Germany and the United States. The American departure from “end of history” globalism came as a surprise to Germany, which in its wishful thinking had, for much longer than the United States itself, believed in the “rule-based” elimination of nation-state interests and power politics. For some time, Russia and China had been uncomfortable with the status assigned to them by the United States after 1990. When in the following decade, after years of economic growth, they felt sufficiently well-endowed to pursue something like strategic political autonomy, the price of their subordination to U.S. hegemony became too high for them to bear. As for Germany, as a non-nuclear power, it was too small to claim a say at the global level. It also had been a major beneficiary of borderless markets under U.S. law and with U.S. money. German industry prospered by buying cheap inputs in China for expensive final products sold there, while buying from Russia a good part of the energy needed for their production. This had long attracted the displeasure of American mercantilists, which Germany was increasingly made to feel as U.S. industry declined and tensions with the two breakaways from the American New World Order, Russia and China, grew.
In addition, the United States had realized that, under the conditions of global economic and financial interdependence that had grown in the neoliberal era, economic sanctions could be an effective first use of force between states. This was true especially for a country of continental size like the United States, for which something like economic autarky is in many respects within the realm of possibility. If sanctions are to be effective, however, they require the participation of other states, which must be persuaded or forced to join. Critical to this is Germany, with its uniquely extensive and diverse foreign trade. Germany, though, necessarily expects to be harmed by the fracturing of the borderless economic world of neoliberalism into geopolitical alliances. While from the American point of view, this would simply be collateral damage, and indeed with positive side-effects for the American balance of trade, seen from Germany it could amount to nothing less than the end of its business model. In this respect, the Ukraine war introduces acute economic strains between the United States and Germany, and possibly puts an end to the German mode of production and prosperity, forced by political disruption of global supply chains, energy sources, and export markets.18
For a few years during Trump’s presidency, it had looked as though the United States would leave Europe to itself in the slipstream of world history (...) But this obviously did not affect the long-term strategic planning in the depths of the U.S. national security apparatus, with Ukraine as the linchpin of a policy of complete NATO-ization of Europe west of the Russian border.
In any case, apart from Russia, Trump had his own axe to grind with Germany, which he repeatedly accused of not fulfilling its 2 percent obligation and free riding on the United States. Nord Stream 2 also played a role early on, insofar as the U.S. Senate, but also the White House under Trump and then Biden, continued to demand that the pipeline not be put into operation.
(...)
Contrary to what Merkel may have hoped, the Biden administration did not forgo exploiting the strategic opportunities that arose here. For Biden, the states of Europe, especially Germany, are allies to be strategically reactivated and kept on a short leash. They, in particular, have to understand that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 was not a Trump-like farewell to world politics but rather a global front-straightening in the service of an overwhelmingly more important goal, to be pursued jointly but all the more resolutely: the restoration of U.S. power before it is too late.
In the informal negotiations between Russia and the United States over Ukraine that followed in the fall of that year, Germany and the European Union played no role whatsoever;
(...)
The United States also did its part to publicly announce the restoration of alliance discipline. In early February 2022, three weeks before the beginning of the war, Biden let it be known, in a now famous joint press conference with Scholz in Washington, that the United States knew how to deal with Nord Stream 2: “If Russia invades, then there will be no longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. . . . I promise you we will be able to do it.” Weeks later, the U.S. Secretary of Defense invited a posse of some forty Ukraine-supporting countries, not to Washington or to NATO headquarters in Brussels, but to Ramstein, the giant American air base in Rhineland-Palatinate, to organize under his chairmanship and in front of the American flag the arming of Ukraine; several more such meetings followed. A few months later came the explosion of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The blast—which would not have been possible without considerable military means and about whose perpetrators the German government claims both not to know and not to be allowed to say anything22 —ensured that gas supplies from Russia to Germany and western Europe have to pass through Ukraine for the foreseeable future. This will allow the Ukrainian government, and indeed the United States, to interrupt any future flow of gas any time. As a result, Germany, which has switched off its nuclear power plants, has to secure for itself a reliable long-term supply of liquefied natural gas, which the United States is of course happy to provide.
(3) Germany and France. The redefinition of the boundaries of German sovereignty by the United States put an end to the old French project of turning a politically and militarily semi-sovereign Germany into the economic engine room of a French-defined European sovereignty. The question of whether what was left of Germany after 1945 should be primarily a transatlantic dependency of the United States or a junior partner of an independent French world power had been the subject of disputes in West Germany from early on, between two conflicting foreign policy schools of thought, “Atlanticists” and “Gaullists.” The outcome, however, was never really in doubt: only the United States and, under its command, NATO could offer Germany something like a reasonably reliable nuclear umbrella. France was nevertheless needed for German foreign policy, especially in the EU as a partner (senior, according to French belief and German diplomatic protocol, and junior increasingly in reality) of a “tandem” that was to advance the “European project” and thus serve fundamental West German postwar interests in regional political and economic inclusion. In the Merkel era, the Franco-German relationship then became the scene of a kind of seesaw politics by which Merkel could opportunistically signal to the United States, on one occasion, and to France, on another, that, unfortunately, their wishes could not be fully satisfied out of consideration for the other partner.
(...)
The war in Ukraine and the return of the U.S. hegemon to western Europe have more than ever transatlanticized German foreign policy and put an end to Merkel-style games of confusion. One result is that Macron finds himself forced, if he wants to avoid being left behind on the diplomatic battlefield, to forget his original demand that the West avoid defeating Russia and allow Putin to save face. As the war drags on, Macron’s public positions have turned increasingly Atlanticist, punctuated by occasional outbreaks of discontent, such as his earlier diagnosis of NATO as “brain-dead.” Given the renewed Babylonian captivity of German foreign policy in Washington, France’s European policy aimed at Franco-European “strategic sovereignty” will have to be reformulated one way or another. Berlin, in order to mitigate the disappointment, after years of foot-dragging, in November 2022 quickly opened the way for German participation in the controversial French-German-Spanish FCAS fighter aircraft project, easily the most expensive weapons system in human history, which is being pushed by France and its aircraft manufacturer Dassault in alliance with Airbus.23
(4) Germany and the European Union.24 The disciplining of Germany by the United States within the framework of NATO and the accompanying strategic weakening of France are effecting deep changes in the politics of the European Union. German leadership, played down under Merkel, is now openly claimed as part of Scholz’s Zeitenwende,25 even though—or perhaps because—under the new conditions it can only be exercised with American authority. The EU of the future will for a long time be shaped by the tasks assigned to it by the United States and NATO in the Ukraine war. These include the design and implementation of a sanctions regime against Russia and, increasingly, China, together with internal rationing in response to supply-chain disruptions, whether caused by the EU itself, by the United States, or by an enemy, whomever that may be. Furthermore, there are likely to be changes in the EU’s admission policy, particularly for eastern Europe, long demanded by the United States and just as long opposed by France, not least to offload the costs of the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine onto Europe, predominantly Germany. Even if Ukraine were refused admission to the EU until the end of the war, having to be content with some sort of a timetable, the west Balkan states cannot be denied membership for long. This would require that the strictly rule-bound accession process be radically simplified and even more politicized than it already is. To avoid this, France is promoting a second-class membership status for countries wanting to join but needing to be socialized in the ways of the EU. Germany, at the same time, is proposing to make the admission of new members conditional on the introduction of majority rule for the European Council in foreign policy, apparently in order to be able, together with France, to deny countries like Poland and, later, Ukraine a veto on foreign policy matters.
Still, there will be a clear shift of the EU’s center of gravity to the east, especially in favor of the American favorites, Poland and the Baltics, and not only as a result of the coming wave of admissions. After the war, the EU will be strictly demarcated from Russia, by both continuing economic sanctions and the coordinated rearmament of EU member states on Russia’s western border under NATO guidance and supervision. Within the EU, Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine in particular will be careful to ensure that whatever tendencies there may be in Germany toward a new Ostpolitik will not call into question the EU’s geostrategic ties to the West. As far as the future character of the Union is concerned, in the eyes of its newly powerful eastern member states, it will primarily be an alliance of convenience for the economic and, under the leadership of NATO, military support of the countries bordering Russia. For them, the EU is decidedly not a vehicle for the supranational dismantling of national statehood or for the replacement of national currencies by the euro. Nor is it seen by them as an institution for political education to spread liberal democracy and a libertarian way of life in culturally backward eastern societies. In this context, the European Commission is likely to find ways to settle, in the not-too-distant future, the legal proceedings initiated primarily under German-Green pressure that aim to cut EU financial support to countries such as Poland, as punishment for violations of Western-defined democratic principles, European “values,” or the rule of law—provided that, unlike Hungary, they remain aligned with the foreign and national security policies of NATO and the European Commission.
Germany in particular will be faced with the problem of preserving the European Monetary Union. To a much greater extent than before, it will have to provide material support to Ukraine and the Union’s eastern frontline states; it also will have to increase its defense budget to more than 2 percent of its national product at the behest of NATO and the United States; and it must somehow compensate its own population for the losses in prosperity suffered as a result of the coming retrenchment of global trade. So far, a country like Italy has been kept loyal to “the European project” by—probably illusory—prospects of economic improvement in some not-too-distant future, through European side-payments under programs such as the NGEU Corona Recovery Fund. This, however, may become more difficult if the electorate in Germany—and other northwestern European countries—begins to feel overtaxed by the combined weight of their European obligations. It would then be predominantly up to Germany, in its newly assumed leadership role, to take on the steeply rising costs of holding the European Union state system together, by fiscal or monetary means, using either the EU budget or the ECB’s bag of tricks, or both. Whether it will have the capacity to do so, given the impending crisis of its production model, seems doubtful.
(5) Germany, the United States, and China. Much will depend on how China acts in the Russian-American conflict over Ukraine and what this means for the looming American-Chinese conflict. Trump had already seen China as America’s real adversary and was anxious to prepare the United States for a military confrontation with the rising Asian superpower. Biden’s line differs from Trump’s and that of the Republicans aligned with him only in that it considers European assistance in the upcoming global conflict as desirable. The Ukraine war serves in this respect as an opportunity to bring the western Europeans up to speed as a geopolitical auxiliary of the United States. For this, Germany would have to give up the production facilities, supply chains, and sales markets in China that it has built over decades, and instead rely on trade and economic relations with the United States—a country that is increasingly as able and willing as China to exert economic pressure for political goals.
The political dynamics unfolding between the United States, China, and Germany in the context of the Ukrainian war appear of fundamental importance for the future of the global political economy as well as for the interaction between the three contemporary “varieties of capitalism”—liberal-democratic, communist-nationalist, and authoritarian-oligarchic. At the level of interstate relations, China seems to be offering face-saving assistance to the United States should it develop an interest in freezing or settling (rather than victoriously ending) the conflict in Ukraine. Repeated statements by the Chinese head of state to the effect that China would not approve the use of nuclear weapons, no matter by whom, point in this direction, as does China’s policy of not providing arms to countries at war, including Russia. It cannot be ruled out that in return for China sticking to this position the United States promised, one way or another, not to equip Ukraine with weapons so superior to Russia’s that, limited to conventional means, Russia would have to fight the Ukrainian army on Russian soil or even face being defeated; in that case, recourse to tactical nuclear arms would be inevitable.
Germany must have an interest, and not only an economic one, in a cooling off of the conflict between the United States and China. Scholz’s relief after a brief visit to Beijing, at the end of which President Xi once again publicly condemned the use of nuclear weapons,26 points in this direction. China, and likely nobody else, would have the means to restrain Russia. Its foreign policy being as unideological as it is oriented toward the long term, a discreet agreement between China and the United States is conceivable to help the United States extricate itself from Ukraine, should it ever feel the need to do so. In return, the United States could refrain from imposing further export controls and other economic restrictions on China. This would pave the way for a continuation, presumably more selective than in the past, of German-Chinese economic relations.
A war with the United States would come early for China, probably too early; that is precisely why there are factions in the United States that want such a war now. Among those in U.S. politics and in the American deep state who would like to attack China sooner rather than later, the lesson of Thucydides from the Peloponnesian War appears to resonate, according to which a sitting hegemon facing a rising rival should strike first as long as it can still win a war with some degree of certainty.27 (Wars, of course, are always unpredictable, and on Clausewitz’s foggy battlefields, like in court and on the high seas, one is in God’s hands.) Athens struck too late against Sparta, and for that it was punished by history. The situation may incidentally have been similar for Putin, who seems to have missed the moment when he could have defeated Ukraine by taking its capital, before the United States had upgraded the Ukrainian military. A Western stereotype has it that China has longer time horizons than the historically younger European world; thus, Xi’s motto today might be the same as that of his great predecessor Deng Xiaoping: “Keep a cool head and maintain a low profile. Never take the lead—but aim to do something big.” If, in view of the shambles they left behind in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and, perhaps soon, Ukraine, the Americans were to go for a settlement with China after all, and if China wanted to buy time to grow unassailable, Germany and Europe might gain a breathing space.
Or they might not. The war in Ukraine may continue for some time, more or less frozen along present fronts, allowing no space for the rise of another postwar pacifism, certainly not in Germany. In order to avoid being pushed around by its allies indefinitely, as in the early months of the war, Germany has, after long hesitation, declared itself ready for a leading role in Europe, within a mandate from the United States and NATO to keep the European anti-Russian alliance together in the name of a united West. In return, it hopes to be allowed to continue profitable economic relations with China, as long as this does not stand in the way of American policy in the Pacific, the future course of which seems difficult to predict.
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This effectively subordinates the EU to NATO, turning it into NATO’s instrument of economic warfare and of mobilizing military and economic support for America’s anti-Russian clientele in eastern Europe.
No New Postwar
The war has torn apart the intricate web of Merkel’s non-decisions and non-committal commitments, leaving the German state defenseless against the geopolitical typhoon that is marking the end of the New World Order. The ongoing reorganization of the world economy under the primacy of geopolitics—the decomposition of the economic interdependencies of the heydays of globalism and their conversion into weapons of international economic warfare—has made it impossible for Germany to continue to cultivate and exploit for its own benefit its national business model. Germany was not prepared for a Zeitenwende. “Europe,” as organized in the EU, is increasingly being used by the political classes of its member states as a garbage can for problems that they find too hot to address; it is not an answer or an alternative to American hegemony. Realistic ideas for an independent European state system, as a third pole in a newly multipolar world, one that could shield the continent from the unpredictability of American politics and policy, have not really come forward, even during Trump’s term in office.
Germany’s future lies somewhere in the highly charged magnetic field between the United States and China—where the fate of Russia, fallen from grace as a world power, will also be decided. Unlike countries such as India or Brazil, Germany is defined by its geostrategic location on the eastern front of a U.S.-dominated transatlantic state system. For this reason, it will find it difficult to identify a position amid American-Chinese bipolarity where it could establish, alone or within a bloc of European states, something like equidistance between the two big-power centers of an emerging new world order.28
Rude Awakening: Germany at War, Again
American Affairs Volume VII, Number 3 (Fall 2023): 79–99
Have not yesterday antihistoricists become today "marxist capitalists" and "evolutionists"?
According to them, history can not "derive" from conspiracy because it derives from necessity, whether democratic, militar, economic, climatic or evolutive necessity ("homo deus"), or from all of them together.
However the guru of open societies now approaching destruction and end (Sir Karl R. Popper) clearly said: "Later on I got a refutation of historicism; showing that for logic reasons it is impossible for us to forecast history's future development
Those forecasting history are, therefore, only "forecasting" the result they are pursuing. And those showing that reality are dangerous conspiracy theorists suffering paranoia (conspiranoids): "blind neccesity, dumb resignation" (recomended Freud in an equivalent context)
All must become "dumb and blind" or be, otherwise, "conspiranoids"
