(...)
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.
(...)
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
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"
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