The Problem with Germany

 

I find myself being frustrated by the heel dragging and ambivalence in German politics and among the populace when it comes to stepping up to fill the void being left by a self-absenting United States.  Russia is on the march.  Germany’s eastern and northern neighbours see the imminent danger and are responding.  The UK and France are sounding the alarm.  With the largest economy in Europe, and the largest population in the EU, Germany needs to be the new lynch pin, the new keystone in the security framework of Europe.  While some are saying the right words, and while there is some movement in the right direction, people like Friedrich Merz face enormous headwinds.  So, as in all things, it is helpful to understand how we got here.

 

 

Rebuilding After the Collapse

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins.  Total defeat.  It had been the second time that France, Britain, the United States, and Russia/the USSR had gone to war with Germany.  They were determined that Germany would never pose a military threat again.

 

To that end, there was even discussion of dismantling Germany into smaller states, but the quickly emerging dynamic of a “cold” war with the Soviet Union prompted the three western allies to put their zones of occupation together into a new (smaller) Germany.  In 1949, they created The Federal Republic of Germany, which would commonly come to be called West Germany.  Still very much an occupied country, West Germany’s constitution (Das Grundgesetz or “The Basic/Foundational Law”), “godfathered” by the western allies, was designed to ensure that no Hitler-like strongman ruler would ever be able to come to power again, and that this new, western version of Germany would be guided toward a pacifist future.

 

That same year, the western allies, headed by the United States, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  They were joined in this original version of the alliance by the three Low Countries, Italy, Norway, and Denmark (and by extension, Greenland and the newly independent former Danish territory of Iceland).  The European part of NATO was to be an extension of the US policy of containing Soviet expansion—a kind of crescent shield of forward positioned friendly countries against the emerging threat from the east.

 

West Germany was not part of this new alliance.  As some have put it, NATO was designed to keep the Soviet Union out and to keep Germany down.  It was not until 1955 that the western allies, and especially the United States, deemed it useful for West Germany to have its own defence force.  As this new West Germany was seen as the most likely future battlefield in case of a Soviet and Warsaw Pact (as Moscow’s equivalent to NATO came to be called) attack, it made sense for them to field some of their own troops to slow the envisioned Communist invasion to give the others time to respond.  Thus, came into being, the Bundeswehr or “Federal Defence Force”.

 

The new Soviet version of Germany—The German Democratic Republic, commonly called East Germany—was also allowed a military.  Indeed, while the Bundeswehr looked a lot like the US Army with different patches, the East German Volksarmee (“People’s Army”), other than the unique helmets, retained much of the old Wehrmacht look, including the goose-step march.  The Volksarmee and the new Communist political rulers of East Germany (die Sozialistische Einheitspartei or “the Socialist Unity Party”, SED for short) understood themselves to be in a war with the capitalist imperialist west.  There was no talk of pacifism per se.  Rather, it was all about “wanting peace but needing to be ready to fight the imperialists”.

 

The creation of the Bundeswehr was met with scepticism by many in the new West Germany. A large swath of the population was fully ready to leave their militaristic past behind and focus on economics, and building a new, peaceful, prosperous Germany. Throughout the 1960’s and until the end of the Cold War in the 1990’s there was a very active peace movement in Germany.  While most young men dutifully served their obligatory time in the Bundeswehr, many questioned the point of it.  The logic ran: NATO was a US vehicle; US and allied troops (UK, France, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands) were permanently stationed on West German soil, some in very large numbers; West Germany effectively remained an occupied country. Later research has revealed that the peace movement in West Germany was actively promoted by East German and Soviet influencers as a way of weakening the western resolve to fight in the hopes of opening a door to extending Communist control.  But Soviet propaganda could not and did not create the movement.  Rather, it merely encouraged what was already there because of its usefulness (thus the term, “useful idiots”).  Nevertheless, pacifism implanted itself deeply into the West German psyche.  While the Soviets may have encouraged it, the roots really were planted by the western allied who wanted a pacified and defanged Germany—and that is what they got.

 

 

Not the Old Germany in Any Way

 The two occupied versions of Germany (the East had large contingents of troops and security officers from the USSR, which is how Vladimir Putin came to be posted there) continued effectively as “subjugated and occupied polities” until the 1990’s when the Soviet Union was dissolved, the Warsaw Pact terminated, and the much touted “peace dividend” was ushered in.  At that point, western allies began to wind down their occupation forces, leaving only the United States, which used German bases to project its military capabilities into Europe and the Middle East (for example, the large US bases in the Rhine region were key in supplying the efforts in Iraq, and later Afghanistan and Iraq again).

 

Nevertheless, the reunification of Germany was not a given.  Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor, wanted it desperately to cement his place in history.  Many West Germans were keen, though not all.  Most East Germans erroneously believed that reunification would be a fast track to riches, but some wanted to keep the German Democratic Republic as an independent entity and have time to fix the broken parts and build an alternative to the “elbow society” in the west.  The outside powers were cautious but not categorically opposed to reunification.  Russia wanted guarantees that US troops would not be stationed in East Germany.  France’s quid pro quo was that Germany would sign on to accelerated European integration (the 1990 enhancements to the Schengen Agreement) and work toward a common currency.  It seems that there was still a fear of a powerful Germany, so it became important for the new united Germany to prove its pacifist credentials.

 

The reunification of the two Germanies amounted to a sort of “corporate takeover” of the East by the West.  All East German institutions were swept away, including the Volksarmee.  The formerly quite large conscription-based Bundeswehr of West Germany was reduced to a smaller, professional force designed for limited deployments, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency.  Many East Germans found it hard to have any enthusiasm for alien institutions which had for 40 years been their enemies—though at first these matters were not issues.  They only began to come to the fore in the politics of the 2010’s.  By then, it was clear that the former East Germany would not catch up to the former west economically.  The influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa was the spark that ignited the fire of a right wing reaction that found particular resonance among easterners, leading the formerly small, fringe, Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland, whose main target was the Euro, to morph into the anti-immigrant, anti-globalism, anti-elite, anti-establishment cesspool of hate that it has become, also attracting Neo-Nazis and “Reichsbürger” (a movement that deems post-World War II Germany to be illegal and illegitimate) looking for a place to call political home.

 

Russia’s actions in Ukraine beginning in 2013 corresponded to a significant uptick in Russian influence campaigning in the west, supporting parties that questioned the political establishments of their respective countries—both far right and far left.  Of the two, the far right was more successful at gaining adherents, while also corresponding more closely to Vladimir Putin’s own package of ideas: traditional values, traditional religion, strongman rule.  In Germany, this message found resonance in the East where both the Nazi and Communist dictatorships had never been properly processed in the civic psyche—in contrast to the West where both are clearly understood to have been bad ideas.

 

The old West Germany, and the new united Germany pursued a policy of engagement with the USSR/Russia (Realpolitik).  The first natural gas pipeline from the Soviet Union was completed already in the 1970’s, over the objections of western allies.  After the dissolution of the USSR, that engagement intensified, leading eventually to the building of the Nordstream pipelines (over the objections and warnings of the newer NATO member states), deepening Germany’s dependence on Russian energy.  Many high placed Germans made fortunes off this engagement.  Even after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some, such as former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, preferred to keep their lucrative Russian corporate posts than even attempt to show any solidarity with Ukraine or protect the basic UN principle of the sanctity of international borders.

 

 

Our Current Reality

The response of Germany to the heightened security concerns since 2022 has been shaped by these factors: 1) the weight of three generations of pacifism (the Frankenstein’s Monster created by the western allies and exploited by Russia), which has led to catastrophic underinvestment in defence and a German public that largely sees even its own arms industry in a negative light; 2) strong, longstanding political, economic, and cultural ties to Russia, which make many feel more sympathetic to Moscow than Kyiv in this fight; and 3) the internal divide between East and West which is making it increasingly difficult to find a national consensus on supporting Ukraine in its fight.

 

It is all very disconcerting, and for me, very disappointing and frustrating.   I feel like I am having to shake an old friend awake before it’s too late.  I can only hope that enough Germans will come out of their torpor and recognize that, at this point, a lasting peace can only be achieved by military strength that will stop Vladimir Putin from his self-described crusade to extend Russia’s power to at least the old Iron Curtain, if not to Lisbon.