Big Germany, What Now?
Germany, A Nation in Its Time: Before, During and After Nationalism, 1500–2000 by Helmut Walser Smith
Discussing Pax Germanica: The Rise and Limits of German Hegemony in European Integration edited by Emmanuel Comte and Fernando Guirao
How We Became What We Are: A Short History of the Germans
by Heinrich August Winkler
Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500–2000 by David Blackbourn
Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022 by Frank Trentmann
Countries, unlike human beings, can be old and young at the same time. More than 1,900 years ago Tacitus wrote a book about a fascinating people called the Germans. In his fifteenth-century treatise Germania, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, better known as Pope Pius II, praised German cities as “the cleanest and the most pleasurable to look at” in all of Europe. But the state we know today as Germany—the Federal Republic of Germany—will celebrate only its seventy-fifth birthday on May 23 this year. Its current territorial shape dates back less than thirty-four years, to the unification of West and East Germany on October 3, 1990, which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
Yet already the post-Wall era is over and everyone, including the Germans, is asking what Germany will be next. Not just what it will do; what it will be. In his excellent Germany: A Nation in Its Time, the German-American historian Helmut Walser Smith reminds us just how many different Germanies there have been over the five centuries since Piccolomini’s Germania was first printed in 1496. Not only have the borders and political regimes changed repeatedly; so have the main features identified with the German nation.
Sometimes the dominant chord was cultural: the land of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers); the patrie de la pensée (homeland of thought) described by Madame de Staël in De l’Allemagne (1813); the Germany that according to George Eliot has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music, in the world.
After two world wars and all the horrors of the Third Reich, many people naturally identified Germany with militarism. But Smith shows how first Prussian and then German military expenditure has in fact been on a roller coaster for the past two centuries.
Very often, however, German nationhood has been identified with economic development and prowess. This point was powerfully made by the Princeton historian Harold James in a book called A German Identity, published the year the Wall came down. And James wrote presciently that Clio, the muse of history, “should warn us not to trust Mercury (the economic god) too much.”
Post-Wall Germany trusted to Mercury. After West Germany under Chancellor Helmut Kohl unexpectedly achieved its goal of unification on Western terms, the old-new Federal Republic moved its capital from the small town of Bonn to previously divided Berlin and settled down to be a satisfied status quo power. Very much in the wider spirit of those times, it was the economic dimension of power that prevailed.
The historian James Sheehan has characterized this as the Primat der Wirtschaftspolitik (the primacy of economic policy), but it was also, more specifically, the Primat der Wirtschaft (the primacy of business). “The business of America is business” is a remark attributed to US president Calvin Coolidge. If one said of the post-Wall Berlin republic that “the business of Germany is business,” one would not be far wrong. This involved the very direct influence of German businesses on German governments, enhanced by the distinctive West German system of cooperative industrial relations known as Mitbestimmung. If it was not the big automobile or chemical company bosses on the telephone to the Chancellery, it was the trade union leaders, all urging some lucrative commercial deal. (Bosses and labor leaders could argue between themselves afterward about how to divide the resulting pie.)
By 2021 a staggering 47 percent of the country’s GDP came from the export of goods and services. The most spectacular growth was in business with China, on which Germany became significantly more dependent than any other European country. And while it self-identified as a civilian power, it exported a lot of German-made weapons, including nearly three hundred Taurus missiles to South Korea between 2013 and 2018—the very make of missile that Chancellor Olaf Scholz is stubbornly refusing to send to embattled Ukraine. In the years 2019– 2023 Germany had a 5.6 percent share of global arms exports, ahead of Britain although still behind France. Mars in the service of Mercury.
With the eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO, Germany no longer had the insecurities of a frontline state. As former West German president Richard von Weizsäcker put it, this was the country’s liberation from its fateful historic Mittellage (middle position) between East and West, since it was now blessedly surrounded by fellow members of the geopolitical West. Accordingly, its defense expenditure sank as low as 1.1 percent of GDP in 2005.
Particularly in the angry polemics between Northern and Southern Europe during the eurozone crisis that became acute in 2010, Germans tended to attribute their economic success to their own skill, hard work, and virtue. After all, they had not piled up debt like those feckless Southern Europeans. German industry does indeed have extraordinary strengths, as anyone knows who drives a BMW, does their laundry in a Miele washing machine, cooks dinner in a Bosch oven, or wears Falke socks. And in the early 2000s, faced with the huge costs of German unification, the government of Gerhard Schröder had worked with business and trade union leaders to push through a painful set of reforms that kept German labor costs low while they soared in Southern Europe.
Yet this economic success was also the result of a uniquely favorable set of external circumstances. The single European currency, which many Germans regarded as a painful sacrifice of their treasured deutschmark, brought considerable economic advantage to Germany, since its companies could export to the rest of the eurozone without any risk of currency fluctuation and to the rest of the world at a more competitive exchange rate than the mighty deutschmark would have enjoyed. Meanwhile the eastward enlargement of the EU enabled German manufacturers to relocate production facilities to countries with cheap skilled labor like
Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia while exporting freely across the entire EU single market. In a sense, this was the achievement of the liberal imperialist politician Friedrich Naumann’s 1915 vision of Mitteleuropa as a Germanled common economic area, but it was done entirely peacefully, for the most part to mutual advantage, and within the larger legal and political structure of the EU.
Even more important were the external conditions beyond Europe. The Washington-based German commentator Constanze Stelzenmüller summed this up in a sharp formula. Post-1989 Germany, she wrote, outsourced its security needs to the US, its energy needs to Russia, and its economic growth needs to China.
Countries change but still manifest deep continuities. The French long for universalism; the British cleave to empiricism. Germans were good at making things in the fifteenth century—the Mainz entrepreneur Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press, for example—and they still are. Another of those deeper German continuities is what the German-British social thinker Ralf Dahrendorf identified as a yearning for synthesis.
With these growing external dependencies, however, synthesis became not just an intellectual preference but a political imperative. Everything had to be not merely connected to but also compatible with everything else. German interests had also to be European interests. Beyond Europe, Germany had to be friends with the United States but also with Russia and with China, all at the same time. The country’s exportbased business model must also be in harmony with its values-based political model. The Germans could do well while also being good.
In the case of the Federal Republic, being good has a specific meaning: to have learned the lessons from the Nazi past, and hence always standing for peace, human rights, dialogue, democracy, international law, and all the other good things we associate with the ideal of liberal international order. How Germany has fared in this respect is the subject of another outstanding book, Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022, a probing moral history with a distinctly mixed verdict. “When moral principles served German interests they were flaunted,” Trentmann writes at one point, “when they stood in the way they were ignored.”
These claims for synthesis were framed within a larger view—prevalent in much of the West in the post Wall years, but nowhere more so than in Germany—of the way history was headed. The “End of History” was an American idea, but it was the Germans who lived the neo-Hegelian dream.
So history was going our way. Germany, Europe, and the West altogether had a model on which others would eventually converge. Globalization would facilitate democratization. True, Russia and China didn’t look terribly like liberal democracies, but as they modernized, they would get better. Western investment and trade would help them down history’s preordained track, while economic interdependence would underpin a Kantian perpetual peace.
Thus the country in which the Berlin Wall had come down enjoyed the greatest successes but also nourished the greatest illusions of Europe’s post Wall era.
Over the last sixteen years this model has collapsed in two ways: gradually, then suddenly—to recall Ernest Hemingway’s description of how one goes bankrupt. The gradual phase coincided with a general crisis of Europe’s post-Wall order that started in 2008 with two near-simultaneous events: the eruption of the global financial crisis and Vladimir Putin’s military seizure of two large areas of Georgia. The sudden arrived on February 24, 2022, with his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
For virtually all the first period—in fact from November 2005 until December 2021—Germany was led by one of the most remarkable figures in modern German history: the former East German scientist Angela Merkel. For many Germans, this was a very good time. Yet most of the problems the country faces today were accumulating in the Merkel years.
The direct primacy of business meant that there wasn’t even a proper primacy of economic policy, since the effect was to privilege the immediate interests of existing German businesses, such as the automobile and chemical industries, over the industries of tomorrow. As a result, Germany (along with the rest of Europe) is far behind the US and China in AI and other innovative technologies, and faces competition from Chinese electric cars that may be both cheaper and better than German ones.
Two extreme manifestations of fiscal conservatism—a “debt brake” written into the constitution in 2009 and the so-called “black zero,” the finance ministry’s insistence for many years on running no budget deficit—have left the country with exceptionally healthy public finances but also chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. The most visible example is the German railways—the Deutsche Bahn—on which fierce cuts were inflicted in preparation for a privatization that never happened. In my experience, you must reckon on a Deutsche Bahn intercity train being either late or canceled.
A panicky choice to abandon all civil nuclear power after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 has made it even more difficult to make the transition to green energy, urgently required to address the climate crisis, while at the same time weaning the country off Russian fossil fuels. Merkel’s decision to let in some one million refugees from Syria and the wider Middle East in 2015–2016 was admirably humane, and most of the new arrivals have been successfully integrated into the German economy, helping to ameliorate its acute shortage of skilled labor. But the fear that this irregular immigration from faraway and often majority-Muslim countries was “out of control” and would culturally transform the country too fast gave a big boost to the hard-right nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Shockingly, the AfD is currently ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats in nationwide opinion polls for this June’s elections to the European Parliament. It’s doing even better in east German federal states such as Saxony and Thuringia, where it seems likely to be the clear winner in state elections this autumn. Also likely to do well there is a new “left conservative” grouping headed by the East German politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who skillfully combines left-wing socioeconomic rhetoric, a culturally conservative approach to immigration, and a tendentially pro-Russian opposition to military support for Ukraine. While there has been enormous investment and significant economic growth in East Germany, the psychological divide between East and West has increased rather than decreased—even while the chancellor was an East German. Many East Germans feel an angry sense that they are treated as secondclass citizens.
Change through consensus has historically been one of the keys to the success of the Federal Republic, in politics as in industrial relations. But with the fragmentation of the political landscape into seven or eight parties, felt at the federal level also through the Bundesrat (the upper house, which represents the federal states), and significant interventions by the powerful Federal Constitutional Court, it has become more difficult to achieve either consensus or change.
Meanwhile, many of the countries that were meant graciously to converge toward the liberal democratic ideal have moved in the opposite direction—even in Germany’s immediate neighborhood. Since 2010, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has systematically demolished democracy in a nearby country where the German car industry is heavily invested. In China, the turn has been even sharper, from the high hopes of gradual liberalization that accompanied the Beijing Olympics in 2008 to the harsh authoritarianism of Xi Jinping’s rule today.
Yet German companies have continued to make major investments in these places, often turning a blind eye to any conflict with their own country’s proclaimed values. Encouraged by the Chinese regime, Volkswagen, which depends on China for some 40 percent of its sales, opened a factory in Xinjiang in 2013. China has subsequently implemented policies in Xinjiang that have credibly been characterized as genocide, with large numbers of Uighurs being interned in “reeducation” camps. Asked about the existence of these camps by a BBC interviewer in 2019, Herbert Diess, then head of VW, said, “I’m not aware of that.” When I more recently pointed out to the head of another big German automobile company that Hungary, in which he had just announced another huge investment, was no longer a democracy, he swept aside the objection with an airy wave of his hand. “We can have different terms,” my notebook records him saying. “That’s okay.”
The most dramatic misjudgment was about Russia. Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker who as chancellor had a portrait of Catherine the Great—a Russian ruler of German origin—in her office, was by far the most influential European politician when it came to dealing with Putin. One might argue that the Minsk II agreement, which Germany (along with France) was instrumental in concluding in February 2015, following Putin’s annexation of
Crimea and the start of the Russo Ukrainian war in 2014, was the best that could be done to stabilize the situation at a moment when Ukrainian defenses were collapsing. Completely indefensible, however, was the German failure to change tack thereafter, realistically reassessing the Russian threat. The most telling evidence is that, far from decreasing its energy dependence on Russia, Germany increased it: by 2020 a staggering 55 percent of its gas, 34 percent of its oil, and 57 percent of its hard coal came from Russia.
To complete the trio of major extra European dependencies, Germany depended more than ever on the United States for its security. Even Donald Trump’s challenge to European NATO partners during his presidency produced only a slow and reluctant upward adjustment of German defense spending. In a speech in Munich in 2017, Merkel did say that “the times when we could completely rely on others are to some extent past.” But there was no fundamental change of policy.
All this happened under Merkel, but for twelve of her sixteen years as chancellor her Christian Democrats were in a so-called grand coalition with the Social Democrats. The worst mistakes in relations with Russia were largely the responsibility of the Social Democrats, especially the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, which was agreed upon and built after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014. And throughout Merkel’s final term in office, her finance minister and vice-chancellor was Scholz, the Social Democrat who in December 2021, after a surprising general election victory, succeeded her as chancellor.
Then, on February 24, 2022, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The beginning of the largest war in Europe since 1945 reduced core assumptions of post-Wall Germany—political, economic, and military, but also moral—to rubble that was less immediately visible than that of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol but no less real.
Under the shock of this horror, and as Scholz introduced a new German word into the English language with his speech about a Zeitenwende (epochal turning point), there was an appeal for Germany to initiate an immediate boycott of fossil fuels from Russia. Scholz’s coalition government decided against taking this radical step, and the way he made the argument was telling. It would plunge Germany and Europe into a recession, he said. “Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be in danger, whole branches of industry on the brink.” (The chemical giant BASF alone guzzled some 4 percent of the country’s total annual consumption of gas, delivered through its own special pipeline.) And then Scholz said—for remember, everything must be in harmony with everything else—“Nobody is served if, with eyes wide open, we put our economic substance at risk” (emphasis added). But if Putin had suddenly been deprived of a principal source of funding for his war machine, somebody would have been served: the Ukrainian people.
Instead, Germany would wean itself off Russian fossil fuel just as quickly as was compatible with avoiding a