“We are living through a watershed era. And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.”
That was how German chancellor Olaf Scholz began his speech to the Bundestag on 27th February. Other political leaders were saying similar things about Putin’s barbaric attack on Ukraine. But Scholz did far more that Sunday morning than express indignation. In 30 minutes, he changed German security policy more radically than in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War. He put Germany at the heart of a transformation in the EU’s willingness to play its full part in defending the international order on which its freedom and prosperity is based.
I have watched German security and defence policy at first-hand since a spell as a young diplomat in Nato during the 1970s. History lay just under the surface of our work: as one small illustration, the British and German ambassadors to Nato had fought on different sides at Arnhem in 1944 (they were firm friends nonetheless). The divided Germany was then the epicentre of east/west tension. Given the ever-present threat of a Soviet onslaught, West Germany fielded one of the largest armies in Europe. But it still depended heavily on its closest allies and played host to large stationed forces from the UK, US and France. In Britain’s case this was the 40,000-strong British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). These had long ceased to be occupation forces, but the areas in which they were deployed still reflected the post-1945 zones of occupation after 1945, and evidence of the long British presence was everywhere in the BAOR area. As a British official visiting our forces, I travelled on RAF aircraft to an RAF airbase without ever needing to show anyone a passport.
At the end of the Cold War, the newly united Germany was, not surprisingly, happy to leave the geopolitics to others. Successive German governments were quick to take the peace dividend, halving the defence budget and concentrating energies on building one of the most powerful economies in the world. Germany’s foreign policy was focused largely on economic integration with EU partners, a peaceful neighbourhood in wider Europe and promoting free trade to maximise German exports. Facing up to their history as few other countries have done, German leaders favoured negotiation over trials of strength, and promoting values over strident appeals to national interests. The European Union, with its law-based approach and endless search for consensus, reflects in many ways a German vision of how the world should work.
The best insight I have seen into the worldview of a German millennial growing up in the exceptional period of post-Cold War strategic stability in Europe came in an article from the German scholar Ulrike Franke on the War on the Rocks website in May 2021: “We struggle to think in terms of interests, we struggle with the concept of geopolitical power, and we struggle with military power being an element of geopolitical power.” That mindset has enabled German governments to outsource the hard power policies of defence and deterrence to more military-minded nations such as the US, Britain and France. German defence spending has been well below the Nato target of 2 per cent for the last 30 years. As a result, the German armed forces are in a very poor state, with much obsolete equipment, high levels of unserviceability (for many months in 2017 none of the six German submarines were working) and low stocks of weapons and ammunition.
Many other European countries took a similar approach, despite increasingly exasperated calls from Washington. Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and Trump’s threats to walk away from Nato unless the Europeans paid more, did at last put European defence spending on an upward trend. But even as the international scene darkened, Merkel continued to move at a snail’s pace, pledging in 2018 that German spending would rise to “at least 1.5 per cent by 2024.”
That was the orthodoxy which Scholz overturned so spectacularly in his speech of 27th February. He reeled off a series of commitments, breaking a series of long-standing taboos. He pledged an immediate €100bn to upgrade Germany’s armed forces, including new aircraft to maintain the country’s nuclear burden-sharing arrangement with the US. He committed to meeting the 2 per cent target quickly, putting Germany on course to be the biggest defence spender in Nato after the US. He undertook to supply military equipment to Ukraine. And, after weeks of dither, he suspended the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
To judge by the polls, Scholz read the mood in Germany right. The support across the political spectrum reflected the fact that Putin’s assault on Ukraine—a country at the heart of Europe geographically and culturally—is an affront to every value on which postwar Germany was built. And this German reaction was shared right across Europe. The EU moved with an extraordinary turn of speed to introduce the most far-reaching sanctions package in its history, agreed to use the EU budget to buy arms for Ukraine and faced up to the need to reduce dependence on Russian energy supplies as rapidly as possible. As EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen commented in a powerful speech to the European Parliament on 1st March, “We cannot take our security and the protection of our people for granted. We have to stand up for it. We have to invest in it. We have to carry our fair share of the responsibility.”
As Scholz said, there can be no going back now, for Germany or the EU. Putin has succeeded not just in strengthening Nato, but in waking the sleeping giant of Europe as a geopolitical power. The consequences will be felt for decades.
