Nie Wieder
Haunted by WWII, Germany is famously reluctant to wield military power. War in Ukraine—and an ascendant Green Party—have ushered in a new era.
In early February, German newspapers described Olaf Scholz’s performance at a joint press conference with Joe Biden as strange and bewildering. It was the German chancellor’s first visit to the U.S. since taking office last fall. The glaring agenda item was Vladimir Putin’s belligerent decision to amass Russian troops along Ukraine’s borders.
In question was Germany’s reliability to its western partners. The heads of state emphasized the depth of friendship and mutual trust between their two nations, but journalists’ questions immediately exposed a palpable disconnect regarding the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The construction of the natural gas tube running beneath the icy waters of the Baltic Sea was officially completed in December. It stood to benefit Germany, which it would supply with natural gas, and Russia through the corresponding cash flow. Threatening to suspend the project, some thought, could deter Putin’s aggression.
President Biden sought unity on the matter, promising that the project would be shut down if Russia invaded Ukraine. But Scholz, with his characteristically sheepish expression, was deliberately vague, refusing to even refer to the pipeline by name.
Just a few weeks later, Germany underwent one of its most significant foreign policy reversals of the post-war era. Prompted by Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, Germany took actions that just a few weeks prior would have been totally unthinkable. It suspended the opening of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, directly sent weapons to Ukraine, allocated an additional $113 billion to its military, and made a constitutional commitment—to the NATO target of devoting two percent of GDP to military spending—which it had long avoided. It also began individually approving requests by other countries holding German weapons to send them Ukraine’s way, a significant shift, given how many arms on the continent are at least partially German-made. Scholz’s stirring speech announcing the new course of action in the Bundestag was met with a medley of applause, jeers, and gasps.
The new measures represent a striking departure from the studious pacifism that has characterized German foreign policy since World War II. While the shift was clearly catalyzed by Putin’s attacks on Ukraine, it also reflects the vision of an ascendant Green Party leadership, which, in what some describe as a “post-pacifist” break from recent tradition, has pushed Germany to take a more confrontational approach in world affairs.
This story begins where it must. The nationalist movements that sprung up in Europe during the 19th century found their most virulent manifestations in German fascism in the 1930s. With the coming and passing of the ensuing nightmare, the period after 1945 brought about a stark shift in the way Germans viewed themselves and their country. As the flagrant moral adversary of World War II, Germans took on a collective sense of shame, beginning a long process of reckoning and confrontation with the horror of their crimes. Still, geopolitical forces threatening to pull Germany right back into international conflict were already at work.
As suspicions between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. grew, Germany became the ultimate proxy, as it was literally split into two opposing and autonomous halves in 1949. The first post-war West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer found himself conducting a delicate balancing act—seeking political influence among western powers to assist the development of the fledgling state, without permanently alienating East Germany. Overzealous alignment with the U.S. risked jeopardizing any chance of German reunification.
In the post-war years, Germany strove to operate strictly multilaterally. While this may suggest a relinquishing of autonomous decision making, the fact that the country was initially occupied by outside powers meant that joining multilateral organizations actually increased its participatory say in the international domain. Other Western European countries, meanwhile, had an interest in harnessing West Germany’s production capacity against the potential threat of a Soviet invasion. Economic and political integration with Germany could also prevent the country from starting another war.
The European Steel and Coal Community was established in 1951 in an effort to prevent future conflict on the continent. A prototype for the European Union, it facilitated the exchange of key strategic resources among former enemies, like France and Germany. Militarily, similar efforts were underway, and West Germany was admitted into NATO in 1955. The Soviets followed suit, integrating their satellite state of East Germany into the defense-oriented Warsaw Pact and the economically oriented Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Thus commenced a German tradition that has persisted ever since: an insistence on multilateral action abroad.
The Cold War had begun, and German social movements, like many around the world, sought revolution, or at least the abandonment of chauvinistic values understood to have animated the world wars. As the movements dissipated, the Green Party, founded in 1980, provided a conduit through which to channel their lingering momentum. The Greens swept an unconventional cohort into the parliament. With their long hair, beards, and knitted sweaters, they cut amusing figures among the prim suits of the German Bundestag.
Environmentalism, pacifism, social justice, and anti-nuclear technology were the Green Party’s main principles. The faction was ideologically divided into fundamentalists (known as “fundis”) and realists (known as “realos”). The fundis counted radical ecologists among their ranks, and generally regarded the Greens as a protest party, rather than a governing one. The realos, meanwhile, sought to actively govern and participate in policy discussions, and were prepared to compromise on the party’s more radical positions if necessary. By the end of the ‘80s, many of the fundis had exited the party. The Greens were on a moderating trajectory, seeking, despite their internal tensions, to govern Germany as part of a federal coalition.
Shortly after the party’s founding, Europe was rocked by massive protests against the U.S. deployment of ballistic Pershing missiles in European NATO territories. The well-known German author and Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, as well as former Chancellor Willy Brandt, conferred a particular gravitas upon an anti-arms movement already fueled by immense popular support. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament organized many of the protests, and the episode reflected Germany’s pacifistic tendencies throughout the Cold War.
It was a Green Party figure who would be tasked with resolving some of Germany’s biggest foreign policy dilemmas. Joschka Fischer did not begin as a typical politician. At the twilight of his teenage years, he joined the 1968 student movement, and in the coming years was swept up by increasingly radical social currents. As a militant leftist he joined the so-called Putzgruppe, a name derived from a German acronym for “Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction.” Fischer led street brawls, and a camera captured him clubbing a police officer (the record would plague him later in his career). In the ‘70s, a string of violent episodes involving the “Rote Armee Fraktion” or RAF, a radical left-wing terrorist organization that kidnapped and murdered politicians and business executives, led Fischer to discard his belief in violence as an instrument for creating political change.
After a stint in the German parliament, and later at the state level as minister for the environment in Hesse, Fischer had become one of the Green Party’s most outspoken realos. When the Social Democrats, in a now reunified Germany, formed a governing coalition with the Greens in 1998, the former’s leader, Gerhard Schröder, tapped Fischer to be his foreign minister. Fischer would soon face a dramatic dilemma that set his party’s deepest convictions against the fear of being complicit in another genocide on the continent.
The eruption of war in Kosovo led to a resurgence of ethnic tension and violence that had, sadly, become common after the breakup of Yugoslavia. The latest conflict pitted Kosovo Albanians, the demographic majority of the population of Kosovo, against the Serb forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Observers and participants feared another genocide, with reason. Only a few years prior, the Balkans had witnessed the Srebrenica massacre, an episode of abject violence in 1995, during the Bosnian war, in which more than 8,000 male Bosniak Muslims were gunned down by Bosnian Serb troops loyal to the Serb Secessionist Republic. The event distressed Fischer specifically and the Greens more generally, prompting a reevaluation of the unconditional pacifism that had been a key tenet of the party.
As foreign minister, Fischer saw it as his mission to ensure that fascism, war, and genocide were permanently rid from Europe. Despite the absence of a U.N. mandate, Germany decided to join the NATO airstrikes in Kosovo. Fischer was convinced, along with his political partner Chancellor Schröder, that foreign engagement was the only way to prevent the sorts of atrocities of which Germany had itself been so recently guilty.
The intervention caused a major stir in Germany. At a party convention debating the decision, someone slung a paint bomb that perforated Fischer’s ear drum. Protestors outside depicted him with a Hitler mustache. Still covered in red paint, Fischer defiantly proceeded to give his planned address. Famously, he justified the Kosovo intervention with the motto, “nie wieder Auschwitz,” literally translating to “never again Auschwitz.” It was a significant moment for Germany. The crisis in Kosovo became the setting for the first deployment of German troops since World War II.
Still, Fischer was no warmonger, and despite the pressure of allies, he upheld Germany’s pacifistic impulses when the stakes were high. At the Munich Security Conference in 2003, he challenged the U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s claims, which would later be debunked, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He convinced Schröder not to join the war in Iraq. Fischer remained one of the mission’s loudest critics, and the German position caused friction in its relationship with the U.S.
Germany later joined the conflict in Afghanistan, which became the country’s second post-war military engagement following the NATO intervention in Kosovo. German troops, however, were stationed in the stable and peaceful north, and away from the combat-heavy south. Annoyed allies continuously exerted pressure on Germany to play a larger role in the south, but it never relented. In many ways, the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan solidified German skepticism about armed intervention abroad.
The recently departed Chancellor Angela Merkel dominated the last 16 years of German politics, and foreign policy during her tenure reflected a pragmatic instinct for the middle way. Merkel, or “Mutti,” as Germans facetiously called her (an old-fashioned, endearing version of “Mom”) forged a trusting relationship with her people. For many Germans, she blended an essential competence with intelligence—evidenced by a background in quantum chemistry—and humility—evidenced by myriad social media posts showing her doing her own grocery shopping.
If Merkel’s leadership had a coherent foreign policy, it was defined by German business interests. In the notoriously export-heavy country, trade relationships loom large. Seeking amicable relations wherever possible, Merkel received frequent criticism for her clear hesitance to speak out against the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Chinese Communist Party. (Her implicit strategy—the idea that economic integration would inevitably lead to liberalizing reforms in China—has not paid off.)
The German military, meanwhile, has been sparsely funded since World War II. NATO membership guaranteed that the U.S., with its military might, could be relied upon if Germany’s security was ever seriously threatened, or if a situation abroad ever called for an intervention. Thus, Germany could rest easy gutting its armed forces and invest the savings elsewhere. Former President Trump frequently admonished Germany along these lines, indignant about its refusal to adhere to NATO military spending targets. Still, when his presidency strained U.S. relations with customary European allies, Merkel became vocal about producing an autonomous European foreign policy, echoing French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called for the establishment of a European army.
Germany has no term limits, and many analysts believed Merkel would have been re-elected had she decided to run. But she left office on her own volition. After a four-term stint in office, in which she led Germany—and to an extent, Europe—through its debt calamity, a refugee crisis, Brexit, and the outbreak of the pandemic, it was time to prepare for a future without “Mutti” at the wheel.
Climate change has become perhaps the most salient political issue in Germany, and there is a relatively broad popular consensus about the urgency of abating emissions; the Greens’ election chances looked promising as a result. Foreign policy, by contrast, is not a particularly important topic in German politics, and the recent election cycle was no exception. The final debate among the candidates for the Chancellery didn’t feature a single question on the matter.
The Greens’ campaign was spearheaded by a double-pronged leadership of Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, and the latter became the Green Party’s first ever candidate for the chancellery. With five months to go until election day, they’d displaced Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats from the top spot in the polls.
The Greens ultimately received just 14.8 percent of votes cast. It was a disappointing showing, sufficient for the party to enter negotiations and form a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats and the libertarian Free Democrats, but well shy of the majority required to control the chancellery itself. Baerbock conceded that she had made mistakes in the race. Accusations of an inflated resume, and somewhat-overblown allegations of plagiarism, undermined her credibility. Still, she secured her second-most favored position: foreign minister.
The coalition government echoed that of Schröder: a Social Democrat chancellor with a Green foreign minister. Baerbock had long been calling for a new German strategy amid tensions abroad. “In the long run,” she once said, “eloquent silence is no kind of diplomacy, even if in the last few years it has been seen as such by some.” The statement was a thinly-veiled critique of Merkel—and a pitch for an assertive, post-pacifist approach. In harmony with that vision, Green politicians openly criticized the Nord Stream project, and called for a more confrontational engagement with the Chinese and Russian governments, given their authoritarian tendencies. Baerbock, with astute foresight, argued that the gas pipeline was being used by Putin to gain leverage over the West by making it dependent on Russia, and as a means of further isolating Ukraine, which would no longer feature as an important player in the transfer of natural gas from east to west.
While the Greens were looking to shut Nord Stream down, the Social Democrats defended the pipeline vehemently. Scholz’s party regarded Russia with ambivalence, its muddled position embodied in the public eye by the activities of its former chancellor. Since losing to Merkel, Schröder, has served in various capacities in Russian oil and gas firms like Gazprom and TNK-BP. He’s also become an infamous Putin apologist, having cultivated a longstanding friendship with the Russian president.
Baerbock now led the foreign ministry, but the implications of this were unclear. A German foreign minister is subordinate to the Chancellor, as the Merkel era clearly demonstrated. And Scholz signaled that he was looking to stick to the Merkel playbook of avoiding direct confrontation wherever possible. As Russia built up its military presence along Ukrainian borders, and allied pressure to respond grew, Scholz remained deeply suspicious of measures that might heighten tensions further.
When Habeck, the Green co-leader and economic minister, proposed the deployment of weapons to Ukraine last year, he was reportedly lambasted. German reliance on Russian energy undermined its leverage, especially considering its limited energy options amid its efforts to mitigate carbon emissions. As a sign of the Greens’ long-term ideological influence, and of Germany’s differences with nuclear-loving France, nuclear energy is off the table in Germany. It prepares to shut down its final three plants this year. Besides energy concerns, many Germans have an appreciation of Russian heritage and culture, with a corresponding willingness to hear out its political arguments and positions.
Then Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began. As, over just a few days, countries around the world rushed to indirectly support Ukraine’s defense through sanctions, goods, and arms, in Germany, behind-the-scenes policy discussions produced a domino effect. Permitting allies to send German weapons to Ukraine prompted the question of why Germany wouldn’t just directly send arms itself. Announcements of a newly bolstered military budget quickly followed, and Germany consented to blocking Russian banks from the SWIFT payment transferring network. Observers framed Scholz’s announcements as a “historic u-turn” in German policy—but Baerbock had his back. “When our peaceful order is being attacked,” she said, “we need to face up to this new reality.”
Still, a cultural attachment to pacifism runs deep among the German population, including—and in some ways, especially—among the Greens, a party founded on nonviolence. In conversations in the days following Scholz’s announced measures, fellow students and older Germans expressed apprehension about the country’s militaristic posture. As menacing ecological and geopolitical forces brew, Germany continues strive for a delicate balance, guarding against the impulses that shaped its own dark history, while ensuring it isn’t complicit in the murderous campaigns of strongmen abroad. ▩