CHATHAM HOUSE - Research paper - Competing visions of international order 10 Germany: An internationalist vision in crisis Dr Constanze Stelzenmüller Director, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution

 CHATHAM  HOUSE - Research paper - Competing visions of international order 

10 Germany: An internationalist vision in crisis

Dr Constanze Stelzenmüller

Director, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution

For decades, Germany has been a linchpin of the EU and loyal to international institutions. But domestic political upheaval and problematic policies on Russia, Ukraine and energy have left it vulnerable to global turbulence.

Germany’s commitment to and dependence on the norms, institutions and politics of the international order have been somewhat singular among the large post-1945 Western democracies. After the Second World War, this dedication was necessary to persuade the world that Germany was truly determined to break with its 20th-century record of war and genocide, which had left it physically and morally devastated – an occupied and divided pariah among nations. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, West and East Germany alike leveraged the international order to boost their status, prosperity and security despite the constraints of their limited sovereignty. From 1990, a reunified and now fully sovereign Germany found that the US unipolar moment, with Russia weakened, the European Union and NATO steadily enlarging, and China just beginning to open up to international trade, together created conditions for an extraordinary surge of Germany’s economic and political power – enough to give it de facto hegemonic status, at least in Europe.

But, beginning with the global financial crisis in 2008, a series of shocks, crises and wars (as well as less tangible tectonic-plate movements) have come together to produce a nearly complete deterioration in Germany’s geostrategic environment. And there is a distinct possibility of worse to come.

Germany is uniquely vulnerable in this moment. Whether its elites or its citizens are prepared for the immense challenges they face, much less whether they have a vision for the future of the international order, is an open question. The choices that Germany makes will have consequences not only for itself but for all of Europe – and beyond it, inasmuch as a coherent Europe might have an important role to play in an increasingly escalation-prone global environment.

From pariah to pillar: the Cold War

With the help of an economic miracle enabled by the Marshall Plan, post-war West Germany223 (often called the Bonn Republic after its capital) raced to establish itself as a peer in the community of civilized nations. The prerequisite was the promulgation of the 1949 Basic Law. This set out a carefully crafted parliamentary democracy with strong horizontal and vertical separation and balance of powers, as well as special protections for political pluralism and civil and individual rights. The objective was to create the foundations of an anti-Weimar Republic: a stable equilibrium of state, economy and society that would be exceptionally resistant to disruption.

West Germany’s understanding of its role within the international order rested on a distinctly idealist set of principles. While grounded in trauma and shame, and asserted with genuine conviction, these guiding ideas tended to be balanced in practice with a robust pragmatism (by no means excluding opportunism 

or hypocrisy).

Wiedergutmachung (atonement): West Germany early on defined its relationships with Israel, France and, later, Poland as key pillars of its strategy of atonement and reconciliation for the crimes of the Nazi era. The commitment to the security of Israel was later even declared a Staatsraison (foundational principle of German statehood). That said, processing the full extent of German guilt, and offering reparations to all the countries and populations that had been attacked by Nazi Germany, took until well into the 2000s, and remains incomplete. And, while Bonn supplied Tel Aviv with nuclear-capable submarines, it also developed lucrative energy and arms trading relationships with a number of Israel’s Arab enemies and Iran.

Westbindung (cleaving to the West): West Germany was a founding member in 1951 of the European Coal and Steel Community, the EU’s precursor. It joined NATO in 1955, having had to stand up a 12-division army from scratch to do so because the Basic Law had deliberately omitted the creation of armed forces. Finally, it joined the United Nations in 1973, at the same time as East Germany, thus completing the triad of membership of international institutions that defined the ambit of its diplomacy in the Cold War. The Bonn Republic became a committed international institutionalist, deploying considerable diplomatic and financial resources to the European organizations, the UN and its sub-organizations, and NATO. Its closest and most important bilateral relationship within the West was with the United States; it hosted hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and an unspecified number of US nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, West Germany began to balance Westbindung with Ostpolitik, a policy of engagement with the Soviet Union under the motto of Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement), which left aside its Eastern European neighbours and was viewed with considerable reservations in other Western capitals.

Verrechtlichung (rule of law): West Germany was throughout the Cold War a dedicated contributor to international norm-setting efforts, such as the UN human rights conventions, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the European legal system. Uniquely for a major Western democracy, influential German political theorists, such as Ernst-Otto Czempiel and Jürgen Habermas, viewed what they saw as an inexorably thickening web of international legal rules, and especially of universal human rights, as a step towards a global normative order that would increasingly constrain and ultimately delegitimize the use of force.

West Germany was throughout the Cold War a dedicated contributor to international norm-setting efforts, such as the UN human rights conventions, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the European legal system.

Zivilmacht (civilian power): As its prosperity grew, West Germany became adept at wielding the entire panoply of non-military power – trade relations, aid, cultural diplomacy and political foundations – to promote development, good governance and human rights, as well as to cultivate good relations and its own interests worldwide. At the same time, the Bundeswehr (federal armed forces) had half a million men under arms at the height of the Cold War, all of them under NATO command. West Germany spent an average of 3 per cent of its GDP on defence annually, albeit a defence that was singularly concentrated on defending the 1,700-kilometre border with communist East Germany against a Soviet attack until the expected onset of nuclear war.

As its wealth, power and international recognition grew, the Bonn Republic somewhat paradoxically tended to emphasize the constraints on its agency, whether external (occupation, alliances, norms) or self-chosen (Selbstbindung) – a sometimes more, sometimes less conscious habit that lasted well beyond reunification. The constraints were often real, but the reference to them was also deployed as deflection: to avoid choice, to pretend that a certain choice was inevitable, or to suggest that a German national interest was identical with European or alliance interests. Few West German policymakers were more adroit at this than the wily Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who was foreign minister between 1974 and 1992.

Reunification and the reluctant hegemon

In 1989, a democratic groundswell that had begun in Poland and Hungary toppled the Berlin Wall. It ended 44 years of communist rule in East Germany and led to reunification in 1990, as well as to the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Democratic revolutions in Latin America, Asia and Africa followed suit. The EU and NATO expanded; by 2010, almost all of Europe was ‘whole and free’. Germany, now with the largest economy in Europe, found itself ‘encircled by friends’, in the much-cited words of former chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Nowhere was Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the ‘end of history’ and the victory of the West through the global spread of democratic transformation, economic interdependence and a US-led international order more enthusiastically embraced than in Germany – because it was misunderstood as confirming the country’s redemption. Once a pariah, suddenly Germany was a model; the apocalyptic vision of a nuclear Judgment Day was replaced by the shining vista of Kantian peace.224 Calls for the abolition of NATO or of the Bundeswehr were common in political debates.

Cheered on by Washington (President George H. W. Bush in 1989 had famously addressed Germany as a ‘partner in leadership’),225 the new Berlin Republic saw itself as the linchpin of the newly enlarged EU: if the US was first among equals in NATO, Germany would assume that role in Europe. And, to a very considerable degree, it did – not least because of chancellors like Kohl (1982–98) and Angela Merkel (2005–21), who over their long tenures were skilful and determined brokers of big-tent European consensus.226 Germany’s smaller neighbours often aligned with its policies; the economies of the EU’s new eastern members, especially, became deeply integrated with German manufacturing industries. The result was – after a near-decade of economic downturn between the late 1990s and early 2000s – an extraordinary growth in economic and political power that by the 2010s had turned the country into a de facto (if reluctant) hegemon in Europe.227

However, the eurozone crisis and the profound European cleavages over Russia, Ukraine and energy policy soon showed the limits of Germany’s ability to lead (or, as its critics said, to impose its preferences). In the case of Russia particularly, the warnings of its Eastern European neighbours, which many in Berlin dismissed, turned out to be correct.

Despite the fact that their country was by that point one of the world’s five largest economies, Germany’s elites continued to think of it as a middle power in global terms. Much energy was expended in diplomatic circles on conceptualizing Germany’s international role as that of an essentially benevolent player actively seeking multilateralism-based solutions for global public goods problems. In 2012, the government nonetheless published what came to be known as the Gestaltungsmächtekonzept (shaping powers concept), which suggested that Germany might be considered a power, among others, capable of shaping globalization.228 In 2014, the federal foreign ministry undertook a comprehensive review of its structures and created an entire new division intended to support stabilization and nation-building in the non-Western world.

But some were scandalized when a think-tank project charted the country’s strategic relationships, dividing key countries into allies, challengers (including China and Russia) and spoilers.229 At the Munich Security Conference in 2014, President Joachim Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen took the stage to announce in coordinated speeches that Germany would in future exercise an international responsibility more commensurate with its power – acting ‘earlier, more decisively, and more substantially as a good partner’.230 Russia invaded and annexed Crimea three weeks later; in retrospect, this was a key waypoint in Germany’s strategic downturn. Merkel’s reaction – to initiate the so-called Minsk agreements, which failed to stop Russia’s aggression in Donbas, and to refuse weapons deliveries to Ukraine – arguably put an end to the ‘Munich consensus’ before it had even taken hold.

One aspect in which reunified Germany differed decisively from its West and East German predecessors was that it overcame its aversion to using the military as an instrument of power – albeit under considerable pressure from its allies and after a lengthy, contorted national debate over the constitutional legality of employing military force. Between 1991 and 2010, the Bundeswehr joined multinational missions in Afghanistan, Africa, Asia, the Balkans and the Mediterranean; at the high point of its deployments, in 2002, there were more than 10,000 German soldiers serving abroad.231 Over the course of those two decades, the German military underwent significant cultural shifts, from a highly specialized focus on territorial defence throughout the Cold War to a disparate sequence of missions representing largely tactical responses to international events. These responses included: sending a handful of medics via a UN mission in Cambodia (1992); providing an underutilized UN support brigade in Somalia (1993); establishing an air bridge between Nairobi and Kigali (1994); manning stabilization missions in the Balkans (1995 onwards); and supplying a medley of expeditionary stabilization and combat troops in Afghanistan (2002–21). However, these shifts also meant drastic downsizing and ultimately professionalization. Conscription was suspended in 2011; the Bundeswehr had shrunk to 180,000 personnel by 2014.

Still, there was a remarkable consensus in German debates that the events which had required these military missions were – while serious enough to warrant intervention – temporary or at least very distant anomalies. Protected as Germany supposedly was by a cordon of neighbours and allies, there was very little consciousness in the first decade or two after reunification that the land and sea borders of the European bloc are attenuated and ultimately indefensible, that the country shared a continent with a Russia that was becoming increasingly restive, and that it was encircled by zones of rising tension in Africa, the Balkans, the South Caucasus and the Middle East. Germany’s hyper-globalized strategic posture – its security outsourced to the US, its energy needs to Russia and its export-led growth to China232 – was premised on the blithe assumption that the inexorable logic of global convergence towards liberal democracy, market economics and peace would continue apace. Not only would its neighbourhood become a peaceful and well-regulated market for German goods and services, but rivals and adversaries farther afield would also become domesticated and herbivorous, or fade and disappear, like the dinosaurs.

Germany’s hyper-globalized strategic posture – its security outsourced to the US, its energy needs to Russia and its export-led growth to China – was premised on the blithe assumption that the inexorable logic of global convergence towards liberal democracy, market economics and peace would continue apace.

Yet there were early warning signs that the world, and even Europe, was not bending towards Kantian utopia: the genocide in Rwanda (1994); the wars in Yugoslavia (1992–95); and 9/11 and the ensuing waves of terrorism in Europe, which were reinforced by the war in Iraq (2003–11). The lights started flashing red from 2008 on: the global financial crisis and the Russia–Georgia war (2008); the eurozone crisis (2010); Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea (2014); the migration crisis (2015) that fuelled the rise of the hard right, Brexit and the election of a US president with a distinct hostility towards Europe and Germany (2016); the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party entering Germany’s parliament (2017); and a Russian proxy war in eastern Ukraine that claimed 10,000 lives between 2014 and 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion on 24 February. Nonetheless it took until 2023 for Germany to adopt its first national security strategy document, making it the last large Western democracy to do so.233

2025: Everything everywhere all at once

When Germany’s ‘traffic light’ coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Free Democratic Party and the Greens took office in 2021, it was determined to overcome the 16 years of delayed reforms and cautious incrementalism under Chancellor Merkel with a forceful and comprehensive transformation agenda. But what it had in mind was social justice, fiscal discipline and climate change adaptation, not war in Europe.

To its credit, the government refocused immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine. Chancellor Olaf Scholz rose to the moment with his Zeitenwende (historic turn) speech three days after the beginning of the invasion. Today, Germany is almost fully decoupled from Russia regarding imports of fossil fuels;234 it is spending 2 per cent of its GDP on defence and is permanently stationing a brigade in Lithuania; and it is Ukraine’s second largest supporter with money and weapons after the US.235

Three years later, however, the Zeitenwende is incomplete and faltering. Defence and defence-industrial reforms are mired in bureaucratic delays. Scholz had no illusions about President Vladimir Putin or Russia, but he stubbornly (in his words, ‘prudently’) refused to give Ukraine weapons and ammunition in the quantities and at the speed it needed to succeed, citing the risk of escalation by Moscow.

By November 2024, the traffic light coalition had become tarnished by very ordinary failures of governance: a bungled heat-pump law, a nepotism scandal, a Constitutional Court judgment forbidding it to use accounting tricks to finance its climate-transformation plans.236 Its three parties had already been trounced in the June European Parliament elections, but, while the opposition conservatives remained the largest party, the real winners were the far-right AfD and the new far-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party.237 Tensions in Berlin were mounting throughout the latter months of 2024. These stemmed in part from three regional elections in eastern Germany in September where the AfD and the BSW made significant inroads, but also from within the coalition over differences on how to manage the budget and the constitutional debt brake. On 6 November 2024, Chancellor Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner, ending the coalition, triggering a confidence vote on 16 December and prompting early federal elections on 23 February 2025 – which were won by the conservative CDU/CSU under the leadership of Friedrich Merz.

Germany’s new chancellor finds himself before a grim panorama: Russia back on the offensive in Ukraine; a horrific resurgence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the potential to set off a regional conflagration; a potentially Islamist power transition in Syria; a second Trump administration that in the course of less than two months revealed itself as far more globally revisionist and hostile to Europe than the first; ever-deepening authoritarian consolidation in China; a largely hedging Global South; a growing alignment among the West’s adversaries (China, Iran, North Korea and Russia); and far-right movements bent on constitutional ‘regime change’ surging across much of the West. On top of it all, Russia is ramping up its disinformation, cyberattacks, espionage and sabotage across Europe with, apparently, a special emphasis on Germany and France.238 (Germany’s security agencies have grown conspicuously more willing to acknowledge and attribute such acts recently.)239

This all looks perilously like a wholesale unravelling of the post-Cold War order, and with it a crumbling of most of the foundational assumptions of Germany’s strategic posture. While France’s parliamentary election in July 2024 did not produce a far-right government, it led to extraordinary political volatility and it has certainly diminished President Emmanuel Macron. Europe’s already sputtering Franco-German motor is now even weaker.

Scholz’s government had held cabinet-level consultations with its counterpart in Poland. It had been quietly building out relationships with some countries (such as Norway), and eagerly reached out to the new Labour government in the UK. But Berlin appears entirely unprepared to play a greater role in leading and defending the European Union. In marked contrast to previous German governments, the traffic light coalition made little effort to articulate a vision of its own for Europe’s future; and in fact, other EU member states have become increasingly concerned by the German government’s tendency to vote against majority consensus on key items of European legislation. Scholz’s telephone call with Putin in November 2024, of which most European states were only informed ex post facto, aroused particular anger and disdain, and was seen as yet another instance of a German Sonderweg (unilateralist response).

In the Middle East, the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not only forced Berlin into a more confrontational relationship with Tel Aviv, but has also exacerbated tensions between Germany’s Jewish and Muslim citizens. Even in the case of a ceasefire or a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, there is no way back to detente (or gas deliveries) with Putin, who appears to harbour an implacable enmity towards not just Ukraine but also liberal modernity. Consequently, Ostpolitik 2.0, for the foreseeable future, means deterrence, defence and resilience.240 Scholz’s chancellery, apprehensive about scenarios of conflict between China and the US, had mostly sidelined the more critical stance of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Economics Minister Robert Habeck, both from the Greens, in a quest for smooth and stable relations with Beijing. Parts of German industry supported the chancellor vociferously. But the visible hardening of China’s support for Russia suggests this relationship, too, is on course to deteriorate, with incalculable consequences for Germany’s prosperity.

Yet the most dismaying prospect Scholz’s successor, Merz, faces is the one opening up in the US – the ally that rescued Germany from itself 80 years ago and put it back on a path of decency, democracy, prosperity and security. The second Trump administration will not just determine the future course of Washington’s foreign policy, alliances and willingness to underwrite a rules-based international order, but it will also shape the future of the US’s domestic liberal constitutional order. The potential effects of the decision made by US voters for the security of Europe and Germany could be severe.

Germany’s new leadership appears determined to rise to the moment by radically increasing spending on defence and infrastructure.

The disintegration of the German traffic light coalition in early November 2024 had been announcing itself for a while; but the fact that it took place on the day after the US elections seemed somehow fitting. Without the return of Donald Trump, Merz’s new grand coalition with the SPD would doubtlessly have pursued a foreign and security policy of continuity within the traditional paradigms of Westbindung, transatlanticism and continued EU integration. But the second Trump administration’s predatory extractive imperialism, its overtures to Russia, its disdain for Ukraine and Europe, and not least the repeated endorsements of the AfD by both Elon Musk and Vice-President JD Vance during the German election campaign sent shockwaves across the continent and appalled the Germans. Europeans are racing to protect Ukraine and to reconfigure their security order – a challenge that will require extraordinary exertions, especially of Berlin. Germany’s new leadership appears determined to rise to the moment by radically increasing spending on defence and infrastructure. Yet the continued rise of the AfD and the surprising return of the left-wing Die Linke, combined with enduring divisions within the democratic parties over Germany’s role in the world, could remain a domestic constraint on Berlin’s attempt to revise the country’s external posture.

Remarkably, Friedrich Merz, following his electoral victory, called not just for ‘independence’ from the US, but for talks with Britain and France on nuclear deterrence.241 Indeed, some of Berlin’s foreign policy elites had, for the first time in their country’s post-war history, been toying with the idea of a national nuclear deterrent.242 Because of the urgent need to upgrade Germany’s conventional deterrence and defence capabilities, Berlin is in no position to afford a nuclear option. But for a country with such high-minded dreams of Kantian peace, it is a bleakly ironic twist.