Three times in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, its chancellors have made strategic choices that opened the door to a better future for Europe. Today, there’s not just an opportunity but an urgent need for a fourth such historic moment. If the country’s new coalition government under Friedrich Merz manages to seize the chance of this crisis, both Germany and Europe will go forward. If it fails, then by the end of the 2020s, both may have fallen backwards farther and faster than most of us could have imagined into our worst nightmares even a few weeks ago.
The big difference with those three earlier pivotal moments is this: in 1949, 1969 and 1989, the Federal Republic’s policy was fundamentally aligned with that of the United States of America. This time, Germany has to build a stronger, free, democratic and Ukraine-supporting Europe against the current policy of the US. The most staggering moment of the German election was when the lifelong Atlanticist, Merz, declared that Europe must “really achieve independence from the USA”. (When compared with Emmanuel Macron’s almost British sycophancy in the White House, Germany’s prospective chancellor is sounding almost more Gaullist than the French president.)
The 1949 choice of Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic’s great founding chancellor, to integrate the western half of his divided country firmly in the emerging transatlantic geopolitical West, and into a more integrated Europe, was in tune with the post-1945, Cold War orientation of both the US and the new state’s key European partners, France and Britain. The opening to the east in 1969 by Chancellor Willy Brandt, his Ostpolitik, chimed with détente policies being pursued by Washington, Paris and London. The determination of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1989 to embed German unification in further steps of European unification, including a common European currency, was welcomed by the US and opened the door to the French acceptance of German unity. In all three cases, there were major reservations in one or other Western capital — the most shortsighted of them being Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to German unification — but in the broad sweep of history, Germany’s big strategic choices were aligned with those of a US-led geopolitical West.
Today, that is no more the case. So long as Donald Trump is in the White House, there will be no ‘West’ as a single geopolitical actor. On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we had the scandalous spectacle of the US voting with Russia against a British-European United Nations resolution in support of Ukraine. America has now joined the transactional great and middle powers of the BRICS in assaulting what’s left of the liberal international order that America itself built. The international relations scholar, John Ikenberry, once described the US as a liberal leviathan. Today, the liberal leviathan has become a rogue elephant.
The free Europe we have built since 1949 is, therefore, under attack from inside and out, and the two kinds of threat are intertwined. An anti-liberal, populist nationalist Europe is gaining ground everywhere. The ‘chancellor candidate’ of the AfD, Alice Weidel, was not wrong, from her point of view, to describe her party’s election result — one-fifth of the overall vote, clear election winner in eastern Germany, second-largest party in the new Bundestag — as a “historic success”. Shockingly, it was supported from Washington. The rant by the US vice-president, J.D. Vance, at the Munich Security Conference was an election speech for the AfD. In response, Merz caustically observed that the interventions in German democratic politics from Washington are “not less dramatic than those from Moscow”.
After Germany’s unification in 1990, we celebrated the fact that Germany has become a ‘normal’ European country. Now, in a sense, we must mourn it. For to be a normal European country today is to be one in which the liberal Centre is drinking in the last chance saloon. If the liberal Centre doesn’t make the changes that will win voters back from the populist extremes, Marine Le Pen will become French president in 2027, the AfD will win the German elections in 2029, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK will overtake the Conservatives.
The good news is that there’s growing clarity across mainstream German and European liberal democratic parties about what needs to be done. Europe has to save Ukraine. We must rapidly build a much stronger common European defence, including Britain. All of us, but especially Germany, have to restore economic dynamism without reversing the green transition and, yet, addressing the concerns about socio-economic and geographical inequality that have driven voters to the populists. We must control irregular migration and yet make a success of the integration of large numbers of immigrants, which is the only way to address our acute demographic challenge.
How to do it? How to pay for it? The obstacles inside Germany are immense. A country famous for its automobile engines is now most notable for its brakes — including a constitutionally anchored ‘debt brake’. Yet it’s also true that a German chancellor has immense possibilities to steer the country in a new direction if, like Adenauer, Brandt and Kohl, he has both the will and the skill to do so.
Traditionally, coalition talks between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would result in a set of compromises involving each party getting slices from a large and growing cake. But what if the cake is shrinking and two large new slices — more investment in defence and in the country’s neglected infrastructure — must be cut out of it? Obviously, Germany must somehow ease that debt brake, but if this is really to be a moment of strategic change — a true Zeitenwende — then Merz will have to follow his two great Christian Democratic predecessors, Adenauer and Kohl, and take a further big step towards a stronger Europe. For security, the defence industry, energy, the green transition and AI, Europe needs scale to hold its own in this world of bullying giants. The solutions don’t always have to involve classic Brussels-type integration, but they can’t just be national.
The biggest German brake of all is a state of mind — a curious mix of being at once too comfortable and too fearful. As a lover of German compound nouns, I was delighted to see the German political scientist, Karl-Rudolf Korte, capture this brilliantly by characterising Germany as a Wolferwartungsland (a country constantly expecting the wolf to arrive). But today, the wolves are actually there: two big ones at the door, Putin and Trump, and one small one, the AfD, which is already inside the hen coop.
To see off those wolves, Germans need one quality above all: courage. Let them take advice from their national poet. “Property lost,” wrote Goethe, “something lost!... Honour lost, much lost!... Courage lost, everything lost!’
Timothy Garton Ash’s books include In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent