Tag Archive for: Angela Merkel

Has Angela Merkel no shame?

When Angela Merkel left the German chancellorship in December 2021, after 16 years in power, she had a credible claim to being one of the greatest politicians of the 21st century (so far). Now, after three years of deafening silence, and with her legacy in shambles, she is promoting her forthcoming political memoir. Her silence was more persuasive.

She gave her first interview to the German weekly Der Spiegel, defending major policies that helped to shape Germany and Europe as we know them today. Among these were her appeasement of Russia, which adhered to the Cold War principle of ‘change through trade’ (Wandel durch Handel); her welcoming of more than one million refugees (mostly from Syria and the Middle East) in 2015; and the phaseout of Germany’s nuclear power plants.

A fourth issue concerns not a policy but the lack of one. Owing to Merkel’s failure to do anything noticeable to adapt the German economy to this century’s technological challenges, the country remains under-digitalised, with embarrassingly poor internet access, an absurdly overgrown bureaucracy, governing institutions that still use fax machines and once-dominant companies that can no longer compete with their American and Asian counterparts. German highways and bridges are crumbling, trains regularly run late and major infrastructure projects (like Berlin’s rail station and airport) take two or three times longer than they would in Poland or even Romania.

Where once Germans heaped scorn on Poles for supposedly being foolish and incompetent, now the tables have turned. Visit Germany nowadays and you may find that you cannot even pay for breakfast with your credit card. You will have to run to an ATM, but you may find that it is broken or does not accept Visa or Mastercard (as is the case two-thirds of the time). And don’t even think about connecting to wi-fi. You will find better access (and a more dynamic information-technology sector) in Belarus—a Russian vassal state.

Moreover, Merkel did nothing during her 16 years in power to prod the industries that Germany prides itself on—chemicals, pharmaceuticals, internal-combustion vehicles—to adapt to the 21st century, and now it shows. The German army, meanwhile, is regularly an object of ridicule in the European press.

If Germans prefer to use fax machines and avoid the internet, that is their business. Unfortunately, though, their government’s decisions affect all of Europe. Merkel’s moral argument for providing aid and shelter to refugees in 2015 is uncontroversial. But surely she should have known that immigration on such a massive scale would produce a populist backlash, not only in Germany but throughout Europe. Merkel made a show of standing up for liberal democratic values, but her policy yielded an assault on them. The result was weaker liberal democracy and less immigration.

Similarly, by stubbornly insisting on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipeline projects, Merkel and other German leaders empowered a dangerous dictator who had revisionist designs on eastern Europe. And by blocking NATO from offering a ‘membership action plan’ to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 Bucharest summit, Germany effectively invited Russia to invade. Anyone with an elementary knowledge of Russia’s foreign policy knew that the Kremlin would exploit the resulting uncertainty.

In her Spiegel interview, Merkel blames others for this litany of failures. She says she was not the only one against a NATO accession process for Ukraine and Georgia; but is that supposed to excuse her? Europeans took their cues from Germany in those days, and Merkel’s voice mattered more than others—as she well knows.

Similarly, Merkel is still repeating the canard that Nord Stream was a purely economic project, even though it obviously was not. In defending appeasement of Russia, she argues that Poland and Ukraine did not mind having gas transit through their territories as long as they profited from it. But the controversy around Nord Stream was that by circumventing Poland and Ukraine, it diminished whatever influence they had vis-a-vis Moscow. Merkel decided that cheaper gas was more important than Polish or Ukrainian security. In the end, her approach brought an energy crisis and was one of the causes of a new land war on the European continent. The result was no cheap energy and no security.

Merkel’s decision, following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, to phase out Germany’s nuclear power plants also empowered Russia by making the German economy even more dependent on Russian hydrocarbons. Again, such choices could still be defensible if we lived in blissful ignorance of Vladimir Putin’s true character. But after 2008, and especially after 2014, there was no longer any question about who he was and what he intended to do.

Merkel herself was repeatedly warned. As early as 2006, Radek Sikorski, then Poland’s defence minister, was comparing the Nord Stream project to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the secret 1939 agreement between Hitler and Stalin not to attack each other). Five years later, he was still beating the same drum, warning that Poland and Europe had more to fear from German passivity than from German power.

Merkel ignored these arguments. During her long tenure, Germany tried to trade Eastern European security for cheap energy, abandoned an existing renewable-energy source, and gave nativist populists a potent campaign issue. She made Europe less safe from threats both foreign and domestic. Today, with Germany mired in a leadership crisis and buffeted by new global headwinds, Merkel continues to tell herself that she did everything right.

German defence spending: Gewehre versus Butter

In March, President Trump claimed that Germany owed ‘vast sums of money’ to the US and NATO for failing to meet NATO’s aspirational (but not enforced) defence spending standard of at least 2% of GDP. Just five of the alliance’s members currently spend more than 2% of GDP on defence: the US, the UK, Greece, Poland and Estonia, but no NATO ally has been singled out by the new US administration as much as Germany has.

In fact, German defence spending has been increasing in real terms since 2014–15, when all NATO members agreed to the Wales Summit Declaration. Some commentators have said that the declaration committed Germany to spending 2% of GDP by 2024, but the document’s wording is more subtle:

Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level will:

– halt any decline in defence expenditure;
– aim to increase defence expenditure in real terms as GDP grows;
– aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO Capability Targets and filling NATO’s capability shortfalls.

While spending 2% of GDP is still the goal for NATO countries, the Wales Summit Declaration doesn’t commit them to reaching that level by 2024—they only need to increase their spending in real terms over the decade from 2014 to 2024. The agreement’s intent was not to precipitate a rapid increase in defence spending, but rather to reverse the downward trend in NATO countries’ defence budgets, most of which had declined substantially after the end of the Cold War.

To get to 2% of GDP by 2024, Germany would have to double its defence spending in real terms to about €70 billion in the space of just seven years (see the graph below). In 2017, the government’s planned total spending represents roughly 44% of GDP—or about €1.4 trillion. That means defence expenditure in 2017 is budgeted at about 2.6% of total government spending.

German defence spending, 2008 to 2024

Note: Percentages are defence spending as a proportion of GDP.

Germany could clearly afford to spend more on defence—at the very least, spending more on maintenance and sustainment should probably be a matter of urgency. But the issue is one of guns versus butter: money spent on defence can’t be spent on other things. Doubling defence spending would require the government to substantially increase revenue, decrease spending on other services, or borrow money—and probably a mixture of all three. That would be politically challenging enough, but modern Germans are particularly averse to militarism.

The historical reasons for Germany’s constrained defence spending largely still exist. That it carries responsibility for two world wars is something neither Germany nor its neighbours have forgotten in the ensuing 70 years. A €70 billion defence budget would make Germany the biggest (continental) European military power, and Berlin is well aware that its fellow Europeans are ‘skeptical, even fearful, of a militarily powerful Germany’.

So Germany is in a bit of a bind. Its peaceful reunification and strong economic growth over the last 25 years, combined with recent global events, position it well to take a larger role in European and international security—for which a larger defence budget is likely a prerequisite. But at the same time, Europeans are suddenly remembering why they didn’t want a powerful Germany in the first place. Right on cue, ‘a historical dilemma is relevant again’, unearthing old fears that Germany will use its dominance to assert its own interests.

A determinedly pacifist culture has prevailed in post-war Germany. The German government’s assertion in its 2016 defence white paper (PDF) that the country should forge a more active role in international security and increase its military contributions was a fundamentally new idea ‘in the German political context’ (PDF). But it’s nevertheless taking steps in that direction. By 2024, the Bundeswehr should grow by 20,000 soldiers to 198,000. Germany is involved in the fight against Islamic State, participates in the Mali and Afghanistan missions, and has taken the lead on the ‘enhanced Forward Presence Battalion Battlegroup’ in Lithuania. But it may be difficult for the German government to continue to sell a progressively larger military role in the world.

Defence might be more of a priority if the average German had a greater sense of threat. But Germans are only moderately concerned about Russia, with 32% saying in October 2016 that they were worried about a possible war between Russia and the West. And even if war did break out, only 40% of Germans polled by the Pew Research Center thought Germany should come to the aid of its NATO allies. In a January poll that asked Germans whether they felt safe, 73% responded in the affirmative, and a slim majority of 57% agreed that Germany is well protected from terrorism. A majority still prefer Germany to play a restrained role in international crisis management (though that number has fallen in recent years, from 62% in January 2015 to 53% in October 2016 (PDF)), and only 34% believe defence spending should increase.

Given such low political support for increasing defence spending above current levels, it’d take a monumental change in threat perception for Germans to support a doubling of defence spending. Even the current ambitions may be annulled if Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union loses the upcoming election: her major challenger, Martin Schulz, says that the 2% NATO target ‘most definitely won’t happen’ if he becomes chancellor. At this point, it’s probably safe to say it won’t happen anyway.