Germany Rearms
Since late 2021 Germany has been governed by a coalition not led, for the first time since 2005, by Angela Merkel. Instead, her former finance minister and vice chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat (SPD), has assembled a coalition with the Greens and the economically liberal FDP. That new coalition proclaimed the time had come for a great modernisation of both German state and society, proclaiming themselves an alliance for “freedom, justice, and sustainability”.
But now its priorities are shifting. Just one day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Scholz, supported by FDP finance minister Christian Lindner, authorised a one-time investment of €100bn for the German armed forces. They also committed to a long-standing NATO target of 2% of GDP to be spent on defence. The SPD and Green parliamentary parties were caught completely unaware of this. They knew a one-off investment was being considered, but it seems no one knew the actual amount to be spent, and Lindner aside it seems few knew Scholz was going to publicly commit to the 2% target. Recent polling indicates that 78% of the German public support these measures.
Germany has long resisted the NATO target, arguing that, for instance, spending on international development and conflict prevention ought to count towards the 2% target. Strong opposition has historically come from Scholz’ own party, the SPD, and from his biggest coalition partner, the Greens. This is not to say these parties are broadly pacifist, they are not. Although the Greens have their roots in the Cold War era peace movement, it was an SPD/Green coalition which took Germany into Afghanistan in 2003.
The Greens have made half-hearted attempts to redefine Scholz’ pledge. Long gone are the pacifist days of the 1980s when the party was closely linked to the peace movement. In 2022, their best hope in the face of the fait accompli is to argue that investments in renewables might constitute investment in strategic autonomy from Russian hydrocarbons. This, however, is likely to fall on deaf ears as long as bombs fall on Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, even supposed German leftists are calling for ordinary Germans to turn down their heaters to reduce Russian gas imports.
Conservative parties (CDU/CSU) support this €100bn investment fund despite their usual fetishism of the Schwarze Null (lit. black zero), a balanced budget now anchored within the German constitution in a way comparable to Aotearoa’s own Public Finance Act. Only weeks ago, the same parties opposed an investment vehicle (similar to the one now proposed) for the purposes of the green transition as violating the German constitution. It seems military expediency has weakened their resolve for the moment, but they are unlikely to allow the Greens to use this as precedent. Unlikely, in other words, to allow for investment which would raise public debt to “unsustainable” levels, even as the planet burns. The far-right (AfD) meanwhile is torn between its support for Vladimir Putin’s regime and its desire for increased military spending.
Shortly following Scholz’ announcement, Lindner referred to renewable energies as “freedom energies”, which would reduce Germany’s strategic dependence on Russia. This is a big departure for a party like the FDP which has generally embraced carbon capture and other highly speculative, technology-based solutions to the climate crisis. No doubt freedom in this domain, in Lindner’s imagination, will not be guaranteed by the state, but rather secured by the market through private investment.
Russian Aggression and the Politics of the Nazi Past
As mentioned, polling suggests that a significant majority of the German public support greater investment in the armed forces. Given the relative reluctance of Germans after reunification to engage in military adventurism abroad this appears at first a volte face due to the major shift in the European post-war order now occurring. Perhaps the German public is finally responding to long-standing calls by pundits for Germany to “take more responsibility” for the maintenance of the international order, if necessary by military means. But there are other factors at play.
Overwhelming support for an apparent remilitarisation of German foreign policy can be surprising only to those who take at face value Germany’s historical rejection of the use of armed force in international politics. At its height, the (West-)German army could mobilise more than a million professional and conscript soldiers. In the 1960s, Germany spent more than 4% of GDP on defence. Its officer corps, well into the late 1970s, was full of veterans of the Second World War who had fought and murdered on behalf of Nazi Germany, and nowhere more so than on the Eastern Front. Millions of men were deployed there in support of genocide not just against Jews and Roma, but against Slavs. Nazi Germany planned the murder, largely by starvation, of more than 30 million people across Eastern Europe, including in contemporary Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Though they sustained heavy losses in their fight against the Red Army, most of these Wehrmacht veterans eventually returned home.
These men denied their own crimes and instead argued they had done nothing but fight bravely for their country to stem the tide of Communism. They perpetuated the myth that the Wehrmacht had been “clean”, that war crimes and genocide had been committed primarily by the SS. Cold War anticommunism amplified the strength of these ideas and even in the 1990s Germans mobilised in their tens of thousands across the country to protest a touring exhibition documenting the German army’s crimes during the Second World War. Many had grown up with the idea that their father or grandfather had simply fought for his country and had done nothing wrong, had perhaps not even known of the genocide, and now had too much invested in those stories. In effect, Nazi propaganda, including the lie that Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union had pre-empted an attack by Stalin, endured for decades after the war’s end. Mobilisation by neo-Nazis around these protests thus fell on fertile ground.
If many Germans grew up with stories of their fathers or grandfathers fighting to defend Western Europe from Russian aggression, then it is easy to imagine these younger generations now taking up the old call. A lack of opposition to Germany’s mobilisation of large amounts of capital for a strategic standoff with Russia needs to be viewed in light of these older exculpatory narratives.
Outlook
In the early 1980s, millions across Europe protested perceived NATO brinkmanship. Today, in the absence of an organised peace movement, in the age of hyper-politics there are only immediate demands to be made of state institutions and individual actions to be taken. You either demand of politicians to invest in rearmament and energy security or you turn down your heater.
There is no mediation, no organisation, no longer term theory of action or of change which the left might embrace. It is these structures which must be built, must be revived in opposition to the warmongering consensus which now threatens to draw us all into a confrontation which might lead to catastrophe even more rapidly than the climate crisis. It is in this vein that the left must oppose the knee-jerk Russophobia now rampant while at the same time condemning Russian aggression and acting in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and refugees from both Russia and Ukraine.
The outlook is bleak. In Ukraine, if the war continues, millions more will be displaced and tens of thousands will die. Their best hope, continued resistance, is also that route most likely to lead to ever more brutal escalation of warfare. In Russia, the impact of the financial front now opened in this conflict is already evident. But it is unclear whether opposition is growing, even as repression becomes more severe, or whether the regime is stabilising. But in any case, financial warfare is unlikely to lead to regime change.
Given the abject military failures of the Russian army so far, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin likely now have one thing in common: they are both fighting for their lives. The former as he evades Russian assassins sent to decapitate the Ukrainian state in a desperate bid to break the resistance. The latter as he faces a quagmire of his own making and domestic opposition keen to exploit the ruling class rifts an extended military campaign might reveal.
Jan Tattenberg recently completed his PhD in contemporary German history at the University of Oxford.