Boots on the ground

Does Germany realise what the Zeitenwende means?

Photo by Touko Aikioniemi on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Europe — and Germany — have entered a new era. As Olaf Scholz so famously put it, Vladimir Putin’s decision to try to change the continent’s borders at the barrel of a gun marked a Zeitenwende in modern European history. Not for the first time, the belief that treaties alone could protect borders from revanchist dictators proved to be a mirage.

The era of the so-called “peace dividend,” when European governments could afford to tilt at windmills rather than invest in defence, is over. This new reality will force Europe to become more pragmatic — and less utopian — across the board. Inevitably, it will mean an end to wasteful energy subsidies that have cost Germany billions while barely reducing carbon emissions. It will also drive reform in the labour market, where a system designed around mid-20th-century life expectancy has left a third of adults now living in retirement.

There are reasons for cautious optimism that the current government will attempt such reforms. Katharina Reiche (CDU), who runs the powerful Economy Ministry, is the first minister in years to speak openly about how renewable subsidies distort the energy market and how Germans must accept working into their seventies. Whether she can push through such reforms against the will of a dying Social Democratic Party — and a Chancellor seemingly afraid to enact the pledges he campaigned on — remains to be seen.

At the very least, the fact that the CDU’s broadly sensible manifesto for February’s election won a narrow victory gives a glimmer of hope that the German public are also ready for the changes the Zeitenwende demands (though many of these changes were inevitable anyway).

Where the penny still hasn’t dropped is on defence. On one hand, straight-talking Defence Minister Boris Pistorius is by far the most popular politician in the country — despite, or perhaps because of, his assertion that the German army must be “war ready.” On the other, the debate about Europe’s future security architecture is completely divorced from reality. One cannot escape the impression that Germans believe a handful of new fighter jets and the odd extra tank will somehow restore stability.

It is almost a cliché to invoke Germany’s own history, but given its recency, Germans really should know better. A country divided between a larger West and an East after a deal struck over its head by strongmen in Moscow and Washington? A fragile, heavily guarded border more than 1,000 kilometres long running through the nation? One half deeply integrated into the democratic West, the other condemned to poverty under Russian authoritarian rule?