At this year’s Düsseldorf carnival parade, two political floats stood out. The first carried a model of the German Chancellor—branded “Scholz the ditherer”—being rammed in the back by a billy-goat labelled ‘Strack-Zimmermann’, the chair of the Bundestag’s defence committee. The second bore a papier-mâché German army tank, its body emblazoned with the lettering ‘Bundeswehr 2023’ and balanced, not on military-grade caterpillar tracks, but on a precarious bicycle frame, pedals and all. Each was a different critique of how the nation’s defence policy has responded to the war in Ukraine.
The Scholz float refers to the episode—much-discussed in the international press—of the Chancellor’s reluctance to supply Ukraine with Leopard 2A6 tanks, and thereby to sanction tank exports from other EU countries. The Bundeswehr float, by contrast, takes aim more generally at the recent attempts at military reform—promised by Scholz days after the invasion of Ukraine—which have seen mixed results.
The former float takes individual indecision, the latter institutional failing, to be the stumbling block of the new foreign policy direction. And while the two are intimately bound together, the very scale of planned reform lends itself more convincingly to a structural explanation. The Chancellor’s proposed programme, if successful, will negate half a century of the Germany’s foreign policy strategy. It will raise from the once dominant philosophy of complacent pacificism a state willing to lead Europe militarily as well as economically. And the birth pangs associated with its realisation may do more to explain Scholz’s dithering than any personal irresolution.
A Faustian foreign policy?
To understand Germany’s radical new approach to its military, we have to look back to the Cold War era, when the obdurate contours of today’s foreign policy were first hammered out. Modern Germany’s Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) is a direct descendant of the détente pursued under West German Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969-1974), who sought to avoid confrontation with the East. This approach was well articulated by Egon Bahr—one of Brandt’s close advisors—in a 1963 speech, where he suggested that East-West tensions were best eased with a “homeopathic” measures, fearing that anything more dramatic would trigger Soviet intervention. Bahr’s ideas developed into the diplomatic philosophy of “Wandel durch Handel”, or ‘change through trade’: the belief that a mutual integration of economic systems would most effectively overcome political differences of rival states, rather than military efforts. It had worked between Western European states—why not between East and West?
Such an approach once befitted the West German situation, and indeed appeared to be vindicated in 1991. However, its failures have since been laid bare by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Angela Merkel’s oft-romanticised Chancellorship of ‘sensible’ compromise is now marred by her pursuit of Nord Stream 2, against the urging of Germany’s allies, and particularly those in Eastern Europe. Worse, a recent report from the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) argues that Merkel-era foreign policy was led by business interests above national ones, rendering the doctrine of “Wandel durch Handel” as little more than a fig leaf over the primacy of capital. Nord Stream 2 was ill-advised not only because it increased Germany’s reliance on Russian gas; it also deprived Ukraine of its central role in gas storage and transit, weakening its international power vis-à-vis Russia. So it was, then, that when Russian troops blazed across Ukraine’s borders on the twenty-fourth of February last year, decades of German foreign policy went up in smoke.
Ostpolitik out of favour
Scholz recognised the need for foreign policy reconfiguration in a speech just three days after the invasion. In it, the key term was ‘Zeitenwende’—or ‘historic turning point’—marking the entry into a new period of European history and meaning (as he explains himself with Germanic bluntness) “that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” For Germany, adapting to this brave new world meant creating an “efficient, state-of-the-art, forward-thinking Bundeswehr” that could provide reliable protection from new imperial powers. ‘Wandel durch Handel’ now off the table, traditional hard power was its necessary Ersatz. The Chancellor promised to commit €100 billion to this end.
If the road to a modernised German military was not to be straightforwardly plied by a lump sum, it ought certainly to have eased the progress. Since the Cold War, Germany has fallen short of the 2% NATO defence investment guideline (agreed in 2006) to such an extent that it has saved the equivalent of 600 billion euros. By contrast, France and the UK exceeded the guideline in this period, overspending 67 billion and 315 billion, respectively. Scholz’s assumption, perhaps, was that if he could bring his nation’s spend in line with his allies’, the Bundeswehr would emerge as strong as ever from its decade-long hibernation.
The wrongheaded nature of this view is now clear. That the Federal Commissioner for the Armed Forces, Eva Högl, felt it necessary to call for a tripling of Scholz’s promised 100 billion earlier this year, speaks both to the scale of Bundeswehr atrophy and the need for more than just raw investment. In the same month, new Defence Minister Boris Pistorius conceded “Most of the Zeitenwende still lies ahead of us.” So what has impeded Scholz’s vision?
One answer is the indecision about the new policy that permeates every layer of German society. A recent poll showed that 68% of the population oppose Germany taking on a military leadership role in Europe; but 60% nonetheless supported higher investment in the military. In the event of an invasion, only 5% of Germans said they would take up arms voluntarily, and a further 6% would fight if called up—in Britain those numbers are 9% and 10% respectively. These contradictory attitudes are reflected in government; the new militarist policy is pursued with a deep apprehension pointedly absent Scholz’s Zeitenwende-rhetoric. For example, while Defence Minister Pistorious and Foreign Minister Baerbock have maintained that Ukrainian victory is necessary to reach a desirable outcome, Scholz has continuously refused to speak in such plain terms. The latter’s reluctance to send Leopard tanks earlier this year can be understood to typify a general nervousness about escalation.
Another answer, though, to the question of the unrealised Zeitenwende, is to be found in structural problems of the Bundeswehr and its associated bodies. In charge of procurement, for example, is the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw), whose cumbersome name befits an equally cumbersome pace of operation. Not until December 2023 were procurement contracts completed, which then had to be passed through the parliamentary budget committee, while Scholz’s special fund was left gathering dust. For Aylin Matlé, Research Fellow at DGAP, Germany’s institutions are yet to be “imbued with the spirit of the new era” that Russia’s invasion ushered in. Choked by procedural standards, these bodies suffer in peacetime from delays and inefficiency. In wartime, casualties suffer.
Oiling the axle
In post-Zeitenwende Europe, the anxieties of NATO nations unfortunate enough to border Russia are obvious. Just over three decades ago, Germany (or, at least, the BRD) was a peripheral borderland of the Western Bloc, reliant on the support of a distant superpower to sustain itself militarily against a hostile neighbour. In today’s Continent, Germany is at the centre, the cynosure of all eyes, looked to for leadership from Western and former Eastern-Bloc countries alike. The nation is no longer an edge, but the very axle of Europe; the way its military policy turns will be felt across the continent.
Scholz’s commitment to modernisation is made in sincerity. The difficulties faced after one year are excusable, given the huge volta that the new policy represents. But bolder action is called for. Some analysts debate abolishing the 1950s-era Federal Security Council with a more dynamic body capable of circumventing formal hurdles. Others suggest the need for a ‘war economy’. It is, in any case, certain that if long-term transformation is to be achieved, the government will need to commit to a level of institutional reform not yet accounted for by officials. They should take heed of the critique of Düsseldorf’s tank-float: in the absence of fundamental structural changes, reforming the military will be an uphill ride.
Luke Dale is a student at Oriel College, University of Oxford.