In the days just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had been in office for a few months, made an important speech in which he announced that his government would create a €100 billion fund for defense investments and the minimum would exceed the target of devoting 2 percent of its GDP to military spending, thereby undoing the traditional and modest prudence with which Germany had conducted its foreign and defense policies up to that point. Scholz received a lot of praise in the west, and many spoke of a new era for Germany: But now something seems to be stuck.
“It seemed as if Germany had finally decided to take on a leading role in European security policy,” wrote the German weekly Spiegel recently. “But six weeks later, this enthusiasm has completely evaporated.”
Indeed, the Scholz administration appears to have lost momentum recently, at least towards what the New York Times has described as “an aboutface in its foreign policy.” Today, several governments and some European institutions are dissatisfied and frustrated with the federal government and Scholz because the announced change apparently never really took place.
In recent weeks, Scholz has spoken out in the European Council against reducing oil and natural gas supplies from Russia, what is believed to be the only tool available to European countries to effectively harm the Russian economy. A few days later, Politico found that Scholz had suspended the dispatch of 100 tanks to Ukraine, ordered by his Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, for reasons that have not yet been clarified. Meanwhile, German officials in European offices remain reluctant to grant Ukraine candidate status for accession to the European Union, which has been explicitly requested by both the Ukrainian government and most Eastern European countries.
Several European countries fear that Scholz’s announcement in late February was on the emotional tide of the early days of the war and Germany is quietly reversing its steps, adopting a traditional caution in foreign policy, particularly towards its own relations with Russia.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk held an impromptu press conference outside the Foreign Ministry in Berlin last week and openly accused Germany of showing excessive caution and restraint towards Russia both in recent years and during the ongoing war. “The images coming out of Bucha are proof of all this,” Szynkowski vel Sęk said, referring to the massacre of civilians carried out by Russia in the first weeks of the war.
The most notable diplomatic incident, however, occurred this week when the Ukrainian government informed German President FrankWalter Steinmeier, the historic political leader of the Social Democrats, that his eventual visit to Kyiv would not be welcome due to his known ties to Russian politicians and businessmen as well as for his involvement in talks on the socalled Minsk agreements between Ukraine and Russia in 2014, which Ukraine says resulted in an overly biased final deal in Russia’s favour.
A certain caution and reluctance on the part of Germany towards Russia comes from afar and is not only found in its political class. The bond between Russia and Germany cuts across all walks of life, not least due to the fact that part of Germany was essentially a satellite state of the Soviet Union for decades, but also due to “a certain sense of guilt,” as the New York Times defines it, for the fact that millions of Russians were killed by the Nazis during World War II.
From an economic point of view, after World War II Russia found itself able to supply cheap energy in the form of natural gas, oil and coal for the burgeoning German industry. In 1973, Russian natural gas began arriving in both West Germany and East Germany and hasn’t stopped since. Deutsche Welle estimates that Russian gas imports across Germany increased from 1 billion cubic meters in 1973 to 25.7 billion cubic meters in 1993.
All of this led to the entire German political and business establishment long supporting Chancellor Angela Merkel’s strategy, whose approach was well known and shared: building trade ties with Russia would benefit German business and politically link it to the rest of Europe . German politicians, for example, were among the most skeptical in Europe about the desirability of increasing military spending to deal with growing Russian aggression in its foreign policy: they believed that the deeprooted trade ties between Russia and Europe would stem any escalation. military from Russia.
The war changed things, but perhaps not to the extent that Germany’s European allies wanted. “There is some skepticism that the German political class is ready to detach itself from Moscow altogether, or that German voters are happy to pay a much higher price for energy in the short term,” he recently told the New York Times.
A survey carried out on behalf of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the past few days shows that 68 percent of those surveyed fear that the rise in energy prices will have a major or very major impact on their spending. The article presenting the results of the survey is headlined “Germans don’t want to stay in the cold for freedom”, understood as that of Ukrainians.
This stance has been criticized primarily on a moral level by a controversial article by economist Paul Krugman published April 7 in the New York Times. In the article, Krugman accuses Germany of complicity in Putin’s violence because it did not understand in time with whom he was establishing relationships and dealings, but above all “hypocrisy”: “while Germany was ready to impose an economic and social catastrophe on those countries that indebted, in his opinion, “like Greece in the early 2000s”, today don’t feel they have to impose a much lower price on themselves, despite their undeniable responsibility “for years of building economic ties with Putin’s Russia.
That doesn’t appear to be changing, at least in the short term: fears of rising energy prices will continue to put pressure on the government in the coming weeks, which in turn could exacerbate ties between those calling for more firmness, such as Baerbock, and most waiters , like Scholz and his collaborators.