Europe learns to stop fearing the Germans
Saturday, 21 July 2007
Gideon Rachman
Are we still scared of the Germans? Even asking that question in the corridors of the European Union is likely to provoke sorrow and incredulity. The conventional answer is: of course not! Fear of Germany is primitive and backward-looking. The war ended more than 60 years ago.
Poland is currently the skunk of the EU, largely because of its flamboyant violation of this polite consensus. In the run-up to the recent European summit, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's prime minister, argued that his country deserved to be given more voting power, in compensation for all the Poles killed by Germans during the second world war.
Even after the summit had ended, Mr Kaczynski was still at it. He warned that "something very bad is happening in Germany" and compared current events to pre-war Europe, when people were scared to speak out about rising German power. The Germans are furious. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the country's foreign minister, said the Poles had made an unjustified use of "historical prejudices".
Mr Kaczynski's arguments were certainly slightly bizarre - and his language was unusually brutal and direct for genteel Brussels. But he tacitly raised an important question about the EU. Has Europe safely put the German question behind it?
There is no doubt that containment of Germany - usually politely put as the banishment of war from Europe - has been fundamental to the development of the EU.
The modern EU started life in the 1950s as a plan to merge French and German steel and coal production. It was no accident that these two products were singled out. They were the instruments of war. The goal, as the historian Tony Judt puts it, was to "take control of the Ruhr and other vital German resources out of purely German hands". From the outset, Germany was Europe's paymaster and France one of the biggest beneficiaries. German willingness to pay up meant that the Common Agricultural Policy - still the EU's most expensive policy - was, in effect, a form of disguised war reparations.
An ingrained suspicion of Germany has continued to underpin many of the EU's most important decisions. The euro - the biggest single act of economic and political integration yet - was largely a reaction to German reunification. France's President François Mitterrand was initially panicked. So Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany persuaded him that a single currency would bind Germany irrevocably into a united Europe.
But still French suspicions persisted. In 2000 it was they who played the role now assigned to the Poles - resisting the idea that Germany's larger population should entitle it to greater voting power. The French insisted that the founding bargain of the EU - rooted in the war - was that France and Germany should always be equal. Many Germans reacted bitterly to this. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asked: "Have 50 years of hand-shaking over the graves of Verdun not been enough to banish the old suspicions after all?"
The French finally abandoned their opposition to greater German voting power a couple of years later. But the Poles, who only joined the Union in 2004, took an even more vehement position. The Germans feel particularly annoyed because of the enthusiastic support that Germany gave to Poland joining the EU. That, they seem to feel, should be atonement enough for the war.
It is certainly true that Germany has faced its own past with an honesty lacking in many other European countries. I remember the astonishment of German colleagues a couple of years ago, when they discovered that the building in Rome in which the ill-fated EU constitution was being negotiated still had heroic friezes of Mussolini carved into the walls. By contrast, a vast Holocaust memorial has gone up recently just off the Unter den Linden - Berlin's Fifth Avenue. As long ago as 1970, Willy Brandt, the chancellor of West Germany, visited Warsaw and apologised on his knees (literally) for German actions in the war.
The Germans have been unflinching in examining their own history. But the lessons they draw from the past are different from the lessons drawn by the likes of Mr Kaczynski. That lies behind many of today's arguments.
German politicians and historians tend to offer two sorts of explanation for Europe's tragic 20th century. The problems were either vicious ideologies, militarism and Nazism, or Europe's system of competing nation states, which plunged the continent into war for centuries. The solutions, therefore, are vigilant safeguards for democracy to solve the ideological problem; and European unification to solve the "nation problem".
But the Polish prime minister takes a different view of what went wrong in Europe. Germany and Russia became too powerful and too dangerous. Close German-Russian co-operation over energy today has revived fears of an anti-Polish alliance between its powerful neighbours. Some also believe that there is a German national character that makes the country dangerous.
The Poles are not alone in Europe in their suspicions. There is a deep vein of Germanophobia on the eurosceptic right in Britain. And I remember being surprised, during a seminar on European defence, to hear a senior French official musing aloud: "Remind me, why is it that we want the Germans to spend more on weapons." Czech politicians have also been vocal in expressing fears of Germany, in particular of land claims made by expelled Sudeten Germans.
The difference is that Poland is the only EU country where these fears are still dictating policy. At the recent summit there were several countries, led by Britain, that clearly did not share the traditional German attachment to a federal Europe. But the Poles were alone in openly voicing fears about what an increase in German voting power would mean for the balance of power in Europe.
Suspicion and even fear of Germany still linger in many European countries. But they are fading. It helps that Angela Merkel, the chancellor, is about as far as you can get from the caricature of a jackbooted Prussian.
More than 15 years after reunification, most Europeans seem comfortable with the new Germany. They fear a weak German economy more than a strong one, and they accept that the welcoming face that the Germans presented during last year's football World Cup is the country's real face, not just a mask. The EU really has moved on from the days when the containment of Germany was its central objective.
Are we still scared of the Germans? Even asking that question in the corridors of the European Union is likely to provoke sorrow and incredulity. The conventional answer is: of course not! Fear of Germany is primitive and backward-looking. The war ended more than 60 years ago.
Poland is currently the skunk of the EU, largely because of its flamboyant violation of this polite consensus. In the run-up to the recent European summit, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's prime minister, argued that his country deserved to be given more voting power, in compensation for all the Poles killed by Germans during the second world war.
Even after the summit had ended, Mr Kaczynski was still at it. He warned that "something very bad is happening in Germany" and compared current events to pre-war Europe, when people were scared to speak out about rising German power. The Germans are furious. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the country's foreign minister, said the Poles had made an unjustified use of "historical prejudices".
Mr Kaczynski's arguments were certainly slightly bizarre - and his language was unusually brutal and direct for genteel Brussels. But he tacitly raised an important question about the EU. Has Europe safely put the German question behind it?
There is no doubt that containment of Germany - usually politely put as the banishment of war from Europe - has been fundamental to the development of the EU.
The modern EU started life in the 1950s as a plan to merge French and German steel and coal production. It was no accident that these two products were singled out. They were the instruments of war. The goal, as the historian Tony Judt puts it, was to "take control of the Ruhr and other vital German resources out of purely German hands". From the outset, Germany was Europe's paymaster and France one of the biggest beneficiaries. German willingness to pay up meant that the Common Agricultural Policy - still the EU's most expensive policy - was, in effect, a form of disguised war reparations.
An ingrained suspicion of Germany has continued to underpin many of the EU's most important decisions. The euro - the biggest single act of economic and political integration yet - was largely a reaction to German reunification. France's President François Mitterrand was initially panicked. So Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany persuaded him that a single currency would bind Germany irrevocably into a united Europe.
But still French suspicions persisted. In 2000 it was they who played the role now assigned to the Poles - resisting the idea that Germany's larger population should entitle it to greater voting power. The French insisted that the founding bargain of the EU - rooted in the war - was that France and Germany should always be equal. Many Germans reacted bitterly to this. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asked: "Have 50 years of hand-shaking over the graves of Verdun not been enough to banish the old suspicions after all?"
The French finally abandoned their opposition to greater German voting power a couple of years later. But the Poles, who only joined the Union in 2004, took an even more vehement position. The Germans feel particularly annoyed because of the enthusiastic support that Germany gave to Poland joining the EU. That, they seem to feel, should be atonement enough for the war.
It is certainly true that Germany has faced its own past with an honesty lacking in many other European countries. I remember the astonishment of German colleagues a couple of years ago, when they discovered that the building in Rome in which the ill-fated EU constitution was being negotiated still had heroic friezes of Mussolini carved into the walls. By contrast, a vast Holocaust memorial has gone up recently just off the Unter den Linden - Berlin's Fifth Avenue. As long ago as 1970, Willy Brandt, the chancellor of West Germany, visited Warsaw and apologised on his knees (literally) for German actions in the war.
The Germans have been unflinching in examining their own history. But the lessons they draw from the past are different from the lessons drawn by the likes of Mr Kaczynski. That lies behind many of today's arguments.
German politicians and historians tend to offer two sorts of explanation for Europe's tragic 20th century. The problems were either vicious ideologies, militarism and Nazism, or Europe's system of competing nation states, which plunged the continent into war for centuries. The solutions, therefore, are vigilant safeguards for democracy to solve the ideological problem; and European unification to solve the "nation problem".
But the Polish prime minister takes a different view of what went wrong in Europe. Germany and Russia became too powerful and too dangerous. Close German-Russian co-operation over energy today has revived fears of an anti-Polish alliance between its powerful neighbours. Some also believe that there is a German national character that makes the country dangerous.
The Poles are not alone in Europe in their suspicions. There is a deep vein of Germanophobia on the eurosceptic right in Britain. And I remember being surprised, during a seminar on European defence, to hear a senior French official musing aloud: "Remind me, why is it that we want the Germans to spend more on weapons." Czech politicians have also been vocal in expressing fears of Germany, in particular of land claims made by expelled Sudeten Germans.
The difference is that Poland is the only EU country where these fears are still dictating policy. At the recent summit there were several countries, led by Britain, that clearly did not share the traditional German attachment to a federal Europe. But the Poles were alone in openly voicing fears about what an increase in German voting power would mean for the balance of power in Europe.
Suspicion and even fear of Germany still linger in many European countries. But they are fading. It helps that Angela Merkel, the chancellor, is about as far as you can get from the caricature of a jackbooted Prussian.
More than 15 years after reunification, most Europeans seem comfortable with the new Germany. They fear a weak German economy more than a strong one, and they accept that the welcoming face that the Germans presented during last year's football World Cup is the country's real face, not just a mask. The EU really has moved on from the days when the containment of Germany was its central objective.