Germany’s Last Sonderweg: How Germany Learned to Love Strategy, in its Own Way

CSDS POLICY BRIEF • 12/2024

By Roderick Parkes

24.4.2024

Key issues

• Almost unnoticed, there is a sizeable shift in the way Germany carries out its domestic security and defence debate, especially in terms of its readiness to dismantle the institutional blocks to allied perspectives, and to formulate an honest national response.
• The Federal Chancellery’s bullish effort to spell out German sensibilities has drawn most attention abroad – not all of it admiring. But this is only half the picture. The Chancellor has triggered a broader sense of self-awareness that could not have been achieved through mere elite exercises.
• Germany nevertheless needs to develop better domestic leadership so that it does not view French leadership as disruptive or Polish leadership as an excuse to sit back and let its neighbour bear an outsized burden.

 

Introduction

This is the untold story of a significant shift in the way Germany carries out its security and defence debate. That shift cannot be measured in the usual metric used by Germany’s French, British or Polish allies – how uncritically the federal government adopts their national perspectives. As this CSDS Policy Brief argues, it can instead be measured by German readiness to dismantle the institutional blocks to allied perspectives, and to formulate a reliable and honest national response.

Germany has strong civic institutions and they are bravely grappling with the new geopolitical situation. Church academies are hosting security experts to re-examine pacifism. Students who might once have joined a club for model United Nations (UN) negotiations are now war-gaming. Feminist groups are discussing whether it is conscionable to refuse arms that might protect Ukrainian civilians. Environmental organisations are discussing existential threats beyond temperature rises. Business associations are working out how to divest from geopolitically risky regions – or, in the case of Ukraine, how to invest.

Germany’s trajectory as an ally cannot be understood without this broader story. This is a tale of German exceptionalism, but not as told in the international media – of political leaders arrogantly ducking uncomfortable realities, carving out cosy derogations and expecting applause from allies. Rather, it is a tale of German civic leaders engaging with an uncomfortable new world. All NATO allies talk of wanting to think and act differently than in the past; Germans are actually achieving this.

Allies try to correct their strategic cultures

Since early 2022, foreign policy elites across NATO have been trying to overhaul their strategic cultures – those reservoirs of beliefs and practices that funnel them towards big decisions such as how to use force. As far back as the Gulf War, most had developed a culture of complacency: after the United States (US) shocked and awed rivals with its precision warfare, they came to believe that they could choose their wars. In February 2022, they woke up to a world in which rivals no longer seemed to fear them and where their enemies would pick the fights.

German officials, just like their counterparts across the West, reached for the reset button in the wake of Russia’s war of aggression. They wished to close blind spots on Russia and China that were undermining their claim to leadership in Europe, and they used the same toolbox as their allies to unlearn bad habits. Officials in the Chancellery spoke of the Verfremdungseffekt – a desire to look at oneself afresh, through the eyes of others. Soon they were war-gaming and red-teaming, foresighting and scenario planning with the best of them.

By winter 2023 at the latest, however, the Chancellor’s men evidently felt that these exercises were counterproductive. They seem to have concluded that Germany was simply different from its allies; that the starting point for Germany’s reset was unique – unlike its peers, it had no sense of power, national interests or strategic culture. Its allies might need to overhaul their strategic culture; Germany needed to create one. Its allies might need to get outside perspectives; Germany needed to assert its perspective towards the outside.

The chancellery tries to build a strategic culture

German elites have long admitted to an inferiority complex when it comes to doing grand strategy: almost all of them reflexively assert that the country lacks a strategic culture comparable to its neighbours in France or Poland. In late 2022, Scholz inverted this inferiority complex, making their beginner status into a point of superiority. Its beginner status offered a chance to leapfrog allies.

Whilst allies bashed Germany for being a “status quo power” incapable of radical change, officials in Berlin suggested that Germany was the exact opposite of this. It had historically progressed by using crises and breaks to start afresh. This had been the story after 1918, 1948 and 1989. The war in Ukraine offered a similar break, and the Chancellor began to talk confidently about Deutschland-Geschwindigkeit – about the speed with which his country had broken off links to Russia and pivoted to a new energy approach. Germany would form a strategic culture better suited to the future than its partners could.

A stubbornness was thus taking hold at the heart of political Berlin – and this culminated in a conviction that, far from just learning to do strategy, Germany could play a teaching role. The allies, after all, had a thirty-year record of bad judgment calls. Germany, by contrast, had never signed up to its allies’ triumphalism about “winning” the Cold War. It had never adopted misguided terms like “war of choice”. It had never conceived of the “Global South” as a mere theatre for operations. Germany’s “most valuable contribution would be to stop deferring to allies”, as one diplomat told this author.

A fuller picture of German change

It is no bad thing this new bullishness, this new desire to spell out the German way of doing things. It is leading to a broader awakening. True, most analysis of German public opinion has shown that citizens are being mollycoddled by the Chancellor’s rather paternalistic approach, that they believe him when he suggests that Germany is showing greater strategic maturity than its excitable European partners in Ukraine. But Chancellor Scholz’s bullishness has also revealed to Germans certain assumptions and practices previously invisible to them.

It has shown them that their country does in fact have a strong and sticky strategic culture, and this often prevents it from being a good ally. The analyst Benjamin Tallis, who runs the project on which this Policy Brief is based, argues that “Germany may not have many strategists but it certainly has strategy”. By “strategy without a strategist” he means that Germany’s domestic institutions provide a repository of assumptions and practices which funnel it towards decisions, and that these function even without a German Security Council or Review Commission who can correct course and be held accountable.

Germans have long told themselves that they had no strategists, so no strategic interests. That perception is changing. Until Chancellor Scholz began politicising the German way of doing things, few Germans had thought of the idea that institutions and rules could have strategic effect. They had not noticed how very German bodies like the European Union (EU) or UN were because, well, these were so very German. Until recently, it felt natural and normal that Europe’s institutions and economy were a continuation of Germany’s own, and that these bodies just happened to produce outcomes that suited Germany.

Five points of change

Over the past four years I have worked with German change-makers – with people drawn from across a range of civic institutions, interested in making Germany a responsible international partner – and their views and behaviour are reflected in the analysis that follows.

The two cohorts of 20 change-makers I worked with were not necessarily focused on defence or security – they covered fields such as climate transformation, social equality and economic innovation. And, even when the war began and they had to engage with topics of security and defence, they did not necessarily share the assessment that Germany would be a good partner if it transferred arms to Ukraine.

Beginning in 2020, I was interested to see how they dealt, initially, with a sharpening geopolitical climate and then specifically with the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine. In my interactions with these change-makers I sought indications that they were aware of how certain features of the domestic debate served to insulate Germany’s strategic culture from alliance pressures and accountability. I mapped a set of five concentric defensive rings which Germany’s allies complained insulated its strategy-making from outside perspectives.

1. The maze of domestic institutions

The outer ring is Germany’s maze of institutions. Alliances like NATO function only if members clearly signal to one another their intentions. However, allies have long complained that Germany lacks this instinct. German diplomats tend instead to highlight the complexity of decision-making, the many branches and stakeholders. Rather than signposting the direction of policy, they have a habit of signalling uncertainty. Allies say that Germany’s institutions are not uniquely complex – rather its representatives are uniquely in love with the mystique of complexity.

One French diplomat I spoke to points out that the purpose of a maze is seldom to keep outsiders out; rather it is to draw them in. The French government has been forced to devote research funding towards Berlinologists. In France, she says, such researchers are always seen as a little bit niche and eccentric; but the Chancellery in Berlin took their presence as proof of the vitality of the bilateral relationship. By overplaying its own institutional complexity, Germany is forcing its partners to pay it undue attention.

2. The high ground

An effective alliance also requires a shared sense of purpose and mission. This is tricky if one partner lays claim to a sense of moral superiority. And that is the second protective feature insulating German strategy-making – the pervasive sense of a moral high ground.

German elites acknowledge their tendency to claim moral superiority, but say that it in fact stems from a position of modesty: they lack the kind of self-confidence that the British or French take for granted – the conviction that they are on the right side of history.

Yet the result is to set them above allies. One Polish diplomat I spoke with complains that her German counterparts will look at the last 30 years of deal-making with Russia and China and give her country a moral pass, admitting to nothing worse than naivety and idealism. Never mind that the outcome of German “naivety” and “idealism” look surprisingly like the ruthless pursuit of commercial interests.

3. The echo chamber

The third insulating feature is the national echo chamber, the fact that its reference points are almost exclusively German. The Chancellery has pointed to progress in reforming German foreign and security policy, pointing to its military support to Ukraine, the extra spending on defence, the shifts in energy and trade policy. Whilst this is true insofar as it goes, the benchmarks chosen are all German. It measures progress according to a readiness to break German taboos about the use of force or historical obligations toward Russia.

This takes just two major historical reference points: 1939 and 1989, two tiny windows when Germany was at the centre of world history. Elites thus measure change and progress by reference to a moment of national evil and one of naivety, and behave as if the world is waiting for them to draw lessons. As an Irish interviewee says: how can you “normalise” when you never reference other people and their history?

4. The hall of mirrors

Make a hole in this echo chamber and the foreign diplomat enters Germany’s Hall of Mirrors, where Germany can look at its reflection and see something very different than the outsider. One interviewee describes Germany as Europe’s “passive aggressive” power – always perceiving that it is providing the lion’s share of solidarity in a crisis moment – Eurozone, migration, Transatlantic – and always slightly hurt by “German-bashing”.

This takes us close to the heart of the matter: that German elites do not see something very fundamental to the reality around them – that European, transatlantic and even some global institutions are sewn up along German lines. Foreigners, by contrast, have complained that Germany asserts an unfair status quo, and how this German refusal to budge in a crisis – even to save an order that tilts fundamentally towards them – exhausts its partners. At this point, Germany looks around at its bankrupt, populist partners and declares itself the grown-up in the room.

5. The grooms of the stool

It became a running joke amongst foreign diplomats during successive international crises. They would make it through these four defences – exhausted, irritated, possibly a little radicalised – only to be met by Germany’s Praetorian Guard – the last protectors of German vanity. “Don’t tell us,” these foreign policy elites would say. “What you want is to be led by us.”

Foreigners describe it as utterly flummoxing, Germany’s extraordinary sense of entitlement to lead others. Nobody in Europe wished to be led by Germany. Yet this conviction that what the West wants is to be led by Germany is the culmination of the other defences – the false centrality of Germany, the exhaustion of allies by foot-dragging and the conviction that Germany needs to face down its own historical taboos, hence stepping up in Europe, with all the attendant risks of domination.

Why I am still talking to Germans about defence policy

For three decades Germany was able to picture itself as the Good Ally. The good European. Always setting aside its interests and deferring to others. That perception is shifting. Here is a Germany rethinking its strategic culture, and in an alliance context. This shift is in evidence amongst change-makers such as the 20 in our project group.

Allies may not have noted this. They see, through the Taurus debate, that the Chancellery is not ready to defer to them. And they receive pushback from the German Foreign Office, which has adopted a punchy kind of public diplomacy when faced with “German-bashing”. They see an elite which talks up German strategy-making, but does not systematically involve them in discussions. But this is only part of the picture. The Chancellery’s bullish effort to spell out German thinking had triggered a broader sense of self-awareness that could not have been achieved through elite exercises.

I found clear signs that German change-makers see they have a duty to signal intentions to allies and simplify the institutional puzzle. That Germany does not need to take the moral high ground in order to reassure itself – that it can seek assurance from allies about its chosen path. That progress is not measured by facing down national taboos, or not only: it is about the real-world impact on Ukraine. That stepping up may not come effortlessly to Germans, but when it does step up, it should not first reassure itself that German leadership is required by denigrating and exhausting its partners. That what Germany needs to develop is better domestic leadership – so that its leaders do not view French leadership as disruptive or Polish leadership as an excuse for complacency. The change-makers I worked with aim to provide precisely that.

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Disclaimer: this was written while Roderick Parkes was Director of Research at the German Council of Foreign Relations (DGAP). It reflects his personal position, not that of any organisation or government.