The Long End of the Second World War

What’s happening in Germany? Jana Puglierin on how the invasion of Ukraine has brought a new commitment to military spending, energy independence, and putting traumas of the past to rest. Hard Reset What’s happening in Germany? Jana Puglierin on how the invasion of Ukraine has brought a new commitment to military spending, energy independence, and putting traumas of the past to rest. Germany was Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Western Europe, until Russia invaded Ukraine. Since the Cold War, German leaders worked to build trade ties with Moscow—and good relations with Vladimir Putin himself. In keeping with this tradition, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, elected in 2021, resisted the strong sanctions that his country’s allies were preparing to deter Putin from attacking Ukraine—and pushed to keep any action against energy supplies out of the sanctions package. Scholz had declared Nord Stream 2, the nearly completed undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, a purely commercial project outside of political interference. But three days after the invasion, Scholz reversed decades of policy. He not only suspended the approval of Nord Stream 2 and said Germany must wean itself from Russian energy; he agreed to send weapons to Ukraine and announced that his government would set aside 100 billion euros for immediate military upgrades and commit 2 percent of the federal budget to defense spending annually. These changes mark a historic departure from the legacy of World War II: For more than 70 years, Germany had been devoted to pacifism and avoided militarization. What does this shift mean for its place in Europe? Jana Puglierin is the head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, where she’s a senior fellow, and has previously advised the Bundestag, the German legislature, on defense issues. Puglierin says that Germany has undergone a transformation in how it sees itself and its relationship with Europe. After years of debate about whether the state should invest more in security, German leaders have had to admit finally that robust trade ties don’t guarantee peace, and Europe isn’t forever immune from war. Pacifism remains a strong current among Germans, Puglierin says, as it does among some officials in Scholz’s Social Democrats and in the Green Party, one of their governing-coalition partners. But Berlin’s new defense spending will give it a military to match its standing as Europe’s leading economic and political power. The imperative from the German public is that it will be a military that stays embedded clearly within the EU and NATO, focused on collective security. ——— Michael Bluhm: How has the war in Ukraine changed Germany? Jana Puglierin: It’s very tough to overstate the change that Germany’s undergone. The government admitted that it was wrong, not just in its assessment of Putin’s goal and means, but also in its broader judgment about European security. It’s sunken in that what’s required isn’t a minor course correction but a readjustment of long-held principles that Germany didn’t want to give up and that are closely connected to the question of what kind of state Germany is. The shift is that Germany needs to let go of some really dear thoughts about European security and its relationship with Russia. In 1989, we Germans came to the conclusion that we’d overcome war in Europe. Of course, there were the Balkan Wars, but that was seen as a legacy of the Cold War. For a lot of Germans, the scenario in Ukraine was unthinkable. In German foreign policy, whenever a crisis occurs, you have this standard phrase: There is no military solution. We need to realize that just because we don’t see a military solution to achieving our goals, others—including in Europe—think it’s completely plausible to use military power to achieve theirs. It’s the end of our holiday from history. We really haven’t fully overcome it; Chancellor Scholz said Putin is trying to bring back the means of the 19th century and take us back to a time that’s long gone. It shows how Germans think we’ve overcome 19th-century power politics and military means. I think they never ended—and that Germans need to realize it. Bluhm: What beliefs about European security are changing? [Advertisement]( Advertisement Puglierin: A deep-rooted belief for a long time was that creating networks with other countries and making yourself mutually dependent was a way to achieve peace, stability, and security. The idea was that others would become like us. This is behind not only Ostpolitik, the normalization of relations with East Germany and the Soviet Union that began in 1969; it’s broader than that. It’s what drove our relationship with China, this idea that through networks and interdependencies you would create this multilateral international order, and things would be decided according to law, not power. Germany needs to change not only its security and defense policy but its economic policy. It’s a geopolitical awakening. Bluhm: What forced Scholz to make these dramatic policy changes? Puglierin: There are many answers to that question. One is pressure from allies and partners. Scholz’s election campaign was about being Merkel in a suit. In foreign policy, he was very much aligned with her worldview, especially on Russia and China—to use trade and economic ties to build relationships, to make them responsible stakeholders, to integrate them into the rules-based order, and to make a lot of profit. When the Ukraine crisis hit, he was completely overwhelmed and always behind in his reactions. Remember that until January, he refused to even say Nord Stream 2 in connection with the crisis. When he talked about it, he called it a purely commercial project. Scholz was under pressure. Germany had lost its reputation. It was seen within the Western alliance as its weak link—an unreliable partner that had only its economic interests in mind. This government realized that our partners were really worried about us. More from Jana Puglierin at The Signal: “Germany will now bear a level of military responsibility for international peace and security that’s commensurate to its position as the biggest and most powerful country in Europe. There’s long been a narrative in Germany that our neighbors, especially in Poland and France, would be scared to see a powerful German army and defense budget. Interestingly, the political elites in those countries have consistently encouraged us to spend more. Of course, now that we are, we’ll have to see what the effect is. It will mean a new dynamic in the European Union, too, because until now, France had been leading the EU in everything related to security and defense, especially after the U.K. left the European Union.” “It was a very hard awakening, because we realized we’d made ourselves dependent on an authoritarian power hostile to Europe and Germany, and now we need to get out of that dependency. The bitter realization is that it’s really, really difficult, because we import 55 percent of our gas, about half our coal, and 34 percent of our oil from Russia. … For me, this is heavy to bear, because we’re paying for Putin’s war machine in Ukraine. Studies have just been published in which economists and energy experts say it would be very painful but possible to cut off Russian fuel supplies. It’s a political decision.” “People feel threatened for the first time in their lives. Many Germans bought what Chancellor Helmut Kohl told them after the country’s unification—that we were surrounded by friends and partners only, so there was no need for higher defense spending or a functioning army because nobody would ever attack us. This has changed now. People are united, they’re frightened, and they want a functioning army that protects them. But you don’t know how long that will last, because the underlying reflexes are still very strong. There’s still great skepticism toward the ideas of military means and being a leading nation in Europe.” ——— ——— Publishing in public beta since 2021, [The Signal]( explores urgent questions in current events around the world. 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