23 - The Paradox of German Power (German foreign policy, Pt. 2 w/ Hans Kundnani)

Germany's beleaguered defense minister has temporarily dropped his PhD title. I don't know what that is. I don't know how much love there is. When we build up... Spargel-Meister is China. Hi, it's Michelle. Hey, this is Ted. Welcome back to Spaß Bremse. Today we are bringing you the second installment in our foreign policy series. So go listen to part one if you haven't already.

For today's episode, Ted reached out to Hans Gudnani, Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Europe Program at Chatham House. a foreign affairs think tank in London. In 2014, Hans wrote a book called The Paradox of German Power, which tracks the development of Germany's foreign policy since its unification.

Ted, do you want to give us a quick overview of what you discussed? Yeah, definitely. Hans, like Michelle said, is an expert in all things Germany, specifically... looking at German foreign policy and a lot of the relationship between some of Germany's economic priorities and its foreign policy.

And so, yeah, I mean, part one from the other week with James is a great background also on foreign policy. And then some of our earlier episodes with Dominic Loisda and Philippe Siegel-Gluckner on Germany's economic policy also give a lot of...

context if you want a little more background for this but if you don't want just want to jump in as well I think things will be pretty self-explanatory And, of course, German foreign policy still definitely in the news with everyone wondering what's going on in Ukraine. The U.S. has claimed that Russia will invade this week and several countries, including Germany, have evacuated diplomatic staff from the country.

But what we do is get beyond a lot of this day-to-day speculation and actually look at some of the roots and motivations for how Germany conducts itself in the world. minute-to-minute Twitter speculation about all this other stuff, but I think it's definitely worth looking at some of the deeper causes and where things actually come from.

One term that repeatedly comes up that I think is worth a little bit of clarification is this idea of geoeconomics. I don't know how common that is in like everyday... usage and i had never heard of it before so as a non-policy world person It'd be nice to get a quick explanation. Yeah. So the idea there, and it's really core to Hans's argument in his book, and I think just understanding, you know, Germany in general. So geoeconomics is basically like...

economic tools being used to advance geopolitical objectives. You can also think about it kind of the other way of using geopolitics, like diplomacy or military, in order to further economic benefits. So it goes in either direction, like economic goals, economic tools for political ends or political tools for economic ends. I think there's different arguments on exactly how to frame it.

I think generally you can see it as like the interaction between economics and geopolitics with a sort of strategic global perspective. And so that's what we talk about there quite a bit. Also, by way of background, this, I think, is the first time on the podcast that we've really gotten in depth into discussing the European Union. We haven't really gotten into the EU very much, I believe, maybe just tangentially.

And important to understand in this, I mean, I think people obviously know what the EU is, but a few... a few concepts we alluded to um was this idea of european strategic autonomy which has come up again and again which is sort of some europeans desire to like distance themselves from dependence on the us and also be able to

sort of act independently and not be overly reliant on other economic powers, say like Russia or China. So that's a big concept that's been thrown around in kind of the EU policy scene for the last few years that comes up. And related to that is European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. When she took over, she pledged to lead a geopolitical commission. Hans mentions this, and I think it's worth kind of saying explicitly what this was.

Basically, it ties into this idea of autonomy, right? But this idea that Europe would no longer be just an economic actor or just sort of a regulatory body. It would actually strive to have influence on the world stage and sort of spread European values and European...

interests. It got everyone in the sort of think tank and foreign policy bubbles quite excited about what this meant. And I think as Hans rightly points out, you know, there is no eu army so like the idea of really being geopolitical maybe is a bit of a a bit of a stretch but he says you know that relates more to geoeconomics we get into all this in the interview

And just lastly, as far as background goes, there's a thread running through the episode about collective memory, actually, or you could think of it as collective forgetting in some senses. And by that we mean how countries can distort memories of the past and kind of draw false lessons for the future based on a misunderstanding or a sort of selective misreading of historical events.

For example, we discussed the legacy of Ostpolitik, the sort of rapprochement between East and West in Germany, led by Willy Brandt, which we got into on the episode with James. But how that is framed today and kind of... Maybe people don't actually understand the full context of that policy and they use this analogy to justify a different type of policy today.

erasure of memories of colonialism in europe and also the sort of origin stories of the eu as this like peace project and again kind of neglecting some of the context and and the the detail there so just to explain what we mean by by this idea of memories. But I think that should do it. We don't want to spend too long. It's a pretty rich interview and we got into quite a bit. So I don't think we'll have too long of an intro today. Yeah, without further ado, let's hear Hans in his own words.

Hey everyone, thanks for joining. Ted here, and I'm joined by a very special guest. We've got Hans Kudnani. who is the director of the Europe program at Chatham House, a foreign affairs think tank in London, and general expert on German politics, who is joining us for this here part two of our series on German foreign policies.

So Hans, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Ted. I want to start here with a book you wrote, I believe your second book on, it's called The Paradox of German Power. It's from 2014, but I still think a lot of the lessons from that hold today, you know, writing, I guess, roughly at the halfway point of what turned out to be Merkel's 16-year tenure. And you talk about Germany kind of re-emerging as a semi-hegemon in Europe and how this re-raises what you call the German question.

Could you give us a little historical perspective about what you mean by the German question and how that has emerged at different points in history since Germany's original unification in 1871? Yes.

When Germany was unified in 1871, And I should maybe preface this by saying, before German unification in 1871, there was a kind of a different kind of German question or German problem, which had more to do with sort of a... geopolitical vacuum at the center of europe rather than german power but i won't go too much into that now what happened before 1871 but what happens after 1871

is that you suddenly have this new version of the German question which is about German power and in particular it's about this sudden emergence Well, I guess it actually wasn't that sudden because Prussia had been a rising power for a little while. But then in particular with German unification, you have this bigger, powerful Germany at the centre of Europe.

In particular, because German unification happens through the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, that suddenly the balance between Germany and France is completely different than it was before. And so the German question that emerges in that context is around the problem essentially of a Germany that is too big for a balance of power, the balance of power which had existed in Europe and maintained peace in Europe.

lots of people would argue, until that point was slightly destroyed by the unification of Germany. So Germany is too big for a balance of power in Europe, but it's also too small and too weak for Germany to be a hegemon. what we then see in that period of the classical german question between 1871 and 1945 is i suppose two things first of all that

Germany is tempted to think that it might be able to be a hegemon. And obviously it makes a bid for hegemony in Europe twice in the 20th century. So there's that temptation, which is part of the problem with this. position of semi-hegemony that Germany is in. And at the same time, because of that German position of semi-hegemony, there's a kind of structural pressure on other powers in Europe to kind of form balancing coalitions against Germany. And, you know, ultimately that...

ends with World War I, the coalition that forms against Germany in 1914. So that's the sort of classical German question, and in many ways that... problem is solved in 1945 in this new context of the cold war where germany is divided and in a sense you go back in a way to the pre-1871 situation where there's a sort of weak center of europe as it were But then I think what happens after...

1990 when Germany's reunified and obviously this is now in a completely new context of NATO and the European Union or not quite the European Union but at least you know what becomes the European Union. What then happens I think is that in a sense Hence the old German question, the classical German question re-emerges.

In many ways, what happens after German reunification in 1990 is quite analogous to what happens after German unification in 1871. However, what makes it very different is this is no longer... as in the classical German question, a question that's around German military power, because that, I think, you know, was something that was dramatically changed.

after 1945 and so i've essentially argued that this sort of geoeconomic rather than a geopolitical version of the german question that re-emerges is after 1990 and then really becomes apparent after the euro crisis begins in 2010 right because you have i mean famously what was said about nato right you're going to keep the the russians out the us in and the germans down and on a military level that that

basically works exactly you know by the by 1990 that that has succeeded but yeah you point out this difference in terms of seeking hegemony and that sort of taking its form in, like you say, a geo-economic and not geopolitical way. Could you elucidate the differences there a little bit and what you mean by that? And also a few of the tools of German power in this economic sense, whether that's through Eurozone fiscal rules, you know, the ECB itself and so on. So the idea of geoeconomics.

I draw a lot on Edward Lutvak, who wrote about this in the immediate period after the end of the Cold War, and his basic argument, and by the way, I should emphasize that he was arguing really against people like Francis Fukuyama.

Also, to some extent, Sam Huntington, who had a particular vision of what the post-Cold War world would look like. Against the sort of end of history vision. Right. So, I mean, in some ways, you know, I think of Huntington and Fukuyama as being the two sort of... different kinds of visions you know about what the post cold war world might look like and uh fukuyama obviously you know

talks about the end of history and the sort of triumph of kind of liberalism so you know the end of the sort of ideological struggles of the cold war lead you to you know the triumph of liberalism huntington says no actually there will continue to be conflicts in the post-cold war world it's just that it will be a long civilized

capitalisational lines rather than ideological lines in the way that it was during the Cold War. And then Lutbach in a way is the third kind of vision in a way because he says that... There will continue to be conflict in the post-Cold War world. It's not as if we're suddenly now moving towards a world of cooperation instead of conflict.

But unlike Huntington, who says the difference is that this will be in civilizational terms, you know, the West against Islam and China, Lutvak places the emphasis more on the tools that will be used in this competition.

international politics in the post-Cold War world. And he says that essentially military tools will become less important and economic tools will become more important. Now, it seems to me that that applies you know more in europe almost than in the rest of the world because europe probably went further in terms of the shift away from military power and within europe germany probably went even further in the shift away from military power than any other country in europe

So it felt to me as if this applied particularly to Germany, the idea of geoeconomics. And so I argued that Germany was becoming a geoeconomic power. Now, the tricky thing, though, and this is in a way... To a large extent, what I had in mind when I talked about the paradox of German power is that there's this kind of disconnect between its assertiveness on economic power and its abstinence on military power. That's one of the sort of... slight disconnects in terms of German power.

But there's also, and it's kind of related to that disconnect, there's also a slight disconnect between the way that Germany uses its power within Europe, and in particular within the EU and the Eurozone, and the way that it uses its power beyond Europe.

Again, this is another aspect of the paradox, in a way, that Germany, especially after the euro crisis began, you could see was... deploying economic power in a very assertive kind of way to impose austerity on on the eurozone periphery and almost to reshape europe in its own image and you know so in a sense this was quite a strategic use of economic tools. It was using things like conditionality and loans for what, from a German perspective, was kind of strategic objectives.

But then in the world beyond Europe, in particular in relation to China and Russia, and we're talking at the time of a renewed Ukraine crisis where this has become an issue again, Germany seemed very reluctant to use... the economic tools that it had for strategic objectives and it seemed instead to merely pursue economic objectives so in the case of china that was you know german exports in the case of russia

It was a little bit of exports, but mainly, you know, the energy question, you know, guaranteeing German energy imports from Russia. So again, there was this sort of disconnect between a kind of an assertiveness within Europe and a kind of abstinence or a kind of a reluctance to use economic tools beyond Europe. And the common thread there being that hoping for... more tranquil geopolitical circumstances overseas and more heavy austerity policies in the eurozone i mean both of those

broadly support Germany's export-led growth model. So that's what you're saying is the common thread through what would seem somewhat paradoxical. I think that's right. And so what I think happened in a way that the sort of... key moment, I think, in all of this was the sort of transformation of the German economy that happened during the Schroeder government in the late 90s and early 2000s, because Germany had always been an export dependent economy.

But during that decade of the 2000s, it became much more heavily dependent on exports as a source of GDP. So exports went from being about a third of German GDP to being about 50% of German GDP, and it sort of maintained roughly around that level just... under 50% since then.

That's an extraordinary level of export dependence for a large country like Germany that ought to have a big domestic market. I mean, Germany's not Singapore or a country like that. Its economy ought to be driven much more by internal demand.

The big problem with Germany in the context of the global economy is its low level of demand. So, yeah, I think that's right, that a lot of this is driven by... the pressures that this restructuring of the German economy that took place in the 2000s created for policymakers.

Right. And so it's this, I mean, we discussed this on some earlier episodes on the podcast. We did one on Hot Sphere early on and then also had interviews with Philippe Ziegler-Gluckner and Dominic Loisder. And they've talked about these policies, you know. basically wage restraint in order to maximize your exports. And so they keep a deflationary environment at home in order to keep...

Price is low in order to keep exports competitive and and what you alluded to that I think is worth emphasizing here is Germany, especially post-euro crisis under Merkel, decides that its European policy is going to be to effectively export this model. to other countries and saying, well, you know, Germany has weathered this fairly well. You know, of course, the low wage sector has has massively increased. You know, things like child poverty have increased under Hartz FIA and so on. But broadly.

headline unemployment is low in germany so these you know greeks and spanish and so on they should learn from the german model adopt our system of wage restraint and a more deflationary policy and everybody can kind of export their way to growth obviously this doesn't really work in the aggregate because not everybody can have an export surplus but

You talk about exporting rules but not norms. And so how has Germany attempted to export these rules and how does that reflect Germany's attempts at achieving hegemony? or further them, depending on how you see it. So I guess I should start by emphasizing that this isn't really about German intentions. I'm not claiming that Germany... I mean, first of all, obviously, Germany is complicated. It's not a sort of...

a kind of monolithic block. There are different views and interests in Germany. And in fact, you know, in particular, you know, part of my argument is about a kind of a capture here of German foreign policy by very particular interests within Germany, in particular.

the export kind of industry. And I think that policymakers have sort of largely played along with that. So this isn't some kind of... strategy in a way that the german government has sort of come up with here and i think it also it's to a large extent a function of the lessons that Germany thinks that it's learned from this experience of the last couple of decades and in particular that period during the Schroeder government when

there was some economic reforms. And so I know, Ted, you're interested in questions around sort of collective memory and so on. And this is a relatively recent kind of collective memory compared to some others that we might discuss. But actually, I think there is now quite a powerful collective memory around the way in which Germany turned around its own economy.

during that period of the 2000s. From the sick man of Europe to the... Right, you know, it had been... Exactly, it had been criticised and, you know, some people thought that it was impossible to reform Germany, you know, back in the sort of coal era and the first term that Schroeder was in power.

And then in his second term, he pushes through Hart's fear, as you mentioned, as part of this sort of broader package of economic reforms. And actually, you know, it seems to me that what caused this turnaround... not so much in the German economy as a whole, but in German manufacturers and exporters, was actually not so much any of these things that the Schroeder government did. It was more the outsourcing of German...

of production to Central and Eastern European countries. You can see this particularly with the automobile industry. And then also, as you mentioned, things like wage restraint, where the unions essentially... agreed to quite extraordinary wage restraint, essentially in exchange for guarantees about jobs.

Those are the things that actually led to this increased competitiveness of German exporters. But the lesson that many German policymakers across the political spectrum have drawn from it is a slightly different one, which is that we did this structural reform.

And that's what led to the turnaround. And so there's very much this idea we then have to sort of, you know, this is the solution for everybody. And so there's this moment when, you know, after the grand coalition of Christian Democrats under Merkel and Social Democrats. passed the debt break the schuldenbremse in 2009 i think it was and i emphasize this was a grand coalition because this was a consensus across the political spectrum

where Merkel then basically says, now we have to export this to the rest of the world. And, you know, that's pretty hubristic, and Germany's kind of not able to really do that, but it was able to export it, at least within Europe. And so then what I think you have is, and this is where the distinction between norms and rules comes in, is that, you know, there's this big divide within the eurozone, you know, basically between north and south, or to put it more precisely.

between surplus countries and debtor countries about the way to solve the euro crisis. And there isn't really ever a sort of consensus. I mean, even France isn't really on board with the German approach on this. But Germany is able, because it's the largest creditor in this currency union of semi-sovereign states.

It's able to use that as leverage and to push through its approach and essentially to constitutionalise this particular economic policy. In other words, you know, this isn't just a policy that... the eu followed at a particular moment but that what happened during that period of the euro crisis particularly with the way that the debt break you know was exported

to the whole of the eurozone in the form of the fiscal compact you have this constitutionalization where these policies are basically set in stone in perpetuity and so now it's extremely difficult we're seeing this big debate now about the the reform of the fiscal rules in the context of the post-COVID kind of moment, it's very difficult actually to reform the fiscal rules because they've been constitutionalised in this kind of way.

without as i say a consensus within europe that this was the right approach to take and that's what i that's what i meant by saying that germany was able to export rules but not export norms Yeah, exactly. And I think that ties us really well into, you know, from your earlier work in this book to the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is some of your more recent writing on the European Union.

about the Germanization of the EU in a way. Like you said, they were able to make these constitutional rules about how much debt states are able to take on in a way that is a really... a very remarkable depoliticization of something you would normally say is in the realm of politics. I mean, Germany doing it to itself is a pretty remarkable thing to institute a debt break, like you said.

to emphasize, with the Grand Coalition, with the Social Democrats on board, with a country effectively just tying its hands for how much it can borrow, which you'd think, you know, a center-left or, you know, somewhat... progressive party would not be in favor of, but they fully did that. And now, being a part of the Constitution, it's almost impossible to undo that. We talked about this on the episode with Philippa Hood.

helped write a paper about how Germany can kind of try to circumvent a few of these roles to try to get a little more investment and not just choke off its own economy. But looking at then how that... idea and those like you say rules have been applied to the eu how how has the eu really changed over the past decade and decade and change because i think for a while it was sort of

in a lot of circles it was held up as like a symbol of progressivism or really like this shining example for the world um you know like basically the the social market economy and this idea well okay you know we can have capital accumulation and fairly free but regulated markets but a strong welfare state and it's like the in germany as well as europe a bit of the the social has been taken out of the social market economy pretty pretty systematically

if you could just sum up i guess a bit how how the eu has changed both in terms of the actual facts and like how it how it operates and what it does and and also sort of what it aspires to and what what europeanness can mean So I have a sort of particular kind of take on this which I'll sort of try to walk you through and a big part of it is I think the way in which and you sort of hinted at this. The centre-left parties in Europe, I would say, have essentially sort of...

abandoned their kind of left-wing principles and bought into this shift, in particular, as you said, sort of taking the social out of the social market economy. I think that's a neat way of putting it.

And I think a big part of the reason why centre-left parties, you know, with the SPD in Germany at the sort of forefront of this... a big part of why they have bought into this it's partly the sort of shift that took place you know among center-left parties across the west you know think of blair in particular but i think also

Part of it is to do with the way that they saw that shift as being a pro-European thing to do. And I think that's part of where they've sort of gone a little bit wrong, is that they're pro-Europeanism, in a sense. kind of made them unable to sort of see clearly their own left-wing principles and when push came to shove they sort of chose the eu over their left-wing principles i i think and so what i what i think has happened is that as you say

You know, historically, you know, before the euro crisis began, historically, I think the EU had stood for, I think, two things. First of all. you know the idea of the social market economy in other words a particular sort of socio-economic model

And then secondly, a particular mode of governance, which in a sense was the sort of depoliticization that you talked about. You know, that in a sense had been, in a way, at the beginning of the European project, the genius of it was to depoliticize, in particular... to depoliticise relations between France and Germany right that's sort of how the project started and there was something quite clever about that and that then led to this kind of I think

much more ambitious attempt at depoliticization. And one way I think you can think about what the EU has sort of always done since the beginning... and this comes back to the question of rules, has been to essentially increasingly take areas of policy, above all economic policy, out of the space of democratic contestation and to create rules to govern them. And the fiscal rules is a perfect example, right? As you said, I think absolutely correctly.

Debating economic policies with distributional consequences is not just something that should be in the space of democratic contestation, but it's arguably the essence of democratic contestation. Historically like a core legislative prerogative, right? Right.

Right. And this is precisely what, you know, the European Union has sought to take out of the space of democratic contestation. So then what I think has happened is that these two... elements of what the eu sort of stood for the social market economy and this particular mode of governance have both kind of hit a wall in a way in the case in the case of the social market economy i think what we've

What we've seen and, you know, we've already talked a little bit about this has been a certain kind of hollowing out of the social market economy. And I would argue that has been largely, I mean, there's a longer history to this going back to the sort of neoliberal turn in the 1970s and that single market process. you know and so on but I think more recently you know I would particularly identify Chancellor Merkel's attempt to make Europe more competitive as being the sort of impulse that really

change the EU. And then obviously in the context of the euro crisis, she was really able to push this through in a big way. Certainly the social market economy, the social part of it was hollowed out in countries of the eurozone periphery but i think you can argue that even in germany that's happened over the last you know few decades there's a fantastic book by oliver nachtwey called the abstiegsgesellschaft which literally means the

The downwardly mobile society, you know, Germany's gone from being an upwardly mobile society to being a downwardly mobile society. This has to do with the, you know, the growth of, you know, the low wage sector, the precariat and so on, even in Germany.

let alone, as I say, in the Eurozone periphery. So that's part of what's happened is this hollowing out of the social market economy. And then the other thing that I think has happened is we've increasingly come to see the problems with this... model of depoliticization it's increasingly become apparent i think that this idea of sort of replacing politics by rules

is really problematic from a democratic point of view. And so I suppose another way of putting it would be to say that the sort of technocratic nature of this mode of governance has become clearer than it was, I think, a few decades ago. And even within Europe and within the Eurozone, there's been a massive backlash against this technocratic model. I would argue that a big part of how we should understand populism

is precisely as a backlash against that kind of technocracy. So then what I think has happened is because that earlier model of Europe, based on the social market economy and that mode of governance... has sort of lost traction and lost the credibility. I think it's quite hard now for Europeans to say this is what the EU stands for. I think Europeans, pro-Europeans in particular, in other words, supporters of the European project or of European integration.

have tried to come up with a new sort of narrative, as it were. That's often the way it's put. We need a new narrative, what Europe stands for in the world. And this, I think, is the most disturbing element of the way that... the EU has changed in the last 10 years has been the emergence of this kind of civilizational narrative. So I've written about the civilizational turn in the European project.

I think this is essentially the idea that instead of standing for this particular socioeconomic model based on the social market economy and the welfare state and this particular mode of governance, what Europe stands for now, many people kind of seem to suggest is... civilization and this comes out in these phrases like the European way of life and European values and so on and one way in which I think you can see this shift happening that kind of ties it all together

is the way that when Macron first became French president in 2017, he talked about l'Europe qui protège, the Europe that protects. And when he first started talking about that, my impression is that this was actually about economic protection. In other words, it was protection from the market. And what he wanted to do was precisely to reform the Eurozone away from Merkel's model of a competitive Europe to create a more...

distributive EU. That was then thwarted by Merkel or basically ignored by Merkel. And then what I think has happened is that Macron has reinvented his idea of Europe qui protège or Europe that protects in terms of cultural protection against... Islam or Islamists, depending on how you want to put that. So there's been this kind of shift from economic protection to cultural protection. I was going to ask if it's fair, you know, you talk about these three poles with Ludwig Huntington and Fukuyama.

if it's fair to say that we're sort of seeing a merging of of lutwak's idea of geoeconomic competition in huntington's civilizational contest it's like a geoeconomic competition with civilizational characteristics right where europe needs to be more and more competitive and yet also emphasize its kind of European-ness and like it's what makes it special vis-a-vis.

you know, the US or China. That's really interesting. Now, I think that's probably, yes, I think that's probably right. So I think, you know, the other thing which I probably should have said is that I think what's happened over this decade of the last decade, you know, Europe struggled with all these crises. is that pro-European thinking has gone from being this quite outward, expansive kind of idea, which was about remaking the world in the image of the EU,

sort of expanding this mode of technocratic governance to something that's much more defensive. Pro-European thinking now tends to see Europe in terms of these threats. This is a more competitive world and so on. But I think you're right that there are differences in the way that people think about that competition. And the Merkel vision of Europe sees that competition, global competition in which the EU is sort of... engaged in largely economic terms.

And the Macron vision sees that global competition more in civilizational terms. And I think it's right that there's a kind of a compromise or a sort of negotiation between those two visions. that is kind of shaping Europe now. Having said that, though, one caveat is that the sort of Lutvacian part, the sort of geoeconomic Europe, I mean, this brings us back to, in a way, the paradox of German power. Because much as Ursula von der Leyen talks about creating a geopolitical commission...

European Commission and you know some people argued when she said that she should be talking about geoeconomic rather than geopolitical commission because that's really what she means is more the use of economic tools rather than military tools you know however There's a way in which the EU structurally is unable to make that shift that Ursula von der Leyen was talking about to a geopolitical commission or a geoeconomic commission. So, you know, I don't think it's quite right that...

The EU does approach competition in a geoeconomic way. If it were to do that, it would use economic tools in a completely different way, in a much more strategic way. This is what Ludwak had in mind. Rather than... simply insisting on the rules which is still what the European Commission does and in a way sort of has to do and I think a very good example of this would be

the way that the EU has responded to Brexit over the last six years. Because if you were really thinking in strategic terms about this...

you would have taken a completely different approach to the United Kingdom to the approach which the EU has taken, which is to insist on the rules and protecting the rules. You would have basically said, look, you know, there is this... global competition going on whether you see that in terms of democracies versus authoritarian states or however you want to see it however you want to see it britain is sort of a key partner for

the European Union that in particular brings military capabilities that Europe really needs and we're seeing that right now in the Ukraine crisis and so you would then approach this in a completely different way if you really were thinking in geopolitical terms than simply insisting on the integrity of the single market and EU rules and so on and how Brexit might sort of undermine those. That's in a way the opposite.

of a sort of geopolitical or a geoeconomic approach to the world. Yeah, I mean, you... to bring it back to this sort of germanization of the eu right i mean it's to me it's a very german reading of how rules work like to to stereotype a bit but you get the feeling in germany right if you i don't know cross a red light or something when you're walking or you ride your bike on the sidewalk like

If one rule is broken, like societal collapse is imminent. Like you get this feeling that like you need to hold the line at the smallest rule or else everything is fair game after that. And you said it almost it almost applies on this like. macro level to Brexit of like, you hear these ideas of like, well, if we if we allowed Britain to have any special treatment, it would undermine the whole basis of the European Union and how we negotiate with people and it has to be worse to be.

outside the block than to be in it. And these very dogmatic readings of certain rules. Whereas my perspective, and obviously I'm biased as a Brit, but I would say, well, of course Britain should get special treatment because it plays a very special role in providing security for Europe. In other words, it's completely different from Russia or any other country. And so there ought to be some kind of consequence of that.

Actually, often it seemed in those Brexit negotiations, and sorry for taking us down a sort of Brexit kind of tangent here, but often it seemed as if it wasn't just that the EU didn't want to treat Britain better than any other country, but it...

felt that it needed to treat Britain worse than other non-EU member states. I wouldn't downplay the frustration that Europeans have to Brits who, I think they feel like the British are always a bit entitled asking for special treatment. And so maybe they just wanted to make a point to that.

No, no. But, you know, there was this kind of interesting, while these negotiations were happening, there's a sort of interesting moment when, you know, there was uncertainty about the US security guarantee to Europe. Right. Because this was the period of when Trump was U.S. president. Suddenly there was all this kind of uncertainty about the U.S. commitment to NATO and the security guarantee to Europe. Then on the other hand, you have France, which is a nuclear power.

The force to frappe is just for France. It's not there to protect Europe in any way. So there was this kind of odd situation for four or five years where, and this is precisely the moment in which these Brexit negotiations were happening. where the UK was the one nuclear power that was unconditionally committed to use its nuclear weapons for the defence of Europe. Yeah. And that's the country that the EU is trying to sort of play hardball with.

kind of, from a British perspective, always seemed quite strange. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, just tying into that, like you said, these sort of proclamations that Europe's going to be different now are going to have, you know... strategic autonomy are going to be geopolitical always i mean i think they always get um

kind of the foreign policy think tank analyst crowd quite excited and then it doesn't ever really seem like much much comes to fruition there but i want to i want to just touch on this sort of civilizational idea of the eu just a bit because i found that really interesting and in your writing and something i hadn't seen much elsewhere that i thought was really important is like we we mentioned you know when people say they're pro-european i think i think people that

Most people that say that often are truly kind of like cosmopolitan and have an international mindset and really don't mean that in exclusionary terms at all. However... Like you said, when you see these expressions like European values, European way of life, or I'm a proud European, it's very easy to read that as I'm proudly white. Like I said, I don't...

think there's ill intent on the part of people that say that, but it's hard to see that in a not semi-exclusionary way. And so could you talk a bit about how... There's like this implicit whiteness in that. And there's also this complete ignoring of like colonial history, right? It's as if to say, here's this like great ideal.

We're going to have these new partnerships with Africa or Asian countries and so on. And let's just totally forget about this whole period of colonialism that really ended only a few decades ago. How, yeah, whiteness and colonialism play into this kind of civilizational idea of Europe. Yeah. I mean, my argument has been not exactly that there's a kind of ill intent, as you put it. when pro-Europeans talk about Europe or say, you know, I'm European, say, you know, proudly, you know, I'm European.

And it's been more that, you know, I'm trying to be precise about what it is that they're expressing. And I think you're absolutely right that often they think they are expressing a kind of cosmopolitanism when they say I'm European. But to me, that just seems sort of wrong and a bit absurd, frankly, you know, because when you say I'm European, that's not saying I'm a citizen of the world. It's saying I'm a citizen of a particular region.

And it seems to me that itself, that sort of tendency to think that it's an expression of cosmopolitanism is itself a kind of Eurocentrism because it's... sort of almost mistaking Europe for the world. And you can see in the history of the European project that just because you have openness and deep integration within Europe, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have openness and...

towards a deep integration with the rest of the world. So there is this kind of, I think, this kind of blind spot in a lot of pro-European thinking to sort of equate Europe with the world, which itself is quite Eurocentric. The history is really complex here of the relationship between, I suppose, three terms or three ideas. One is Christianity. Second is...

whiteness and the third is European-ness. There's a very complex history between these three terms. And very, very roughly and reductively, in the medieval period, what it means to be European. And that's the first time that idea of European identity emerges, as opposed to a geographical space called Europe.

What that means is essentially, you know, to be European is to be Christian. They're the same, they're used in the same context. And this is obviously in the context of, you know, conflict with Islam. You know, this is the period of the Crusades and so on. And then what you have in the modern period

is a kind of, I mean, first of all, the concept of European-ness or European identity becomes much more prevalent. It gets used much more frequently. But a sort of new modern kind of, and this is, you know, from the sort of roughly the 16th century on. a new sort of modern definition of Europeanness emerges, which is more racial than religious. And it is very closely connected to the concept of whiteness.

happens partly in the context of the European encounter with the populations of Africa and Asia and the Americas. And this modern idea of European-ness and whiteness emerge very much together. and they are largely interchangeable and i think you see this very very clearly in the colonial context but also say if you think about apartheid South Africa you know you had benches in apartheid South Africa that said whites only and you had benches that said Europeans only

And they basically meant the same thing. I mean, it's very clear that in those contexts, if you say, I'm European, that means I'm white. Now... What happens within Europe after World War II is that, you know, it is true that there's a new kind of European identity that emerges that has to do with some of what we discussed earlier, you know, the sort of...

political sort of civic identity of the European Union that was emerging around the social market economy and around this model of governance and so on. So there is a kind of a new European identity. And very rationally to try to prevent another disastrous war, you know.

I don't want to imply that it was always this sort of exclusionary... negative thing i mean you just had two catastrophic wars in the space of a few decades and the original idea is let's get the the coal and the steel yes denationalized so countries can't wage war with each other yes although that focus on war and peace is kind of interesting and i'll come back to

that later on because i think in a way that is part of the problem but what i wanted to say was was just that you know this this new identity does emerge and it's more of a sort of civic regionalism a civic identity rather than a sort of ethnic or cultural identity as was the case historically but it's always kind of mixed up with these earlier versions of identity and one very simple example of that is if you think about the way that pro-europeans

I mean, first of all, they constantly invoke these figures from pre-1945 European history, whether it's Erasmus or whoever in the Enlightenment. So there is this sense that there is a prehistory there. It's not as if this new identity, 1945.

was an hour zero and this new identity comes out of nowhere but that also like the culmination of an earlier dream in a way right like that finding these through lines between them yeah yeah i think that's right But what happens is precisely because it's quite hard actually to sell

this kind of civic identity, and this is also the case within nation states, that we've often tried in all of our countries to come up with these kind of civic versions of nationalism, but they're quite hard often to get... traction for beyond sort of elites. And so what then happens in the European context is that pro-Europeans are constantly drawing on these earlier ethnic and cultural versions of European identity.

in order to get legitimacy for the project and to get and to give it pathos and so on and one very simple example which i always give is you know the prize for pro-europeans is the charlemagne prize you know which is you know given For exemplary pro-Europeans

in the name of charlemagne who you know is the embodiment of this medieval version of european identity which is synonymous with christianity now if what you want to do is say we have this entirely new version of european identity that has nothing to do with the

earlier versions and it's not at all exclusionary then seems like charlamagne is a pretty odd choice of role model to pick, you know, which just kind of illustrates, I think, the way in which these different versions of European identity get very much blurred and continue to be blurred.

And then maybe just finally to come back to this, the question you asked about the colonial history, but also the point you made about the idea of the EU as peace project, right? Overcoming centuries of conflict within Europe that had culminated in World War II and the Holocaust. Now it's absolutely true that that was part of the narrative.

I think, by the way, we've slightly exaggerated the role that that played at the very beginning. To some extent, that was retrospectively imposed, I think. There's a bit of self-mythologizing there, I think. Exactly. There's a lot of rewriting of the history of the European project. But it is clearly true that that has been...

one of the sort of central ideas animating the European project is this idea of the EU as peace project, overcoming centuries of conflict, in particular between France and Germany. The Holocaust wasn't initially part of this, but it did get brought into it later on. You know, alongside, you know, and obviously because that took place in the context of World War Two. So that has now become very much part of the European project. You know, Tony Judd even famously said that.

Holocaust recognition is the contemporary European entry ticket. In other words, it has really been incorporated into the narrative of the European project. However, and this is, I think, the kind of blind spot in pro-European thinking. is that although the project has always been based on this idea of kind of learning the internal lessons of European history, pro Europeans have never engaged with what I call the sort of external lessons of Europe.

In other words, what Europeans collectively did to the rest of the world, in particular colonialism. That has never informed the European project in the way that these internal kind of lessons have. And I think that's related to an even deeper problem, which is... The story that pro-Europeans tell themselves about European history is sort of as Europe as a kind of a closed kind of system.

Right. So, you know, you'll tend to hear from pro Europeans is version of European history that goes directly from Christianity to, you know.

the Enlightenment and then the conflicts within Europe through to the European Union, as if Europeans didn't interact in all kinds of ways, some of them very problematic with the rest of the world. And that's... particularly problematic because of the way that, and this is really being written out of the story of European integration and of the European project, the way that the sort of early phase of European integration

coincided with the moment of decolonization when the treaty of rome was signed in 1957 france was in the middle of a brutal colonial war in algeria and not only that not only did they coincide but that Early pro-European thinking, and this includes even some of the early founding fathers, for them part of the idea of European integration was precisely for Belgium and France.

to consolidate their colonies in West Africa and Central Africa at a time when they were no longer able to maintain them on their own. This is the... project of your africa and there's a fantastic book of that name which i recommend to

in particular to pro-Europeans, because most of them have no clue about this history. But at the beginning, this wasn't at all an anti-colonial project or a post-colonial project. It was very much... conceived as a way for europeans to be able to hold on to their colonies as they in particular french and belgian colonies in in western central africa

Now, they lost those colonies kind of fairly quickly afterwards. And so then there's a further development of the European project. But in that early phase, and I call this the sort of original sin in a way of the European project. Very consciously, by the way, you know, making an analogy to American history there.

You know, this was very much about, it was very much seen as a way to hold on to those colonies. That's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, it brings to mind this one quote, which you hear a lot in European policy circles. Europe consists of small countries and countries that don't yet know that they're small. I forget if that was a Kissinger quote or someone else. No, it's pulling on each SPAC. And it's very interesting that you mention that.

SPAC is precisely the kind of founding father that I was talking about, who essentially saw European integration precisely in this colonialist kind of way. And they feel the need to make themselves. It's like it's a it's a self sort of soothing myth, right? Because you're like, oh, we're such little countries. We're so we all need to band together. Like what harm could we possibly do? We need to band together and sort of protect ourselves. Right. Ignoring, obviously.

this time that okay maybe they're small on the map but in terms of their global power not at all Yes, that's right. I mean, I also always find that statement, which you're right, that quote gets wheeled out so often as if it's really profound. And, you know, I think it's just wrong. I mean, because if you take that, if that's correct.

that all European countries are small, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, then you're basically saying... that all countries in the world are small except what the united states china maybe india

you know because then japan for example is a small country as well you know and it starts to become a little bit absurd this same thing comes up in debates about european sovereignty you know because people will say well you know no european country anymore is really sovereign on its own but

If you think that logic through, then, as I say, implies that Australia is not sovereign. Japan's not sovereign. The only sovereign countries in the world are like maybe three or four, which I think starts to become a little bit meaningless. If you take, as I say, France or the United Kingdom.

permanent members of the Security Council, nuclear powers with second strike capability, economies with GDP that puts them in the top 10 in the world. I mean, how can you say that they're small countries? It seems a little bit absurd to me unless you have this. I think, really megalomaniac vision of Europe, which is, you know, it's not enough to be, as I say, sort of medium-sized power with nuclear weapons and so on, but you have to...

literally be able to compete with China and the United States. But by the way, also, you're not prepared to do the things that it would take to compete with those powers. So I think it's really disingenuous, the use of that quote. Yeah, that's interesting. You have a very good perspective on that. And I think your idea here that European-ness can be expressed both in this in-group... cohesion and this sort of out group exclusion is like it's very true and it's why something like

The Schengen zone and Frontex can boast the expressions of European unity, that being the free travel zone within Europe and the sort of now notorious border police on the borders of Europe, which, you know, have been implicated in several scandals now.

is in the Mediterranean with not helping people that have been drowning and so on. And so it's almost like, but you'll see them, you'll see these like ads that Frontex does on like Twitter or so on. And they'll be like, Europe's working together. Like we're all, and it's like, we're working.

like, what is European unity if it's for just keeping poorer people out, right? And, like, this almost feels like the real tradition of Charlemagne, right, of protecting Europe from people from the South. And, like... and as you've like wisely put it a very a very kind of disturbing

trend for like attention that's always been there as you said with like the sort of original sin period but now it's like we're sort of seeing that more colonial or like neo-colonial dynamics coming back without any acknowledgement of it yeah I think I would say, I don't know if this is in defense of pro-Europeans or not, but this is part of the sort of shift that I've been trying to describe in pro-European thinking. Because, you know, so you mentioned Schengen and Frontex. I think...

There was an earlier point in the history of the European project, perhaps in the sort of 90s, I suppose, when pro-Europeans could and did still think... that removing borders within Europe was a kind of a step towards a borderless world, a truly borderless world, that Europe would be the sort of vanguard. This, as I say, was the period when pro-Europeans thought about remaking the world in the image of Europe, right? And so, you know, I cut people a little bit...

of slack who at the time thought that we'll take this step within Europe to remove our borders internally and then the rest of the world will see how wonderful this is and they will eventually follow suit. I remember people saying that even

as recently as 2014 well see this is when i was here exactly because the next year the so-called refugee crisis and then that really changed exactly and so what i think has happened in particular as you say with the refugee crisis is this recognition that actually the flip side of removing borders internally is to have a much harder external border. So it's not as if it's a

a forerunner to a borderless world, quite the opposite in a way. And so, yes, I think this is part of the sort of shift that's taken place. I think another good example, even more recent example for me that really illustrates this is... If you remember at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when initially France and Germany impose export restrictions on PPE, masks and so on, within Europe to each other.

So this was seen as being sort of nationalist debt, which is terrible. And then what happened a couple of weeks later was this was superseded by a set of EU restrictions on exporting PPE beyond Europe. And, you know, this was presented as a triumph of, first of all, European unity, but also as to go back to what we discussed earlier, sort of slightly almost sort of cosmopolitan.

sort of thing to do yeah which is completely absurd because at least from my perspective the eu collectively restricting sending masks to the rest of the world which really needed them is worse than France and Germany kind of imposing restrictions on each other.

You know, I'd rather have the national restrictions than the Europe-wide restrictions. But I think from a certain kind of pro-European perspective, this was a triumph of European unity and a step forward. And to me, that illustrates, again, this kind of blind spot in European thinking when... this tendency to think because we've lifted the restrictions on each other, somehow this is a cosmopolitan thing to have done and somehow this is good for the whole of the rest of the world. But actually...

It's not at all. And the U.S., I remember the U.S. getting bashed for sort of similarly like nationalist policies or China at the same time. I remember this term that was thrown around, mask diplomacy, where it was like they were trying to.

basically ingratiate themselves with countries by sending PPE. And I was like, well, I mean, you don't have to like necessarily love the Chinese government, but that seems like a pretty normal country thing to do. I mean, that's basically what Europe claims it wants to do is use commercial power for more.

for more political power. Vaccine nationalism was another term that was used a lot. And to put that in the terms that I've tried to frame this discussion in, to me, vaccine regionalism is just as bad as vaccine nationalism.

In fact, arguably, it's worse, as I say, because it seems to me that the disparities between Europe and the rest of the world are even bigger than the disparities within Europe. And so the idea of Europe collectively hoarding vaccines, to me, is worse than individual countries doing it.

I should add one thing, though, on this kind of what I've called the civilizational turn. And you mentioned a minute ago a sort of certain kind of neo-colonial kind of aspect of pro-European thinking or of the EU. I think it's important to emphasise that... you know as i say what i've called the civilizational turn this emergence of a kind of pro-european civilizationalism it's a defensive civilizationalism it's not an offensive civilizationalism i mean you know the crusades was offensive civil

right and you know as we were discussing earlier on i think a big part of the shift that's happened in the last sort of 10 years or so is that the eu has become much more defensive instead of you know as it used to thinking that it could remake the world in the image of it EU and export its system, export its rules, export its preferences.

it now sees the rest of the world largely in terms of threats to it, and hence this whole narrative around protection and l'Europe qui protège. Yeah, I think that's just sort of an important difference, that this isn't really any more about some kind of colonial...

approach in that sense because Europe's just not able to do that it's dealing it's really just trying to protect itself from these threats from from the rest of the world so it is seeing those threats in civilizational terms that's my critique But it's a defensive approach rather than an offensive one, I think.

Right. Yeah. And I think you make that make that point really well in your Guardian piece, which we'll definitely link to as well. And sort of I think you talk about seeing protection no longer as protection from the market, but protection from from other people as the real risk there.

so just to close out here i think it's actually a current events thing that really ties all these strands together is the current uh current situation in ukraine and germany's approach to that because that both involves you know Where do we draw the line on what is Europe? What are Europe's borders and how do the borderlands relate to that? And also, how is German power wielded and how does it conceive of itself in the world?

You've obviously had Germany in the spotlight quite a bit and its policy towards Russia and Ukraine. We just released an episode about this that gets into detail on the situation, so we won't get into the details too much here. I'm curious on your take about this, especially in light of your book and the idea that Germany is not willing to sort of...

disrupt the status quo for importing gas, exporting cars, to put it very crudely. And so do you see Germany's sort of relatively restrained policy towards Russia. You know, Schultz is in DC now. You have both Habeck and Baerbock in Ukraine now at the moment, I believe. So it's not like Germany is just totally sitting on the sidelines. I think that is a bit of a misnomer and just a mischaracterization. How do you see German policy?

towards Ukraine and Russia? And how does this tie into this idea of like, is there just kind of a cynical commercial thinking behind all of it? So you kindly said at the beginning that you felt that my book, which came out in 2014, um you know still remained kind of current now and it's interesting because

I do feel that we're sort of roughly still where we were when I wrote that book. Nothing much has changed, to be honest. And so actually, you know, I wrote the book just before. I mean, I basically completed it. just before the ukraine crisis in 2014 happened you know the annexation of crimea and a lot of people at that time you know sort of said to me this is a total game changer

Germany has now experienced a geopolitical awakening. The relationship with Russia that Germany previously had is over. There were plenty of pieces written at that time along those lines. And, you know, essentially I was told that my book was now out of date. And I think it's quite remarkable how eight years later, how we're kind of back in a very, very similar sort of situation.

I wouldn't want to claim that German policy hadn't changed at all towards Russia. It's true that there was a shift. But my argument is that it was essentially forced on Germany by Russian actions. So Germany sort of resisted this for as long as it could. And by the way, even after the annexation of Crimea, Germany was very hesitant about any kind of meaningful sanctions. And it was only after MH17 was shot down in the summer of 2014 that...

German policymakers were really able to act on that. And by the way, even when they did act, by which I mean committing to tough sectoral sanctions, the quid pro quo for that at the time... was precisely that the energy sector must be excluded from those sanctions. That was the basis on which Germany agreed to the other sanctions and that then created the kind of...

situation with Nord Stream 2 that we're now struggling with. So in a sense, it seems to me that the seeds of the current crisis or not the current crisis, but the seeds of the current dilemma in relation to Germany were actually already planted. at a time when everybody kind of was saying that Germany was shifting policy and becoming much tougher on Russia, actually it had set up, I think, this next dilemma, which was around Nord Stream 2.

That was part of the sort of compromise that had been reached there. And it's remarkable how we're having exactly the same debate. Again, for example, this debate about sending defensive... weapons to ukraine you know this was something that back in 2014-15 obama had sort of tried to you know start talking about this you know to create some additional pressure on Russia and Merkel at that time immediately shut down the possibility of sending any defensive weapons to Ukraine.

We're now having that debate again. So, you know, to me, this feels a little sort of Groundhog Day like. And to what extent is Schultz? I mean, if you say it's kind of a repetition, but obviously the party in power and the chancellor has shifted from. Merkel and the CDU to the Schultz and SPD. But I mean, he's famously kind of made his his pitch to be like the Merkel continuation. And it's fair to argue that I think there's a broad.

a broad continuity in foreign policy absolutely you know for example on this question of supplying defensive weapons to ukraine and this is precisely what schultz and and and others say is is this is a long-standing german policy this isn't anything new here and they're right you know i just saw him defend that on CNN in English, actually, with Jake Tapper. I just saw that this morning, and he's mastered the art of

deflection in English as well. So impressive on that front. I mean, and Jake Tapper, I thought was good in terms of pointing out, you know, first of all, that Germany did supply weapons to the Peshmerga, for example. That's, you know, conflict zone as well, but also more broadly. that germany is now i think you know the fourth largest exporter of weapons so and it's it's selling weapons you know to all kinds of you know

dodgy regimes around the world. So this idea that sort of somehow Germany doesn't do this is not very persuasive. But yeah, I mean, there's total, well, not total, but to a large extent, continuity between the Merkel government and the Scholz. government not least obviously of course because you know the social democrats in general and schultz in particular part of the grand coalition schultz was the deputy chancellor and the finance minister in the last merkel government

Also because of the way, though, that I think, you know, a lot of this is quite structural, I think, in German politics. The way I sometimes put it is that even when you don't have a grand coalition in Germany and you don't technically have a grand coalition now, it feels a lot like one.

to do with the way that the german system works the federal system all the checks and balances which mean that it's such a consensual form of democracy anyway that that that you get um you know you kind of get a grand coalition even if you don't have one

And then this coalition in particular, if this were a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Greens and the left party... then that would be a different government but actually what you've got is you know the social democrats and the greens but then the fdp

which does kind of make this a grand coalition, actually, in the sense that it's kind of cuts across the political spectrum from left to right. Well, and Linka, I mean, Linka obviously performed so poorly in the election that it so-called red, red, green with the Greens SPD. and Linke was not even possible mathematically. But I remember during the debates, it was this ongoing thing where they sort of kept wanting to make...

Die Linke, the left party, sort of pledge its allegiance to NATO, kind of precisely to avoid any issue. And they were sort of... Schultz wouldn't rule out going into a red, red, green, but it seemed clear that they were kind of trying to kneecap Die Linke there. And so it's like any potential government can only be. a like a groco with like slightly different flavors on it like it's it's all

going to be roughly the same balance. And from my perspective, you know, this is this obviously reflects my own sort of politics. But, you know, it's kind of it's really tricky because I'm kind of kind of conflicted about it because. It seems to me, actually, that a red-red-green coalition would have been great in terms of solving some of the economic problems around the Eurozone, in terms of moving towards a more redistributive EU that I talked about.

could have actually been possible if you had a red red green government however the dilemma instead of the fdp and the finance minister exactly you know fdp essentially blocking any meaningful reform of the eurozone however a red red green government on these issues around russia think would have been really difficult so it kind of feels like you know you're either going to have a German government

which is really difficult to deal with on these economic questions around the Eurozone, or it's going to be really difficult on these foreign policy questions around China and Russia. And that... maybe finally also brings me to that the the last part of the question you asked me which is you know to what extent is this sort of

cynical you know and is germany just driven by commercial interests here i think that is a big part of it the the role that the in particular sort of manufacturing industry the automobile industry plays i think that is quite important in a lot of this

But it is more complicated than that. And actually, in a funny way, I think one of the things running through our conversation is actually the sort of role of collective memories and sort of narratives right now we've talked about the the eu and the narrative around the eu and how there's been some rewriting of that but also in the german case and so

Looking at the current Ukraine crisis, I think a big part of this does go beyond particular interests and in particular sort of economic interests. And I think a lot of it has to do with a certain kind of narrative. around German history, around peace. You know, this idea of Germany as a Friedensmarkt or a force for peace has become such a strong part of German national identity almost.

And then, I guess, within that, also the sense of Ostpolitik and the sort of success of Ostpolitik as a sort of paradigmatic sort of German foreign policy success, really, in the sort of post-war period.

that's also become a little bit of a bipartisan consensus but here again what's happened is there's been a distortion of what us politic was and it comes back actually interestingly to what we discussed earlier around geoeconomics and the paradox of German power, because actually AusPolitik in the 70s... wasn't actually about you know doing business that wasn't what um what it what it was about it was you know much cleverer

strategic kind of approach to the Soviet Union. Well, actually to the GDR more than the Soviet Union at the time. And it wasn't really being driven by business interests particularly. It was a very clever idea that what you do is you use economic tools for strategic objectives and what the strategic objective was and this has been completely forgotten was german reunification this wasn't about transforming russia so the way that now people talk about wandel door handle change through trade

That was not the slogan. The slogan was Wandel durch Annäherung. But in particular, the change that was meant to happen, the Wandel, wasn't about... turning the Soviet Union into a democracy or making it a responsible stakeholder. It wasn't anything to do with the Soviet Union. It was precisely...

to change was German-German relations. And the idea was in taking a series of small steps that in the long term would get you to German reunification, which is kind of what... Basically create a series of dependencies with the relatively weaker East German economy needing to...

import Western machinery or take loans. Well, that's right. But even that part of it, the connections, and this was the verflechtung, the sort of interweaving part of Wandel durch Annäherung. Actually, to begin with, it wasn't largely about economic connection. connections. It was about people-to-people connections. So the first decisive step in Ostpolitik was to do with Passagierschiner. This is to do with the ability of East and West Berliners to travel between East and West Berlin.

So it was largely about developing people-to-people links, but with this strategic objective in mind. And what's happened over time is that the SPD and the foreign ministry have sort of distorted what AusPolitik is, and they now instrumentalise it to justify a policy.

that is essentially about German economic interests. But that's really not what AusPolitik was. So I think, as I say, in a funny way, there's something running through this conversation, which applies to both Germany and the EU, which is about... forgetting your own history in a sense, or rewriting your own history. Yeah, and in a way, I mean, I think it definitely...

Also ties into the sort of neoliberalization of the SPD, right? If you're suddenly a more pro-business party, you're going to rewrite the history of Ostpolitik to mean, oh, rather than, you know... specific set of policies designed to reunify Germany. Oh, that just means generally let's keep up our kind of export led business model and sort of keep everything as it is. And it's, I mean, we got into this on our last episode is

You know, I broadly like see some benefits definitely to the German perspective towards Russia and Ukraine. I mean, as opposed to. You see the Biden administration repeatedly sort of saying, oh, this innovation is imminent and like sort of like raising this rhetoric a lot. And Germany taking a bit more of a, I guess, a cool headed approach. i wish i wish that came maybe a bit more from an earnest point of view that like and this is where i think actually i mean red red green obviously

Seems unlikely at any point in the future. And I think even if they were in a red, red, green, I don't think they would have really any influence over foreign policy. That's where they've seen a sort of dangerous and they'd be cordoned off into some more social policies. But but even if that, I mean, if we could. assuming you know germany maintains its roughly kind of pacifist foreign policy if we could get that to actually be a bit more values driven and not so much commercial driven i think

I think there is a lot to be said for that. That's great. I completely agree. I too have some sympathy with the sort of restraint kind of argument. And actually, I think now the debate, I mean, I don't live in DC anymore, but my impression is that the...

The debate in DC is now really sophisticated on Russia and you have a real kind of really good argument taking place between sort of liberal hegemony and sort of realism or restraint. Finally, yeah. I sympathize, exactly finally, and I sympathize a lot with... you know i'm very agnostic on this but i do sympathize with a lot of what the restrainers kind of say but in germany you just have the feeling that that it's not being driven by you know

It's a disingenuous discussion. It's not really being driven by what is the best strategy towards Russia, but there are other interests. that play into that and actually it was quite striking i watched on sunday night annaville which is the sort of german talk show you know where they have guests talking about the particular issue of the day and so obviously they were talking about ukraine and it was quite interesting because dietmar barch who's from the

linker was on there and he i thought was quite interesting because of all the parties around you know in that discussion in the german political debate they're the one that you would think of as being in a way the sort of softest on Russia, the most pro-Russian, perhaps. But what was interesting was that he was quite anti-Nord Stream too, right? For exactly these reasons that you just hinted at, which is...

I think he probably genuinely is trying to think about what the right approach to Russia is, not how can we promote German economic interests. And so I think you end up then in quite a different place than if... you know ultimately um you're just using all of this as a as a smoke screen for the german interests and economic interests in particular interesting yeah yeah i mean it's

It's important to pay attention to the nuances of this debate, right? If listeners are coming from the US or the UK or other countries, because what you would think is the kind of typical left-right continuum.

on this you know the pipeline or ukraine and russia in general it it doesn't line up with what you'd think i mean we talked about this before but the greens being more hawkish and then and then the social democrats you know um i guess you would expect them to be dovish but then the the cdu is also almost right there with them. And so it's a bit odd, but it's definitely interesting to pay attention to. And I guess just close out a couple of closing thoughts just on the general...

politics situation here. Gone a long way from the sort of historical origins of German foreign policy and the EU and this, and I know you're a general German politics observer. And so... What do you see as sort of important developments here in German politics? Obviously, I'm thinking maybe in particular Friedrich Matz taking over the CDU. We haven't gotten a chance to talk about him in detail on the podcast yet. And we talk about...

Schultz being this kind of miracle continuation from the old Volkspartei. But then Merz seems like that could actually be a radical break, especially now with this EDU kind of... regaining in the polling. I know it's basically useless at this point. We just had an election. It won't be a while. But you're sort of seeing, OK, maybe our German voters coming home. They're now sort of returning to this equilibrium state of the CDU, CSU union.

being ahead of the social democrats and the greens and the other parties staying about on a similar level and merits being a quite radical cultural conservative but also on the libertarian front like being pretty right-wing on both culture and economics and

now him in charge of what is traditionally Germany's largest party. I was curious if you had any observations on that or anything else you've seen going on in the country. It's a really great question. And I sort of agree that actually it gets to, I think, one of the big... questions about German politics. So I've been working in the last few years quite a lot on questions around democracy and thinking quite a bit about the sort of problems in our democracy.

both in europe but also contrasting that with the united states because i think there's been a bit of a tendency in the last five six years to sort of think of the sort of crisis of liberal democracy as being kind of the same in the United States as in Europe, even if perhaps it's more extreme in the United States, but broadly the same sort of problem and almost a sort of tendency to look at our own politics through the prism of American politics, which I think really misleads us often.

And so in particular, so much of the debate about democracy over the last five or six years has been about populism and polarization. And there's this sort of assumption that, you know, I mean, it's clearly true that in the United States, polarization is a huge problem.

huge probably the main threat to democracy the way that since the realignment that you had in the 1960s basically around the question of race in this is in the sort of era of the civil rights revolution that since then you've had this growing polarization whereby America has sort of divided into these two sort of mega identities, as Liliana Mason puts it, which largely correspond to the two parties. So you have liberals and conservatives and that maps on to, you know, Democrats and Republicans.

And that in turn has now led to a situation where the sort of independent institutions no longer function because of this polarization. I think that is broadly the story of the crisis of liberal democracy in America.

But it seems to me that what's happened in Europe, and in particular in Germany, in the same period over the last few decades since the 1960s, is literally i mean it's almost the opposite of what's happened in the united states it's not a story of polarization it's a story of convergence actually if you take german politics in the 1950s

or even earlier it actually looks quite a lot like american politics now it was quite tribal actually if you think about say you know if you were born a social democrat you voted for the social democrats you didn't want your kids to marry you know somebody they didn't marry somebody you know voted for another they kind of mapped onto

The class differences in a large way. Confessional differences, right? Because you have the Catholic Party and then the Christian Democrats, which represented Catholics and then Christians. so actually what's happened in the in the sort of particularly in the last sort of three decades or so is there's been convergence between the left and the right

in German politics and more broadly in European politics. And so, you know, the problem is sort of too much consensus and not enough polarization, I think. And obviously, you know, we called this on our on our Hatsphia episode and a few other ones, the the Groko mindset. It's just like, same with the debt break too, right? It's like,

I mean, you have the Social Democrats enacting basically a right wing policy or the two parties coming together to enact a right wing policy. Exactly. So, you know, as you say, you know, three grand coalitions in the last four electoral periods in Germany. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. This is not a polarized country.

right now i i think that what's happened the the way that that convergence that produced these you know three or four three grand coalitions in the last four electoral periods i think the basis for that was partly what we've already discussed which is that the centre-left party, i.e. the Social Democrats, moved to the right on economic policy. I mean, to put it very reductively, they embraced neoliberalism and the Schroeder-era reforms, you know, sort of embody that. But the other part...

and this is where Mertz comes in and the Christian Democrats, is that the Christian Democrats under Merkel moved to the left on cultural questions. And so the basis for this consensus in the centre ground of German politics...

was a CDU that had moved to the left on cultural questions and a SPD that had moved to the right on economic questions. Now, that worked brilliantly for Merkel as a... sort of electoral strategy obviously she could have continued remaining chancellor for a lot longer if she wanted to but i would suggest that it's been quite bad for german democracy

you know so you called it the the goal core mindset you can also think of it in terms of sort of politics of no alternatives right that you know Merkel says there is no alternative and then that in turn you know empowers populists like the AFD who come along and say no no there

is an alternative i mean even the name alternative for german for germany is a direct response to Merkel's statement there is no alternative and so you end up with populism as a kind of a response to that okay sorry that's a very long sort of explanation to get to answer your question about Mertz so

The question is then, what should the Christian Democrats do after Merkel? And... I look at this from two perspectives and I think it's quite important to look at it from two perspectives because I think a lot of people allied these two perspectives, at least in my kind of world, where people love the fact that Merkel has... as they would see it modernized the christian democrats on these cultural questions because they sympathize with those views but

i look at it also from the perspective of democracy and as i say i think it's been bad for german democracy because you know whether we like it or not there are a lot of germans

that have different views on these cultural questions. And what I think has opened up is this sort of representation gap where none of the mainstream parties were representing these people anymore. And I think the Christian Democrats under Merkel sort of... got out ahead of this, got too far without really sort of bringing enough of their base with them.

So I actually think, you know, as abhorrent as I would find it for the Christian Democrats to move to the right and be much more sort of hard line on these questions around immigration and Islam and culture in general.

remember what the CDU was like pre-Merkel and it was horrible on a lot of these questions you know I can remember Christian Democrat regional politicians running for office you know with all kinds of racist slogans There was the famous campaign by Jürgen Rutgers in Nordrhein-Westfalen in the 2000s.

where he ran on a campaign that was, the slogan was Kinder Stadt Inder, children instead of Indians. And this was basically the idea that instead of importing Indian software engineers, which the Schroeder government was trying to do at the time,

they should train German workers for the same jobs. There were all kinds of campaigns like that. It was quite horrible, but... You see AFD slogans with similar things now, but it's like... become yeah like they've taken up the mantle of that kind of red as abhorrent as i find all of that kind of stuff i think the reality is there are enough germans that sympathize with that that way of thinking about the world and about germany that they have to be represented.

And I think on balance, I would rather have a centre-right party like the CDU representing them to some extent. This was the kind of Franz Josef Strauss strategy for a long time. I would rather have the CDU trying to integrate those types of voters.

and reaching out to those voters to some extent rather than completely excluding them and leaving them to the AFD. So I basically think that As abhorrent as I find Mertz on a lot of these questions and other Christian Democrats who want to go further to the right, either in cultural policy or in economic policy, I think it's probably good for German democracy.

Because as we've seen, I mean, you can't kill, you can't eradicate politics, right? Right, exactly. Whether this is on the German or the European level, like it will bubble up somewhere. And if you try to just have everything be, you know, this sort of eternal grand coalition.

it's it's gonna spring up in ways you don't like it and i think the afd is obviously a manifestation of that um and just just general like dissatisfaction with this and i also find it problematic because like you said i mean i'm 100 on board on the the how awful these you know like reactionary cultural views are but at the same time if you try to put cultural questions kind of beyond the pale beyond the realm of debate it can also do the same with then economic questions and

questions of say foreign policy like we talked about and so you know while it's overstated i think how much america was like culturally progressive i mean like abortion was still illegal under her tenure i mean even advertising it we've talked about on here before. So it's not, she only did gay marriage, you know, very belatedly. So yes, she might have been. And even that personally she was opposed to, right?

Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, she might have been, she might have allowed for some of these changes, but it's not like she was a real cultural modern artist. She just wasn't totally, totally revanchist. And so... While I may agree with some of the general sort of cultural liberalization of Germany and that sort of depoliticization of that maybe suits my perspectives on this, I wish there were more debate on fiscal rules, on foreign policy, things like that.

By de-politicizing it, it's a risk because it might serve your interest in one aspect, but not the others. And I think that's basically what's happened for the past decade. That's exactly right. And that brings me to the... what next thing i wanted to say or the last thing i want to say which is that i think there is a relationship between there's a polarization on economic questions and polarization on cultural questions which is that the less you have polarization

on economic questions. And I think this has been the story, not just in Germany, but elsewhere in the last, you know, 30, 40 years. We've had less polarization around on economic questions as the center left and the center right have sort of converged around basically neoliberalism.

that then inevitably democratic contestation shifts onto cultural questions because you're no longer debating economic questions so there's a way in which you know to put it sort of again quite reductively neoliberalism creates identity politics And these cultural kind of the sort of polarization around the cultural questions. And by the way, to come back to the United States, I think this is exactly.

why what's happening in america is so is so troubling right now is that cultural polarization is extremely toxic and it's very difficult to resolve these questions economic polarization is much more healthy for a democracy and To circle back to something we discussed earlier, I would argue that it's almost the sort of essence of democratic politics is that you're having, you know, real polarisation around these distributional questions, economic questions.

And to the extent that you don't, you end up then having sort of cultural fights, cultural wars instead. Well, and two presidents who were in the US who were quite economically moderate, like... Clinton obviously moving, basically enacting Republican welfare reform, and Obama while sort of campaigning as a progressive, carrying out a fairly center-right agenda.

Obamacare, basically Mitt Romney's plan. And you see the fever pitch of rhetoric then taking over in the culture wars because there's almost no debate left in economics. And so, like you said, it bubbles up into the cultural realm. So then to come back to Mertz...

What I would prefer would be for... the christian democrats to move back to the right you know on economic policy and actually mertz in some ways you know that was part of how he was profiling himself was less actually on the cultural issues it may have shifted a little bit now but in a way way i thought of him as being actually more sort of right wing on economic questions rather than cultural questions and so i prefer that and then you know similarly for the spd to move back to the left

on on economic questions which they have been doing a little bit of at least you know the party schultz is a centrist but the party has certainly taken a shift to the left on economic policy and so i would you know i prefer that

But, you know, it might be that you have to have a little bit of both economic and cultural polarization. And that seems to be where Mertz is going towards. Yeah. Well, that's great. I mean, I think that's a great place to leave it is, yeah, hoping for... a little more a little more polarization in some regards in germany and a little more democracy makes it i think to make both a better germany

Hopefully a better Europe and also just a more fun country to observe for those of us that observe politics here. Dare more democracy. Dare more democracy, as Billy Plant famously said. Hans Gunnani, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much to Hans for that discussion and any of those pieces mentioned. If you want to do some further reading, we'll link to those in the episode description as well as where you can find Hans's writing.

or if you want to read The Paradox of German Power. And we will see you next time for installment three in the Foreign Policy Series. That should be out in two weeks. Yep. Yep. Thanks again to Hans. That was great. Yeah. Like Michelle said, definitely a good person to follow for updates on Germany and the European Union. Definitely one of the... the better sources of analysis and writing going on today. So yeah, we'll link to all that and see you next time. Thanks a lot.

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