The leadership tour. Autoship race. Germany's beleaguered defense minister has temporarily dropped his PhD. Hey, it's Ted. Welcome to Spaßbremse. I'm really excited to share this episode with everybody since I had the great pleasure of speaking with friend of the pod and all around expert on Germany and Europe, Hans Kudnani. who's currently a fellow at the Remark Institute at NYU. You might remember Hans from an episode about two years ago where we discussed German foreign policy.
This time we have him on to discuss the state of Europe with about a month to go until the European Parliament elections. But we also reconnect to some of the themes that we discussed in 2022 and also some more recent insights about Germany's approached Israel and the war in Gaza. Hans is really all around one of the best writers on Germany out there today. He's just an incredible thinker and also a great conversationalist and sharing his writing with me in this conversation.
So it was really incredible to get the chance to speak with him again. It's one of my favorite conversations I've had on the pod in a while, and I hope you all enjoy it. Before we get to the interview, I would just love to say we would all appreciate your support on Patreon. That helps keep the show up and running. It's a lot of work to prep all these interviews in the midst of PhD and working and all that. So anything you can contribute helps me keep the lights on and the mics recording.
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And if you can't support financially, totally get it. But it would be great if you could share the show, rate and review and all of that. And without any further ado, we'll get on to the interview with Hans Kudnani. Hey everyone, and welcome to Spaßbremse. I'm joined by a repeat guest, actually, that I'm very excited to have on. It's Hans Kudnani, who is currently a visiting fellow.
at the Remark Institute at NYU, is also an associate fellow at Chatham House, where he used to direct the Europe program. and all-around expert on Germany and Europe, and someone I'm delighted to have back on the podcast we haven't had for a couple years. So he's been a prolific writer on a number of topics, and I'm very excited to talk to him. So Hans, thanks so much for coming back on.
Thank you so much for having me again, Ted. Looking forward to the discussion. As you say, a lot's happened since I was on the podcast last time. Yeah, I was looking back at our... our first episode with you where we were discussing your book, The Paradox of German Power. And I realized it was published on February 17th of 2022. So exactly one week before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And, you know, Hans has written prolifically on German foreign policy, but as well as kind of European affairs, as I mentioned. So thinking that's quite a... coincidental time for the foreign policy discussion to have taken place pre-Seitenwenda, et cetera. But we will get into all of that and discuss some kind of through lines in your work.
There's three main kind of topics that I kind of picked out of your recent writing that I wanted to cover. We'll do them in turn. I just want to flag it for our audience as we go through. And one is your writing and the broad rightward drift in Europe. and this concept of Euro whiteness, which is the title of a book from last year, actually, which I can highly recommend and will link to. The second is German foreign policy, the so-called Zeitenwende that Schultz announced.
epochal change in foreign policy. It's always translated differently, but that's the one I see the most. And then finally, Germany and Zionism, especially after. october 7th and like i said i think there's a number of through lines between these that we can all we can all discuss as well so starting now with this first topic about and the EU's rightward drift, which is of course something that people are paying a lot of attention to, especially now.
you know, in a kind of purely electoral sense, right? Looking ahead to the European Parliament election saying, you know, there's a projected rise in the far right, et cetera, et cetera. And so there, you know, the rightward drift is getting a lot, getting a lot of attention. But I think it's kind of happening the way it's discussed is happening in a very kind of narrow, like I said, just narrow electoral sense, not talking about the kind of broader.
these broader shifts that you've documented and what you've called the civilizational turn in Europe. And I think you laid out this argument for the first time, or at least most prominently in a 2021 New Statesman piece. about what does it mean to be pro-European today. Could you talk a little bit about that argument about...
the role of whiteness in Europe? I think we might have discussed it a bit on the first time, but to bring people up to speed about this broader argument about, yeah, whiteness and the European project. Yeah. So... So, yeah, this is something that I think I started to think about, particularly after the refugee crisis in 2015, you know, so it kind of goes back kind of a long way.
It did increasingly after that seem to me as if the refugee crisis was a kind of a critical juncture, that something quite fundamental was changing in the EU. And then, as you say, I wrote this. essay in the new statesman in 2021 where i sort of kind of slightly thinking aloud about this for the for the first time um and i guess um
I guess there were two things going on. And this is then, in a way, what produced the book, Euro Whiteness. And because the New Statesman essay sort of resonated quite a bit and there was quite a bit of discussion around it, it sort of prompted me to sort of... go further and turn it into a short book which which came out last summer and and in a way as i say there were sort of two things going on one was this sense um that that i had as i say that that
actually something was changing objectively within the eu um uh there was a sort of troubling transformation um of the eu going on and actually you know it seemed to me that had I had that feeling actually since the euro crisis began in 2010, that they had sort of set in motion a kind of troubling transformation of the EU. And I'd written about that in different ways.
But then it did seem to me as if after the refugee crisis in 2015, what I then called the civilizational turn, this way in which, in particular, the EU and pro-European seemed increasingly to be.
perceiving threats to the eu as you know in civilizational terms that's roughly what i meant by the civilizational term um uh and so so that was the first thing was as i say this this sense that something was changing in the EU and I was trying to kind of capture that but then the other thing that was happening I guess at the same time was that sort of subjectively as it were I was increasingly having the feeling that
a lot of what I thought I knew about the EU and particularly the history of the EU was wrong. It was actually myth rather than real history. One example of this is the sort of, if you go back to the origins of the European project, European integration in the 1950s, I mean, we now know from, you know, decades worth of scholarship on this, that, you know, it began as a colonial project, right?
that part of the point of European integration of the 1950s was from France and Belgium to consolidate, to integrate, if you like, their remaining colonies in Western Central Africa. And this was something that had been completely written out of the sort of official narrative of the EU as peace project and so on. And so, as I say, you know, in a way, part of what I was trying to think through was, you know, how much of.
My sort of changing perceptions of the EU were just to do with the fact that I was, you know, you know, going back and. and and looking again at the history and changing my mind about about what the eu is all about and how much was actually a sort of objective change that was happening you know as i say after 2010 um and I finished the book in the spring of 2023. And it ends basically with this idea of the civilizational term, this sort of troubling direction in which the EU seemed to be going.
And then after I'd finished working on the book, but actually before it came out, which was in the summer of last year, it actually seemed to me that...
things were developing even further in the direction that I'd kind of been saying otherwise, something going even beyond the civilizational turn. And for me there, the paradigmatic figure was Georgia Maloney. So when she was elected as the Italian Prime Minister, you know, towards the end of 2022, the way that the EU and pro-Europeans kind of reacted to her election, I found really, I mean, quite shocking, but quite illuminating at the same time.
And in particular, they essentially, when she said that, when she made it clear that she wasn't going to be. disruptive uh on the eurozone in other words on sort of eurozone economic policy and when she indicated that she wasn't going to be pro-russian she was going to be pro-ukrainian it seemed to me as if
in particular, the European centre-right, the European People's Party, essentially said, OK, you know, in that case, you're one of us and we can totally deal with you. And so, you know, for me, this raised... some questions that even went beyond some of the arguments I'd made in Euro whiteness, which is basically around the possibility of a kind of far right EU.
which I think until quite recently had seemed to many people to be a kind of contradiction in terms. How can you have a far right EU? But the fact of Maloney and in particular, you know, these images of Maloney standing alongside Ursula von der Leyen. signing these refugee deals, EU refugee deals, you know, refugee deals with, you know, countries like Tunisia and more recently Egypt.
I think made that very, very sort of concrete, that possibility of a kind of far right EU. And so, you know, in the sort of, you know, during last year, essentially, I started to kind of write about that a little bit as well. And I think that sort of, in a way, made some of the arguments that I made in Euro whiteness, which may have seemed a little bit kind of abstract or sort of...
academic in a way, quite concrete, right? That, you know, when you have this, you know, the far right surging and increasingly influencing the EU itself ahead of European elections in June. I think that sort of made some of the arguments I made in Euro whiteness resonate a little bit more than they otherwise would have done. Absolutely. I mean...
It used to be that like far right populist and Euroskeptic were basically used as synonyms, you know, anytime the sort of more centrist, you know, quote, pro-European. would identify these as a threat. And now it seems like the two are able to be reconciled quite well. I think there's probably an element of...
The far right parties themselves kind of looking at the example of Brexit and realizing they don't necessarily want to go down that path and and that they don't actually have to moderate on.
core elements of their program, like migration, like you said, as long as you support NATO and kind of support the more foreign policy paradigm of the sort of center right, often German, like you said, von der Leyen approach, then all of a sudden you're kind of welcomed into this group and a lot of other, you know, you're no longer outcast and there's not really this.
This cordon sanitaire, like they like to say. And so when you say this term, though, far right EU, do you see that as the main threat coming from actual far right parties, you know, forming part of. what is in effect the government taking positions in the commission? Or do you see that in this kind of other way that we see the far right exert power, which is through dragging the center right in their direction?
Yeah, no, that's a great question. And so this is in a way exactly what I've been saying over the last, you know, sort of six months or so is that since I started writing these. pieces about this possibility of a far right EU sort of almost a year ago now.
you know every time there's an election in a europe in an eu member state um you know the spanish election the polish election and the dutch election you know i now have sort of journalists kind of asking me to sort of comment on this you know given some of these arguments i've been making
And the tendency is a little bit to kind of sort of say, well, you know, when a far right party does very well in an election, like, for example, in the Dutch election last October, I think it was, you know, then people sort of tend to say, oh, turns out your thesis was right.
And when far right parties, you know, do perhaps not quite as well as they're expected to, like, for example, in the Spanish election last year, then people say, oh, that shows your thesis is wrong. And I kind of, you know. tend to sort of say, well, hang on, you know, we need to not just look at these raw numbers in terms of, you know, far right parties kind of going up or down or, you know, going up more than expected or not quite as much as expected.
But we also need to focus on exactly what you said, Ted, which is the influence that they're sort of indirectly having, you know, through centre-right parties increasingly adopting a lot of their... rhetoric and policies, especially on these questions around identity and immigration and Islam. And so, you know, the way I sometimes put it is there's a way in which the far right can win without winning, right, which is, you know, if the centre right takes on the agenda.
And I should say, part of the reason that I'm quite conscious of that is that I'm a Brit of a generation that remembers Margaret Thatcher. And this is precisely what Margaret Thatcher did, you know, in the late 70s and early 80s in Britain was in the late 70s. There was a far right party. The National Front was doing very well. And in the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher deliberately and quite kind of...
sort of openly reached out to their voters, said, I understand your concerns about the country being swamped by immigrants. And so it essentially indicated to them that she was kind of going to. um uh sort of take on some of the um the national front's um agenda on on these questions around immigration and then when she became prime minister she then you know did in indeed you know with the 1981 nationality act kind of restrict
immigration and the rights of immigrants. And that essentially killed off the National Front, right? So I'm very conscious that that is something that the centre-right can do and do quite effectively. It's sometimes said... The centre-right parties always lose when they try to copy the far right. Some political scientists would say that. I'm not entirely convinced that's true, as I say, because I think I have this example of Margaret Thatcher in the back of my mind, at least.
In any case, I think the crucial thing, and by the way, you know, we know this also from going even further back in history, you know, to the history of fascism and so on, that, you know, when the far right kind of tends to rise. Everything does depend on the centre right and how the centre right kind of responds to that rise of the far right. This is a very old story. And I think that's exactly that's exactly where we are now. And just one final thought on that, which is that, you know.
Because now the discussion I now find myself having with a lot of people is, you know, it is it's kind of about like the definition of the far right. And a lot of people kind of want now to, particularly people in the center right, want now to believe. that somebody like Maloney can no longer be categorized as being far right, precisely because in these very selective ways, she has abandoned some of these earlier radical positions, whether it's on, you know, leaving the EU, as you mentioned.
or whether it's on issues around the Eurozone, or whether it's on some of these foreign policy questions like Ukraine. And I think some people really want to believe that if you... a supportive of, you know, neoliberalism in the Eurozone and of Ukraine. How can you be far right? That's that's very much the narrative that I think we're getting now from from from from the center right.
Partly because they have an interest in that narrative, because it then means that you can cooperate with those parties, perhaps even be in a coalition with them in a way that would help them. i think now the the argument we all seem to be having is is you know what it even means to be far right and my sense and the sense of some others like for example cass muda you know one of the leading experts on on the far right you know
I think the way he put it, you know, was that, you know, being pro-Ukraine has now become a proxy for being liberal democratic. You know, as long as you're on the right side of that struggle. then, you know, as I say, you can no longer even be considered far right. Yeah, and I think, I mean, specifically with the Russia-Ukraine issue,
I think that's actually, I'm curious what you think, but I think it's kind of strengthened this civilizational struggle rhetoric, right? I mean, obviously Russia, well, you know, not exclusively white country, of course. different regions there. And actually, when you look at who's dying at the front, it's often non-white Russians. But, you know, the way and that kind of contributes how it's it's again being framed as a sort of Asiatic other. And.
And I think you see this where the far right is more willing to make these explicitly kind of defending white Christendom kind of arguments that are pretty hard to see in any other way than a far right context. But the center right is willing to say, oh, we're defending freedom. And they'll say we need to fight back against malicious, revisionist, authoritarian countries. They mean typically exclusively Russia and China.
You know, they're happy to go to Azerbaijan to secure new gas deals. Like, it's not really a matter of political regime. It's, you know, it's, I think, a specifically civilizational issue. And in a way... And I think also with, you know, post October 7th, the supporting Israel has become another one of these kind of set like tick box things like as long as you do this, it's OK.
And again, you know, it's not we're not we don't have a problem with Islam. We just it's just beyond the pale not to fully support Israel. And there's so this the center right removes itself one step. from these kind of openly far-right positions, but they just kind of do it through a proxy of like, oh, you don't oppose the Russian invasion enough, you don't oppose, you don't condemn Hamas enough, or you don't support Israel enough. And it's like they distance themselves.
tiny bit, but have effectively the same position. Yeah. So I think we're going to probably come back to Israel. And so I'll leave that for the moment. But I guess two things. The first is on this question of... the center right and the far right and the civilizational turn. So, you know, I completely agree with you that that this idea of the way I have put it is that the the idea of a sort of threatened European civilization.
is the kind of sweet spot that links the centre-right and the far-right. They're both increasingly, I mean, it's very much a far-right kind of idea, as you mentioned, connected to white replacement theory and so on. But it does seem to me increasingly that the center right is also sort of, you know, increasingly thinking in the same civilizational terms. And one way of thinking about sort of.
the different emphases that the centre-right and the far-right kind of put on this is that, and I think I even sort of mentioned this in that 2021 essay, and it was one of the things that upset a few people was was that if the far right sees the main threat to European civilisation being from non-white immigration...
And as I say, very closely related to white replacement theory, you know, that that's what they see as being the thing that's going to destroy European civilization. The center right here, I'm thinking particularly of Macron, I have to say. They also see a threat to European civilisation, but it's a slightly different one. Instead of focusing on immigration, they do a bit of that too.
But actually, the thing that's distinctive, I think, about the centre-right is this foreign policy focus. In other words, European civilisation is threatened, yes, by migration. but also by, you know, the rise of China and by, you know, Russia as the foreign policy actor and so on. And this then, you know, and this is something which is, you know, very mainstream now in sort of European foreign policy discourse.
you know, the idea that even if they don't quite use the term European civilization, which Macron absolutely does, this idea, you know, by the way, Macron said this again the other day, the idea that sort of Europe can be destroyed. Right. You know, it does start, I think, to come quite close to the far right discourse on the threat to European civilization. And then the second thing is, yeah, you know, exactly as you say, it does seem to me that.
Russia is increasingly being kind of constructed as a kind of civilizational other for Europe embodied by the EU. as you also suggested, this is not so much something completely new as it's reverting to something which actually goes back to the origins of the EU. Because as you mentioned, during the Cold War in the 1950s, A lot of the discourse around European integration was precisely this idea that Europe and the bloc that was then being formed was a kind of a bulwark against...
against, as you say, a sort of Asiatic threat. This is how a lot of people at Adenauer and so on thought about this. And so there's a way in which, as a friend of mine put it, what I've called the civilizational turn is actually a civilizational return. right sort of going back in a way to um some of this uh um cold war discourse that kind of conflated the ideological and the civilizational so obviously it was partly an anti-communist kind of you know bulwark
But it was also sort of understood in kind of civilizational terms. And one kind of, I think, interesting sort of sort of just metric, I suppose, of that is I think if you and I haven't sort of gone back and done this in detail, but if you went back, I think, and looked. during the period between 2014, in other words, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and 2022, in other words, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
I think if you went back and looked at what people were saying about Russia on the one hand and Ukraine on the other hand, and whether they sort of belonged to Europe and belonged to the EU, there was no clear consensus on that at all. You know, some people saw both as being part of Europe. Some people saw neither as being part of Europe. Some people saw Russia. Even 2019, you know, for example, Macron is saying Russia belongs to a Europe of value.
But in any case, there was this kind of, as I say, there was this kind of ambiguity about, you know, in a sense, where Europe ended in civilizational terms, you know, on its eastern, you know, in its eastern borders. And I think what happened almost overnight. in 2022 after the Russian the full-scale Russian invasion was there was a sudden consensus that Russia is out and Ukraine's in you know and von der Leyen says that almost immediately right that that
Ukraine belongs to us, she literally says that. And then at the same time that Russia has shown that it doesn't belong to Europe. So I think there's been this way in which... You know, the sort of eastern borders of the EU have been increasingly defined in civilizational terms, and they've been defined increasingly clearly since 2022. And so I ended the book, which, as I mentioned, you know, I sort of finished writing in the beginning of 2023.
I ended that with a sort of open question about whether, as you suggested, the war in Ukraine is going to strengthen the civilizational return. But since then, it does seem to me increasingly to be the case that it has done, as you suggested. It's a complicated thing as well, because at the same time that it's strengthened this idea of kind of a European civilization. in at least like rhetorical kind of emotional sense.
It's strengthened the actual kind of dependency on the US and actual like tangible military economic sense, you know, LNG or F-35s, whatever the case is. And so Europe has kind of. as it's asserted its own uniqueness, it's actually become less independent in a material sense. And the other point there, what I would have is you're talking about the... The Cold War and identifying the civilizational opposition to Russia as a return to that and Adenauer and them.
In a lot of ways, what Adenauer and how they framed it was itself just a sort of slightly softened version of the Nazi rhetoric during the Second World War. And so, you know, I'm not I'm not saying kind of NATO support for Ukraine is akin to Barbarossa, but. There's certain echoes there. No, no, absolutely. And I should say for the sake of clarity or rather to sort of locate my arguments in a slightly bigger context, you know.
I suppose there are at least two kinds of civilizationalism going on. One is a European civilizationalism, which is what I'm writing about in Euro-wideness. But there's also clearly a broader sort of Western civilizationalism, right? The West as civilization.
And when Sam Huntington writes The Clash of Civilizations, he sees the West as one single, you know, Europe and the United States basically as one civilization. Right. It's the West against the rest, in particular, the West against China and Islam in his vision. And that. you know, absolutely exists. And I think, you know, it's had a resurgence since the Russian invasion in 2022.
And I think, you know, some of what you said, you know, particularly about the increasing dependence on the United States, the sort of resurgence of NATO. I mean, Western civilizationism, you know, NATO tends to be a vehicle for that. Right. But. There's another sort of less well-known and even kind of less obvious form of civilization.
civilizationalism, which is this narrower, much more specific European civilizationalism. And this goes all the way back to the 1920s. It always informed the European project. And in that version, Europe is a distinct civilization from the United States. In fact, the United States was always perceived as being one of the threats to European civilization. This is something that you get in the 1920s, this kind of idea that...
The European spirit, this is the language that they were using at the time, was threatened by these two sort of materialist civilizations on either side. This sort of American materialist civilization. and then the Soviet kind of communist, atheist kind of, you know, materialism. But the European spirit is being threatened by both. And you still get some of that now, you know.
This sense that, you know, the United States is both distinct from Europe in civilizational terms, but is even a threat to European civilization. And that, again, comes through in Makrov. You know, he kind of says this, right? He doesn't believe in the idea of the West. He thinks that Europe is a distinct civilization, distinct from the United States. Yeah, I think there are a lot of important dividing lines there, too, where the kind of...
Actually, this is segwaying nicely to this second bullet point I have talking about the changes in German foreign policy and their, you know, as you say, the Berlin blob, because that sort of vision of. foreign policy, even as it's, you know, similarly hawkish in some ways, is a lot more willing to embrace the U.S. And I guess that is also, you know, has a lot of continuities with German policy during the Cold War.
So, you know, now I think it's a great time to speak about this, you know, the Zeitung Wende, you know, a lot has been remarked on that. But I think it's an interesting way to frame it. as you know not so in some ways it's a it's an epochal change as as uh schultz has said in other ways it's a sort of tentative uh getting the wish list of this like berlin foreign policy blob which
which you talk about. And I was glad to do that because I think it is such a sort of small thing that a lot of people in the English speaking world don't actually. Don't actually know about it, but having sort of, you know, worked myself around the edges of it, I found a lot of your observations very astute. And especially in the sense that it is...
quite a bit disconnected from the rest of the population. You know, I think in basically every case, the sort of foreign policy think tank blob is going to be a little bit more hawkish than the median voter. I think in Germany, it's like... three or four steps more hawkish. It's really remarkable. Could you talk a little bit just about what you mean by, you know, the Berlin blob, maybe even just the term blob in general, in case anyone's not familiar?
Yeah. So before I get onto the blog, maybe just a word though on the Titan vendor, because it was interesting how you started this podcast. You talked about how my book, The Paradox of the German Power, came out just before the... uh the the the annexation of crimea and so a lot of the discussions i had about that book back in 2014 2015 um were precisely about the
I mean, in a way, the Zeitung vendor that Germany was meant to have, you know, the Berlin foreign policy analysts told us had taken place after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And especially in that summer of.
sort of 2015. There was something called, it's all totally forgotten now, right? But there was something called the Munich Consensus around 2014, 2015. And there was this idea that, you know, with the shock... of the essentially everything which you now associate with with the titan vendor now and the debate that's happened since 2022 there was a version of that that happened after 2014.
And so in response to my book, I had a lot of people saying, oh, well, your argument is wrong or out of date. Because look, Germany has just, you know, I was making an argument about Germany as a geoeconomic power. And people said to me, oh, this is all out of date now because Germany has suddenly rediscovered geopolitics after the Russian annexation of Crimea.
There were all these claims being made at that time about how a massive epochal shift had already taken place in German foreign policy in 2014, 2015. that, you know, Germany had become much more strategic, much more willing to embrace military force, that Merkel had shown this kind of exemplary leadership in, you know, coordinating the sanctions against Russia.
So there's a, you know, for someone like me who's been around for a little bit, there's a bit of a feeling of kind of Groundhog Day about this, that, you know, we've been through this once before. And all the same people who are now telling, who after Schultz gave that speech in February 22, telling me German foreign policy has changed. We'd already been through this in 2014, and it turned out not to have changed that much, essentially.
Hence, some of my skepticism about all the claims that were being made about the Titan vendor around that time in 2022, which I think have now turned out to be right, because actually the change has been less dramatic than... than it was hoped or claimed that it was at the time. And that then brings me to the Berlin blob. So the term the blob comes from Ben Rhodes, who was...
Obama's foreign policy advisor. And he used this term to refer to the US foreign policy establishment in Washington. And in particular, the sort of group thing. of you know the foreign foreign policy think tanks um and um you know that term has kind of since become you know used by other people and and what i tried to do in this little piece that i wrote was was to sort of
Think about the Berlin version of that. If there's a sort of blob everywhere where you have in capital cities where foreign policy is made. by a sort of relatively kind of isolated elite that tends to think in the same way, but as you said, you know, not necessarily the same way as the general public does about these issues. You know, you can sort of apply the term blob to other places, you know, other than D.C.
And having worked in foreign policy think tanks in London and in Berlin and in Chatham House, you know, I was sorry, in London, Berlin, Washington. I sort of, you know, tend to sort of. think about the comparisons between these different blobs. And if you like, you know, which is more blobby, you know, the sort of Berlin or the DC or the London version. And I have to say, you know, this was basically the thrust of this little piece that I wrote, that the Berlin blob seemed blobby.
than any other one of the ones that i know and by that i mean that the both this tendency towards group thing you know that they all think the same but also you know related to that this disconnect between them and the general public seemed to me to be even greater
in the case of the Berlin Blob. But above all, what prompted me to write some of this stuff was that, for me personally, given this history that... I sort of described, it was kind of striking for me how the Berlin foreign policy analysts, who they suddenly seem to become much more hawkish after February 2022, but not in a transparent way.
Right. Not in a way that said, you know, yeah, we got this wrong. You know, we need to correct that mistake. They sort of give you the impression now that they've always been super hawkish. In other words, you know, for example, that they've always been in favor of supplying.
ukraine with whatever weapons it needs in order to be able to defeat russia i mean to watch german foreign policy analysts now when you watch them on talk shows and so on you would think as i say that that's what they've always argued for
the reality is very different. So as I mentioned, I've been writing about German foreign policy for over a decade. And during that period, particularly between 2014 and 2022, I was being very critical of German foreign policy towards Russia and China as well, arguing, this is part of my argument and paradox of German power, that it was driven by the interests of big German companies. and that it was strategically kind of flawed and so on. And at that time...
All of the Berlin foreign policy analysts were very defensive of that approach to German foreign policy, Merkel's approach, basically. They were very defensive of Merkel. And so at that time, I was sort of more hawkish than they were, as it were. And then what's happened since the Russian invasion is they suddenly become they suddenly out hawked me. Right. And they now criticize me for not being hawkish enough. Right. Because I'm a little bit skeptical about.
the Western strategy in the war in Ukraine. And so, you know, for me, that raises this question, which Stephen Ward and other realist international relations theorists. have kind of asked about blobs, which is that part of the problem is that there's no accountability. The best example of this would be American neoconservatives, right?
They never sort of, you know, they sort of come back and, you know, they've never sort of really been, you know, they were discredited for a while. But now suddenly we listen to all these same people again who've made terrible errors of judgment. Yeah, liberals are all reading David Frum in the Atlantic now. Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, basically, I was trying to point to the German version of that, the lack of accountability.
um for foreign policy experts essentially yeah and you you make this good point about this weird term like leadership right you know schultz needs to lead and it always means as you say you know doing what the blob told him to do and they they have this sort of periodic preoccupations with specific weapons deliveries. And we talked about this. I did a whole podcast about this on the...
The whole Leopard fiasco, which was supposed to be this, you know, obviously the German Leopard 2 tank. And it was this whole big thing about, you know, are they going to send in? tanks and give them to Ukraine as part of their summer counteroffensive. Eventually, they end up doing this. But of course, this counteroffensive doesn't go hardly anywhere. But it's really like symbolic thing. And now you see it again.
with the Taurus missile. Right. And it's like we have to give them this thing. But in both cases, I find it hard to believe that anyone would really think that this one specific weapon is going to like. somehow single-handedly turn the tide of this war. It's a very like, yeah, like a completely symbolic thing and something you can kind of create a social media movement around, you know, free the leopard, free the tourists, whatever.
I don't honestly understand fully what the thinking behind this is. It's sort of like they want the social democratic leadership to sort of... I guess, repent for like what they see is this like neo-politique. And then each of these is sort of like these weapons is like a form of tithing or a form of repentance. It has a very bizarre symbolic quality to it.
And it's just it's sort of unclear what Germany is going to actually contribute to the sort of Western rearmament program. I mean, a policy I've seen some people kind of half jokingly say is that. it would be a lot better to spend this money. Just give it all to Poland and like, let them rearm. Like Germany clearly is just going to waste all this free armament money. If you actually wanted to strengthen German defense, give it to a country that can actually kind of field an army and can, can.
put this money to you successfully again you know not not backing that proposal but it speaks to the nature of which there's not a lot real concrete happening with changing the reality on the ground and a lot more symbolic politics yeah i'm glad you brought up the um the leopard 2 campaign the free the leopards campaign as you say um because yeah i did find that really absurd as well and um
And absurd because of the way that, to me, it sort of just really illustrated this tendency to basically go from doing serious analysis to activism, something like cheerleading, essentially. I mean, I found that. That was what I found absurd about it, was seeing all these German foreign policy analysts basically doing cheerleading. It's interesting as well. You mentioned earlier on, you know, you were sort of hinting at some of the continuities going all the way back to the Nazi era. Right.
This is an interesting case, actually, because part of the reason that Schultz was hesitant, I think understandably so, about sending Leopard 2 tanks to Russia was, you know, that... I think he had a sense that he was nervous about the prospect of German tanks. being sent into combat against Russia. And I think he also got that the German people were anxious about that, right, precisely because of the historical precedence of that.
But it also strikes me that, you know, you didn't use this term, but the way in which Leopard 2 was kind of fetishized by the Berlin blob. It was presented as, to use a term that does go back to that period, as a kind of wunderwaffe. It's hard not to, I think, see that kind of link. Yeah, and then, you know, I think the sort of...
For me, one of the very striking things, and I don't get this either, I find this very puzzling too. What was the Berlin Blob thinking? Because part of why it was so absurd to fetishize and overhype... Leopard 2 was I think when it then turned out that it wasn't the Wunderwaffe that it was being hyped up to be and it wasn't the game changer.
It didn't make that much of a difference, right? I tried to look this morning before this podcast, actually, coincidentally, I was trying to get to the bottom of how many of the Leopard 2s have been destroyed. It's certainly a lot. I don't have an exact figure, but a lot of them now have been destroyed.
They had like a bounty on them, I think. Any sort of the counter offensive started. I heard that the Russian army, like because it was so hyped up, like, oh, this superior, you know, Western armaments going to. going to destroy our our tanks they they kind of yeah they put like a a prize on them and then they were very quickly targeted um yeah and it like you said oh go ahead there you go
I was going to say, you know, this Wunderwaffe, just to kind of build on the echoes you're describing. I mean, A, that it's still named after a cat. like the Tiger and the Panther tanks of World War II. So it's really a deliberate callback to Wehrmacht tanks. And again, it's sort of a similar, and the Russian tanks still start with T and then a number. And then...
Also, that the same kind of idea that, you know, like waiting for this sort of miracle weapon in the way that like the Tiger tank was superior to, say, the T-34, but the sort of superior numbers. did end up overwhelming them. And then you see kind of the same dynamic, right?
You know, again, I don't want to overplay these parallels because obviously ideologically this struggle is not the same, but you can see why there are a lot of people that do feel hesitant about this because some of these echoes are just a little bit too loud to ignore.
Well, I would go one step further, which is, you know, you're absolutely right. The name, that's a very good point. There is a deliberate continuity there. But I think the other thing, which is perhaps even more important, actually raises an even bigger question about... German history and German foreign policy, is that it's the same companies manufacturing the tanks as it was during World War II. So if you take Rheinmetall, I mean, this is the same company.
Right now. And the reason I think that raises an even bigger question that goes beyond Ukraine is I think this is one way of thinking about German history in general, which is that, you know, obviously it's the case. that after 1945, the political structures of Germany completely changed, right from the Nazi period to, you know, what becomes the Federal Republic. So there is a very clear break. And you have, you know, democracy.
with all its flaws, replacing a fascist state. But if you look at the structure of the German economy, and in particular the companies, there there's a huge continuity. across 1945 right so you know we're talking here about you know arms the arms industry and that's one example but you can also take let's take the chemical industry Right. Yeah. I mean, the big the big three German chemical companies, BASF, Post and I can't remember the third one, but these are the three companies.
that come out of IG Farben when IG Farben is broken up. And that was, you know, this, you know, dominant chemical company that, by the way, also happened to produce cyclone B gas. Yeah, I would encourage everybody to go back and listen to our Nazi companies during World War Two series, actually, because we yeah, no, I can I can only agree. And we.
Yeah, I mean, you're talking Krupp as well, Krupp-Steel. I mean, you can go on and on, really. Volkswagen would be another sort of paradigmatic case. Yeah, no, absolutely.
It's a good way to, you know, like you said, you can find a lot of through lines rather than tracing the sort of political system if you trace the actual capitalist structures, right? And I guess the last thing on this sort of specific... nature of the blob is something I find particularly interesting is that the way that public opinion is used.
in in these kind of debates and so you'll have often someone say a twitter thread or an article or something and they'll they'll get um you know a certain amount of polling And if there's a poll that agrees with their positions, like, you know, should we support Ukraine? I kind of in the abstract, right? A lot of people will say yes. I say this shows that Schultz needs to do more.
Um, you know, like the, he needs to follow public opinion. And if it's like, should we send X weapon to Ukraine? Say this shows the. shows that Schultz needs to do more messaging to get the public on board with him. And so whatever the actual public opinion is, the foreign policy establishment is correct. And so I find it.
I find it remarkable that even in the same Twitter thread, they'll use this different language. It's like, wait, are we a democracy that follows the public or are you an expert who leads the public? And the answer is whatever suits them. I think that's exactly right. And I suppose the idea of animating it is that we know better, right? So in other words, if the public agrees with us, then that's all fine.
If the public disagrees with us, then, you know, they need to be educated to change their minds. Now, I think that would be kind of, to some extent, at least justifiable. If the foreign policy experts had a really strong track record of always being right over the last several decades. Right. But I think whether we're talking about the United States or Britain or Germany, it's not the case. They've made terrible errors. And often actually the public's instinct on a lot of these questions.
has been more sure-footed actually than what the foreign policy experts have told them. The British and American version of this obviously is Iraq. But I think there's also a German version of this, which is what we've been talking about, this kind of decade in which the German foreign policy establishment had this disastrous approach to China and Russia.
which basically collapsed, you know, at least in relation to Russia with the Russian invasion in 2022. And there's been no sense of, you know, accountability for that, basically. And now it seems like the tendency is to swing so far in the other way that any kind of continued economic exchange with China is tantamount to appeasement. And, you know, it's gone from, yeah, like you said, maybe overly...
accommodating in some ways, especially, I would say, towards Russia. But now it's, you know, even like China gets lumped in with Russia and it's like, oh, if you're selling them any cars, you're like, you know, you know, letting the totalitarians take over the world. And it's like, OK. I don't think we want World War III with China. At least on Russia, I find it hard to avoid the sense that...
you know, what you hear now from the Berlin blob, this very hawkish position is a kind of an overcompensation for their previous mistakes. On China, I think it's... I, you know, you, you, you might be closer to this than I am. I think you spend more time in Berlin at the moment than I do, but, but my sense is that, that Germany's and even the foreign policy.
world is quite divided, actually, on China, that you have some people, as you say, that have now gone to the other extreme, have become extremely kind of hawkish on China, and are really pushing the decoupling and so on in a, you know, perhaps sort of... reckless kind of way but it does seem to me there are still sort of maybe not so much in the foreign policy think tanks but certainly big parts of the political establishment that basically want to say
China is not Russia. And so although we recognize we have to now, you know, have a different approach to Russia at site and vendor, we're not yet convinced, actually, that, you know, we need to. learn some lessons from what went wrong with our Russia policy for our China policy. I mean, that's clearly the case with a lot of German business that in some ways are actually doubling down on manufacturing in China and so on.
So there, I think there's, you know, there's, my sense is from the outside is that Berlin is quite divided on China. And we don't quite, I don't quite yet have a clear sense of whether that's... you know, how that's going to evolve, actually. Yeah, I think you're right with the political establishment insofar as the people that actually are in the parties still are much more conciliatory because they're so much closer to German business. But then...
Because there are such strong Atlanticist links in the foreign policy think tank world, they tend to then be the more hawkish ones because they are not getting donations from Volkswagen for the most part.
and so there's a you know there there might be funded more defense industry etc um not saying it's all the money but you know i think i think that does play it does play a role there and so i think i think that is often the divide it's not so much a partisan one as it's a sort of who your employer is often i think that's right yeah and now kind of moving to the the final and and obviously thorniest topic um of all of these in in german politics today
And it's Germany's relationship with Israel and Zionism and the kind of changing meaning of the Holocaust in German historical memory. You wrote this great piece for Descent that just came out last month. called uh zionism and lest anyone think that this is you just being uh sort of snarky or glib. This is, uh, this is drawn from, uh, the CEO of Springer, uh, Matthias Dutfner, who, uh, has put this, um, what is it? He put it in a, in a.
interview or an email where he said this phrase. So just do want to clarify that so you're not banned from the Federal Republic. yeah i'm glad you clarified that um yeah and the thing is that it's the last it's literally the last three words of the piece So you have to read these 3,000 words before you realize it's not me, as you say, making that quote up. It is in quotes. The title is in quotes. So it does put a little distance. But yeah, I just want to emphasize that for your own sake.
But yeah, could you talk about this? Because this kind of goes back to your first book, Utopia or Auschwitz, and the changing meaning of... the Holocaust and Auschwitz in German politics. So could you just give maybe a kind of a speed run through that and what your kind of the main arguments, both of the book and then kind of observations subsequently?
Yeah. So, yeah, as you mentioned, my first book, which is called Utopia or Auschwitz, was about the so-called 1968 generation in Germany, which is basically the German baby boomers. And so these are the children of the sort of Nazi generation, what they call the Auschwitz generation. And so this whole question of, you know, what are the right lessons from the Nazi past, in particular for the lessons from the Holocaust?
for Germans are quite existential for that generation. And so, you know, this then, you know, very much informs what happens in Germany in 1968, the West German student movement. And I sort of try to in that book, which came out in 2009, I try to sort of trace the influence of the thinking of the 1968 generation from. the 60s itself and the student movement through to the red-green government between 1998 and 2005, which was this coalition of social democrats and greens.
And the two kind of leading figures in that government were Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrat Chancellor, and Joschka Fischer, the Green Foreign Minister, both of whom were of that generation and came out of the student movement.
in slightly different ways i won't get into the details of that but they were both influenced at least by you know the events of the 60s and the aftermath in the 1970s and so i look at how you know that whole struggle that they've had with, you know, this question of the right lessons of the Nazi class, how that influences the foreign policy of the red, green government.
And that government comes to an end, as I mentioned, in 2005. And that's when Merkel then takes over and is German chancellor for 16 years. But my book ends in 2005 with the end of the Red Korean government. And as I say, it came out in 2009. So I'd sort of left that book behind. And then, you know, since October 7th, I've sort of felt myself being kind of pulled back to that whole set of questions.
Because I think outside of Germany, particularly in the US and in Britain, although I think all of our governments, the British government, the American government, the German government, have actually positioned themselves pretty similarly in relation to this conflict.
I think what struck a lot of people in Britain and America and also in other countries around the world is this way in which there's been so much repression in Germany of sort of public debate, essentially, on these questions in a way that isn't quite the same. um you know in in britain and america um you know although as i say this you know i'm speaking from new york and we've had these you know protests here which began at columbia and have now gone you know
nationwide in the US. And there has been a sort of fairly heavy handed kind of response to that. So it's not a million miles away. But nevertheless, you know, I think this sense of, you know, a kind of McCarthyism. um sort of zionist mccarthyism i think is even more sort of extreme in the german case and i think a lot of people were quite puzzled by that outside of germany not least because and this is i think the other thing that makes germany a little bit distinctive here is
The left, it seems to me, plays a slightly different role in this in Germany than it does in, say, Britain and America. That was what was very puzzling. I think if you think about debates about Israel-Palestine in Britain and America, it's roughly a left-right issue.
You know, the further right you go, the more pro-Israel you get, the further left you go, the more pro-Palestinian, roughly. Whereas in Germany, it's a little bit more complicated than that. The left plays a different role, and in particular, the Greens. who are again now in government, in particular in control of the foreign ministry, as they were during the Red-Green government.
play a slightly surprising role there. And I think a lot of people were trying to wrap their heads around what's going on in Germany. It seemed like a mystery to a lot of people. And what I tried to do in that essay was go back to Utopia Auschwitz and try to sort of look at what happened to these debates about the meaning of the Nazi past and especially the Holocaust after.
Joschka Fischer stopped being foreign minister in 2005 and Merkel took over as chancellor. And Merkel gives this famous, notorious speech in the Knesset in 2008. In other words, three years later. where she, and she's the first German Chancellor to speak in the Knesset, where she says, she has this famous line where she says that Israeli security is German Staatsräson, which is a sort of German translation of the French term, raison d'etat.
reason of state is something roughly like national interest, but it's a slightly odd term. It's a very archaic, almost pre-democratic term. Sort of goes back to Machiavelli and so on. And a lot of people sort of, as I say, saw... That is a critical juncture in sort of committing Germany to Israeli security. By the way, precisely at the moment where Israel is starting to move further and further to the right, Netanyahu comes back as prime minister a year after.
Merkel gives that speech in 2008. But actually, the first person to use that term, Staatsräson, in the context of German foreign policy, albeit in a slightly different way, was Jotker Fischer, when he was the Green... German foreign minister between 1998 and 2000. In fact, even before that, he uses it in the 1980s. And so what I try to do in the essay is to show how the use of that term evolved.
and in particular to show how when joshka fisher was using it and say from the 80s onwards it was a kind of a universalist idea So, you know, he says only responsibility for Auschwitz can be the basis of German Staatsräson. So he's not specifically talking about Israel. And it's a kind of a universalist idea that Germany has, because of the Nazi past and because of its responsibility for the Holocaust, it has a special responsibility to kind of speak out against and try to prevent...
any genocide anywhere. You know, in other words, it's never again for everybody, right? It's a universalist kind of approach. And in particular, where the rubber hits the road in this is when he's the green foreign minister. in the red green government, you have the the the war in the Kosovo war. And, you know, he invokes this principle of never again.
in order to justify German participation in the NATO military intervention against Serbia in 1999. And whatever you think about that intervention, the crucial thing is that the population who... He was invoking the idea of never again to seek to protect was a Muslim population. Right. That I think is significant.
And then what happens, and I think this is the crucial shift from Yoshka Fischer's version of this to Angela Merkel's version of this, when Merkel gives her speech in the Knesset in 2008, she, I think, goes from a sort of universalist idea. of what never again means to a particularist idea of what never again means. In other words, no longer never again for everybody, but never again specifically for Israel.
So when she says that Israeli security is German Staatsräson, it's not this kind of general idea that we should be on the lookout for any genocide anywhere and we should act to prevent them. It's that we have a much narrower... specific responsibility towards Israel, and in particular for Israeli security. And then that obviously raises the question of, well, then what about the Palestinians?
And I think that's all, you know, basically come to a head since October 7th, because, you know, since Merkel gave that speech in the Knesset, you know, essentially Germany said, you know, we're going to provide unconditional support for Israel. And that, I think, has then led to this situation now where the German government, and in particular, Greens like Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, find it very, very difficult.
to criticize Israel at all for what it's been doing in Gaza in the last six months or so because of this way in which, you know... the idea that Israeli security is German Staatsräson has been constructed as this kind of fundamental principle of German foreign policy that is sort of beyond contestation, you know, that can't be challenged at all. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, and my reading of it too, like Merkel's almost an intermediate point between the Fisher and the Schultz Baerbock.
She says the historic responsibility is part of the Staatsräson of my country. And for that reason. We have to always defend Israel, which is one degree softer than what Schultz said, which is the security of Israel is the Staatsräson of Germany. She's saying.
The responsibility is. And then from that, I personally derive the importance of the security. And Schultz just condenses it to say it's one in the same, which is, you know, really like sort of this ongoing radicalization of the term Staatsräson.
I love that. I think that's really interesting. And it makes me think of a parallel, which I'll come to in a minute. But yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right, that what tends to happen, you know, as I wonder if this applies elsewhere in sort of foreign policy discourse generally, that you get a sort of quite precise idea.
And then what happens over time is it gets kind of used in a less and less precise kind of way. And, you know, and it becomes increasingly sort of unhelpful or misleading, but it's to do with this lack of precision. And I think that's exactly right, that you go from something, you know, quite, you know, much more precise with Merkel to then basically people just saying flatly, Israeli security is German status. And as you say, that's not quite what Merkel said.
The problem with what Merkel said, though, was also that she sort of gave the impression, the way she presents it is sort of, she tries to claim that she's making explicit something which was implicit all along. There's actually not a big shift.
in German foreign policy or Germany's approach to Israel, because she talks about her predecessors. She basically says all of her predecessors kind of thought this too. She's just making it explicit. And so I think it's a little bit disingenuous what she does because she doesn't quite... own up to the fact that she's hardening this German commitment to Israel in a way that wasn't the case before, actually, with any of her predecessors, including even Adonau.
And then the parallel I wanted to bring, and I bring this up because it brings us full circle to the first thing we were discussing about the EU and civilizationalism and so on. It strikes me that there's a parallel here with the way that... pro-Europeans talk about the EU as a peace project. I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently because of the way that now a lot of people are saying that the EU needs to develop a war economy.
become a war project, as some people have put it. So I've been thinking about this history of the EU as a peace project quite a lot. And, you know, what happens, you know, from 1950 onwards with the Schuman Declaration... in relation to the question of war and military force, is something quite specific, which is that Europeans don't reject the idea of war altogether after 1945 at all, or the use of military force.
They just reject the idea of war with each other. It's quite a precise kind of thing, right? And it's very striking that when Robert Schuman makes his, you know, the famous declaration in 1950... that then leads to the coal and steel community which is the beginning of the eu as a peace project you know france is fighting a brutal colonial war in indochina right and then seven years later when the treaty of rome is signed the next big step in european integration
France is fighting a brutal colonial war in Algeria, right? Both of which illustrate that Europeans were quite happy to keep fighting wars, just not with each other. But what happens over time is in a somewhat, I think, analogous way to what you were describing with the idea of Germany's commitment to Israel, is that this sort of becomes used in this kind of vague way that basically Europeans just think they stand for peace, period.
We're these uniquely peaceful people. But if you compare, say, even in the post-Cold War period, if you compare, say, Europeans collectively with China... I mean, Europeans have been willing to use military force much more than the Chinese have. Right. So this sort of idea that in some very general way, Europe stands for peace and Europeans are uniquely peaceful is just so misleading.
But it's something which you'll hear very smart people kind of say because of this way in which, you know, something that was something which was quite true in quite a precise way has just become sort of generalized and used in this very kind of vague kind of way.
Which is just, you know, it's just no longer true, but people are able to sort of still believe this. I mean, and just to bring it back all the way to the immediate present of these upcoming European elections is I saw recently people posting some of the... the Wahlplakate in Germany of both the Greens and the SPD and using this phrase Friedensschen, secure peace. And it's interesting as these are the...
the parties that are actively sending weapons to, you know, to war zones, which used to be totally, you know, beyond the pale in in German German policy or at least, you know, German German rhetoric. You can debate to what extent they were doing that.
But to say, you know, we're going to protect peace at the same time as they're funding ongoing wars. I mean, it's this it's this bizarre like how you can claim both of these traditions simultaneously. We've always been a peace project and we've always supported Israel.
you know there's a con there's a you know isn't it sort of orwellian it's a sort of double thing yeah right um that's how you know and so for example something like the european peace felicity i mean that does strike me as being very orwellian Um, you know, uh, uh, you know, but I think you're, I think you're exactly right that I think, and this is what I've sort of been thinking about and I'm trying to write about at the moment is this way in which.
You know, Europeans are essentially pro-Europeans and essentially saying now we need to sort of prepare for war, develop a war economy, turn the EU into a war project. They're struggling to reconcile, I think, in their own minds.
How do you do that and still hold on to this claim that we stand for peace? We are uniquely peaceful, right? I don't think you can square that circle, but this is, I think, you know, what the EU is not willing to do is sort of... give up on the idea that we stand for peace right even as it does all of these things which as you say sort of make it more sort of war like
I think it's another way we can maybe talk about this. The move to the right is it's a, it's a very Reaganite piece through strength kind of idea, but the other trying to square this, the circle that's quite difficult to do. Yeah, well, I think that's a that's a great place to leave it. And, you know, Hans, appreciate your insights as always. And I think this is especially valuable conversation as.
I think this is an especially valuable conversation as we go into those European elections, which should be about a month from the time this comes out. So thanks again. And where can people find your latest work? Oh, it's sort of in various different outlets. So probably the easiest way to sort of follow it is through Twitter. I tend to post things I write on Twitter.
Great. I'll link to your Twitter and then, of course, as well as the different pieces we mentioned and your most recent book, all of which, you know, I can recommend a quite comprehensive reading list of just Hans's work. I really appreciate all that you've contributed to our public conversation about Germany in Europe and, of course, having this conversation with me today. Thank you so much, Ted. It was really good fun. I enjoyed it. Great. Thank you, Hans. Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening. And thanks especially to Hans for sharing all his insights and the great conversation. And just one more time, if you can, please click the link in the show notes, support us on Patreon. and share the show with any friends you might think would be interested. Thanks a lot. Cheers.