Cruise control: Idealism trumps realism in German foreign policy

Learning German in the hope of understanding the Germans better is a noble pursuit – even if you used to be Pippi Longstocking.

This week Inger Nilsson, who played the anarchic Astrid Lindgren heroine starting in 1968, announced she is studying German to grasp better her fans and their country.

Even more than her native Sweden, Nilsson told Der Spiegel magazine how Pippi’s popularity remains undimmed in Germany. She’s right: people need very little cajoling to deliver word-perfect renditions of the German Pippi theme refrain: “We’ll make the world into one which suits us.”

Two decades ago, Europe’s big bang enlargement shifted Germany into the centre of the continent’s political landscape. But how much “Wunschdenken” or wishful thinking, critics ask, has coloured German foreign policy, in particular on Russia?

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This question is not entirely new but there was something timely about how Donald Tusk, on his first visit back to Berlin as Polish prime minister, noted how certain nameless countries’ recent Russia strategy had confused “geopolitical sense with wishful thinking”.

Estonian leader Kaja Kallas, tipped as Nato’s next secretary general, wondered aloud in a recent Hamburg address, also with Chancellor Olaf Scholz listening, if post-Cold War triumphalism had, in some nameless western countries, contributed to a certain complacency and “the danger of wishful thinking”.

Like Donald Tusk, Kallas was careful to praise Germany’s taboo-breaking military assistance to Ukraine since February 2022, second only to the US in absolute terms, and its €100 billion defence investment at home.

“But let’s not be afraid of our own power,” she warned, putting her finger on an exposed German nerve.

What power does Germany have, and how does it choose to use it – in particular towards Moscow?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered decades of cosy – and profitable – Berlin-Moscow ties. The war has revived, too, an unresolved tension: is Germany still – as Konrad Adenauer insisted in his speech as West German chancellor in 1949 “by attitude and origin” a committed western, Atlanticist country?

Many eastern Germans dispute this, along with the resurgent left in Mr Scholz’s own Social Democratic Party (SPD). Drawing, respectively, on their past on the other side of Iron Curtain and ex-chancellor Willy Brandt’s legacy, they see Germany as a medium-sized power best kept equidistant between the US and Russia.

This is what prompted the SPD’s influential Bundestag floor leader Rolf Mützenich to wonder aloud a month ago how Germany plans to coexist with Russia in the future, and whether the time had come to talk “about how to freeze” the war in Ukraine.

Mr Scholz is firm on Germany meeting Nato spending targets this year.

Equally firm: his refusal to deliver Taurus cruise missiles. Following similar hesitation over ammunition, tanks, air defence systems and other equipment – all eventually delivered by Berlin – Mr Scholz insists he will only deliver weapons when German can control their use.

“Of course I trust my friends,” he laughed at a town-hall meeting last week, “still: I wouldn’t give everyone every kind of weapon.”

His hesitation and his jokes have irritated many, chiefly Kyiv, but – judging by an SPD jump in polls – is popular with German voters ahead of the European elections.

But who knows best – Kyiv or Berlin – to decide what Ukraine needs to win against Russia?

In a hard-hitting lead article, Der Spiegel summarised the Scholz strategy last week as: “Putin must not win under any circumstances, but neither must he be challenged by German Taurus cruise missiles.”

How Berlin sets its priorities vis-a-vis Moscow and Kyiv means that, the magazine suggests, Germany has become a “strange bird of international politics”.

As for European politics, Mr Scholz had dinner last week with Emmanuel Macron, but the French president knows to expect as little official response from Berlin to his second Sorbonne speech as his first, on the future of Europe, in 2017.

Responding in detail to his far-reaching proposals – on common EU defence financed by jointly-issued debt – would require honest reflection in Berlin over how we have reached this point. In particular: how much German wishful thinking on Russia contributed – and contributes – to Putin’s feeling of impunity, then and now.

For critical observers, Germany’s gaze – 20 years after enlargement – remains distorted by old habits of navel-gazing and wishful thinking. Berlin views the world, they argue, through self-satisfied Pippi Longstocking glasses.

“After the horrors of the last century we now want to see ourselves on the side of good at all costs,” says Prof Klaus Schubert, political scientist of the University of Münster. “As a result, our foreign policy is shaped by idealism rather than open, pragmatic realism.”

The war has revived, too, an unresolved tension: is Germany still – as Konrad Adenauer insisted in his speech as West German chancellor in 1949, ‘by attitude and origin’ – a committed western, Atlanticist country?

For critical observers, Germany’s gaze, 20 years after enlargement, remains distorted by old habits of navel-gazing and wishful thinking. Berlin views the world, in other words, through self-satisfied Pippi Longstocking glasses