When the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, visited the White House earlier this year for a high-stakes meeting with Donald Trump, he invited a Washington-based German researcher little known outside expert circles to a private dinner.
Liana Fix had caught his eye with a forthright essay in the journal Foreign Affairs warning of the perils of Germany becoming “Europe’s next hegemon”, whose military dominance may come to scare its neighbours and divide Europe once again. That concern might seem far-fetched after three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, during which a peace-loving reunited Germany let its armed forces wither and rust, prided itself on being a “civil power” and preached a gospel of military restraint.
Yet the combination of a sudden surge in German rearmament, growing doubts over the United States’ willingness to remain the guarantor of European security through Nato, and the rise of the far-right nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, currently leading in opinion polls, has reignited old anxieties among Berlin’s neighbours, especially Poland and France.
Fix, a historian and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has built her argument into a timely and incisive book, Germany Rearmed: The Return of War and the End of Illusions. Among the fallen myths she skewers are not just the delusion that economic interdependence would make Russia a benign partner for Europe, which collapsed with Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but also the end of what she calls “the illusion of the west”, which had been central to Germany’s identity and foreign policy since 1945. “It is not that Germany wants to leave the west, but the west seems to be abandoning Germany, in particular the US-led western order,” Fix told me in an interview.
To guard against any hegemonic temptation, she urges Berlin to anchor its future military power in closer European unification by helping to finance European defence through joint defence bonds, embracing a Europeanisation of the continent’s national arms industries, and deepening the integration of the Bundeswehr into European armed forces.
There is little sign so far that Merz, whose first defence strategy, released in April, vowed to make Germany Europe’s strongest conventional army by 2039, is heeding her advice.
Struggling with unpopularity, economic stagnation and a rising cost of living, the conservative chancellor has ruled out issuing eurobonds to fund European defence. His government scrapped two big arms cooperation projects with France – a next-generation fighter aircraft and a tank. Planned arms purchases worth €123.3bn notified to parliament last month are overwhelmingly from national and US industries, with only scraps for European partners.
To be sure, all Berlin’s armed forces are committed to Nato, unlike France’s, and it has invited allies to join its European Sky Shield air and missile defence programme. Germany is the biggest donor of financial and military assistance to Ukraine. It is working with the UK on deep precision strike weapons. And it has stationed a brigade in Lithuania to help protect Europe’s eastern flank in the first permanent deployment outside its territory since 1945.
Defence industrial nationalism is by no means confined to Germany. France and the UK are equally protective of their national arms makers. The EU’s defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, laments that up to 80% of European defence purchases are made by direct awards with national prime contractors without a competitive tender, exploiting a security exemption in the EU treaty.
The fact that German rearmament coincides with a severe slump in core manufacturing industries such as cars, chemicals and machinery is an extra reason to “buy national”. But Berlin, once on the frontline of east-west confrontation, is now cushioned by a buffer zone of central European allies and should have an interest in helping them invest in their own defence. For practical reasons, it’s better to help equip friends and neighbours to intercept drones and missiles before they reach Germany rather than waiting to shoot them all down over Berlin and Frankfurt.
Fix is right to argue that because of its dark history and its weight in the middle of Europe, Germany must do more than others to reassure its neighbours and to embed its rearmament in common European industrial, political and military structures. As Timothy Garton Ash has argued in the Guardian, that is what Helmut Kohl achieved a generation ago by anchoring German reunification in a common European currency.
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Otherwise, the question of German power and its political uses is bound to return sooner or later, especially if the Russia-friendly AfD, which opposes assistance for Ukraine and advocates withdrawal from the EU, continues to gain ground in German elections.
“The German question is not dead,” Fix told me. “It’s dead in the sense that a militaristic Germany will not re-emerge under a centralised government. But the German question can also just be a question of dominance and of balance. And this is the thinking we unfortunately have to revive.”
