The House of Commons, the US Congress, the European parliament, each stood to applaud the besieged Ukrainian president after he addressed them (remotely) with superbly crafted speeches. Last week the German Bundestag was the latest to give Volodymyr Zelensky the floor and an ovation; but the atmosphere was somehow different.
Unlike at Westminster, it was not followed by a speech of endorsement by the leader of the government, or any debate or reflection. Instead, the Speaker of the Bundestag thanked him perfunctorily and then ... wished two MPs happy birthday.
Perhaps some of the awkwardness stemmed from the nature of Zelensky’s speech, deeply critical of the slowness of the German political establishment to wake up to the true nature of the Putin regime (not just by persistently ignoring eastern European nations’ concerns about the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 gas project, but by being the most reluctant to block Moscow from the Swift banking payments system): “When we asked for preventive sanctions, we ... turned to you. We felt resistance. We understood that you want to continue the economy. Economy. Economy.”
Zelensky was using the word “economy” almost sardonically. For a reason. Because Germany’s policy, towards both Russia and China, was called Wandel durch Handel: change through trade. The theory was that the more it did business with such countries, the more democratic, less authoritarian, its trading partner would become. In recent years, with Russia and China, the opposite has happened. As our former ambassador to Germany Sir Paul Lever put it to me a year ago: “The German attitude is that trade is the key to harmonious relations and should not be threatened, no matter how vilely China or Russia behaves towards its own people. It is a genuine principle, but also, of course, self-serving.”
Now that Putin is not just bumping off his domestic political opponents but murdering, en masse, the citizens of an independent European country, he has shattered and almost overnight reconfigured the German consensus. The political establishment has — at least for now, while the TV screens are filled with pictures of Russian atrocities — abandoned the entire basis of its foreign policy. As an enormous piece in Der Spiegel, “The calamitous errors of Germany’s Russia policy”, pointed out: “Germany is now facing the ruins— politically, economically and militarily — of its Ostpolitik, its policy of détente towards Russia that dates back to the Cold War era.” And Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, the chief of the German army, confessed: “The Bundeswehr, the army I have the honour of leading, is more or less empty-handed. The options we can offer policymakers to support the [Nato] alliance are extremely limited.” Indeed: the Bundeswehr has fewer tanks than neutral Switzerland.
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The new Social Democrat chancellor, Olaf Scholz, responded to this debacle by agreeing to honour (after Germany refused to do so for many years) the commitment by Nato countries to devote 2 per cent of GDP to defence. Yet as The Times’s Berlin correspondent, Oliver Moody, pointed out last week, this is “not primarily about expanding the Bundeswehr or equipping it with the weapons of the future [but] about repairing some of the damage done by 30 years of pacifism, parsimony and neglect”.
The attitude was understandable, as well as fiscally convenient. I have never forgotten how a German ambassador here, when I asked why his country hadn’t supplied a single soldier in the first Gulf War (to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s military occupation), replied: “You trust Germans more than we do ourselves. We don’t trust a German with a gun in his hands.”
This goes back to the Nazi experience and above all the eastern front, where the civilian death toll in the parts of the Soviet Union under German occupation was 14 million, of whom over four million were deliberately starved. This historical debt was cited last year — the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR — by the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to justify the continuation of the Nord Stream 2 project against strong protests from Poland and Ukraine: “For us Germans there is another dimension. That does not justify any wrongdoing in Russian policy today, but we must not lose sight of the bigger picture.” The Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin was outraged, and no wonder: proportionally more of his people were slaughtered by the Nazis than of those defined as Russian.
My instinctive reaction, therefore, was that one reason Germany has now reversed its former effectively pacifist foreign policy was that Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine had somehow relieved Berlin of part of its historical baggage. But two German journalist friends of mine see it differently. One said, and the other agreed, that “it was fear, not kindness, that made us never want to pick another fight with Russia. We saw what happened afterwards. But now it’s clear that this didn’t stop them. So there is no choice.”
It needs to be added that there is now something personal in it for Scholz, always seen as strongly Russophile. He travelled to Moscow and drank champagne with Putin in February, when the Russian leader assured him he had no intention of invading Ukraine. As his foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, later told the Bundestag: “The Kremlin strung us along, lied to us ... Putin wanted this war.” Even more humiliating, the German government had dismissed the US and British intelligence reports of imminent invasion (perhaps understandably, after the fiasco of Saddam’s “WMDs”).
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But this disaster for Wandel durch Handel is much more serious if President Xi sticks to the Kremlin’s line on Ukraine. China has already supported Moscow’s justifying fiction that the US had a biological weapons facility in Ukraine, and last week Professor Wang Wen, an adviser to several Chinese ministries, told BBC viewers that it “cannot be described as an invasion” and that “Ukraine has become the war agent of the US to suppress Russia”.
If that is the official line (and reports of Xi’s video meeting with President Biden on Friday suggest it is), Germany’s colossal industrial bet on China is at grave risk. One in two Volkswagens worldwide are sold and manufactured in the People’s Republic; an adviser to one of Germany’s carmakers told the FT last week that if there were pressure to withdraw from China, it would be “close to an existential crisis”.
In fact Germany’s trading relationships with Russia and China are two sides of the same coin, as was starkly pointed out by one of Angela Merkel’s biographers in an interview last week with the BBC’s Mark Urban. Ralph Bollmann observed: “We are in a deep crisis of the German economic model that is not yet in the minds of many Germans: our model depends on exporting to China especially and importing cheap gas from Russia.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Bundestag moved on to other matters as soon as Zelensky had finished speaking.
