Tribune. The drama of the war in Ukraine led Germany to put an end to two taboos which it justified by its history and the questioning of which marks a break in its political and military culture. It also opens up a new perspective on the way to what is still lacking in Europe: a common defense and strategic doctrine.
There is first of all the military dimension of foreign policy, admittedly sometimes assumed, with difficulty, as in 1999 during Germany’s involvement in the war in Kosovo, but until now always with a bad conscience and virulent debates, with reference to the Nazi past. The Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has just broken this taboo by announcing, on February 27, a rearmament of Germany and by formalizing the delivery of lethal weapons to a country at war, Ukraine.
In addition, what German diplomacy itself called the “special relationship” with Russia is also called into question, determined by the memory of the barbaric Hitlerian aggression of 1941, and concretized by the policy of openness to the East. , the famous Ostpolitik, led by Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s. Political actors and historians consider, like Eckart Conze in The search for security (“the search for security”, Siedler, 2009, untranslated) that this policy, with the anchoring in the West of the 1950s, has “contributed to an evolution which culminated on November 9, 1989 [chute du mur de Berlin] and October 3, 1990 [réunification de l’Allemagne] ».
Towards a “powerful Europe”
The official abandonment by Germany of these two axioms, if it is permanently assumed, might well constitute an essential step towards the birth of a “Europe power”. Thus, during the extraordinary sitting of the Federal Parliament on 27 February, Chancellor Scholz insisted on the European dimension, when he announced that Germany was creating a special fund of 100 billion euros to equip the federal army which, moreover, the “classic” budget will continue to increase to reach 2% of GDP, the criterion adopted by NATO. “We must clearly invest more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy, an achievable objective for a country of our size and our importance in Europe”, did he declare.
Several reports from senior officers had recently warned of the poor condition of federal army equipment. In a country where the subject of defense remains inflammable, due to the persistence of elements of pacifist culture, still marked among some of the Social Democrats and the Greens, the subject did not hold sufficient attention. Nevertheless, two elements indicated that a mutation was in progress.
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