Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a speech to the Bundestag, the federal parliament, reflecting a radical swerve in foreign policy.
He called for immediate military aid to Ukraine, economic sanctions against Russia and rebuilding of Germany’s neglected armed forces with a special 100 billion-euro ($108bn) fund.
“We are living through a watershed era,” Scholz said. “And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.”
It became known as his Zeitenwende speech, after the word meaning epochal change.
Two and a half years later, Germans are divided. Some have sharply criticised Scholz for falling short of his stated ambitions.
“There has been no Zeitenwende in Germany,” Benjamin Tallis, an international relations expert at the Centre for Liberal Modernity, a Berlin-based think tank, told Al Jazeera. “There has been no major strategic transformation that leads Germany to rise to its security responsibilities or to meet the geopolitical moment.”
He and the other experts interviewed for this article spoke to Al Jazeera on the sidelines of a recent symposium, “Zeitenwende: The changing role of Germany in the Baltic”, convened by Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics.
“The Zeitenwende speech was written in a moment of abject panic in Berlin when it looked as though Ukraine was going to fall … Then the Russians fall back and bought time [for Ukraine] to be armed by the rest of the world and the air went out of Germany’s process of change,” Tallis said.
He called the resulting policy “Slightenwende”.
Tobias Cremer, a European Parliament deputy for Germany’s ruling Social Democratic Party (SDP), disagreed.
“Zeitenwende is a process. And it’s clear that it has not yet been completed,” he said.
“While in previous years we were spending 1.2 percent of GDP on defence and 2 percent was a ceiling we had to reach, now we are totally at home with the idea of maintaining that level of spending as a baseline and going up from there.”
This year, Germany will reach the 2 percent threshold NATO deemed a minimum in 2014. It has also pledged to train, equip and command a full brigade – about 5,000 soldiers, almost half of which will be German – to Lithuania.
“I don’t see anyone else doing that,” said Cremer, referring to the brigade.
Germany’s stance matters in economic, industrial and political terms because it has the European Union’s biggest budget, one of its largest defence industries and a powerful voice in consensual decisions.
But critics say it is refusing to deploy these strengths and, worse, has used them to hold back others more enthusiastic than itself.
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks aid to Ukraine, says Germany has spent a total of 14.6 billion euros ($15.85bn) on aid to the war-torn country, putting it in second place globally after the United States in nominal dollar terms.
But in terms of expenditure as a proportion of the economy, Germany ranks 15th in the Western military alliance, well behind smaller economies such as Estonia (first), Denmark (second), Lithuania (third), Latvia (fourth) and Finland (fifth), all of whom have cumulatively spent about 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on Ukraine.
Estonia and Latvia have this year committed to spending 0.25 percent of their GDP per year on Ukraine for the foreseeable future. If Germany had spent at Estonia’s level since the Zeitenwende speech – 1.6 percent of GDP – its cumulative expenditure on Ukraine would now have reached 70 billion euros ($76bn).
Caution, cover and hedging
Germany has earned its foot-dragging reputation since it has not been the first to move on any significant new armament to Ukraine.
It opposed the deployment of European heavy armour when the Czech Republic and Poland sent their Soviet-era T-72s to Ukraine in March and April 2022, respectively. The US had to send High Mobility Army Rocket Systems (HIMARS) in May 2022 for Germany to agree to send its equivalent MARS II.
The United Kingdom had to commit Challenger 2 tanks and the US M1 Abrams tanks in January last year for Germany to agree to allow NATO allies to export German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
Last month, Germany backed Dutch former premier Mark Rutte as NATO secretary-general over Estonian premier Kaja Kallas, an example of the rift its caution has opened with Baltic and Nordic states concerned for their own security should Ukraine fall.
This is all at odds with the German public, whose support for Ukraine has remained high, said Timo Graf, a senior researcher at the Bundeswehr Center of Military History and Social Sciences in Potsdam.
Graf and his colleagues have conducted frequent polls showing that German security concerns went up in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and openly supported insurrections in Ukraine’s eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
That support shot up in 2022, with Russia’s full invasion. Graf’s polls suggested that more than 60 percent of Germans thought Russia was a direct threat to German security.
“Things have to get personal. There’s no altruism at work here,” said Graf. “The higher the threat perception, the higher the support for NATO’s eastern flank or for defence spending.”
About 60 percent of Germans polled in favour of higher defence spending and 50 percent for supporting NATO’s eastern flank in 2022.
Those numbers dropped a little last year as Ukraine won back territory, but had risen again by February this year, said Graf. Support for helping Ukraine is back to 60 percent, and support for increased defence spending has shot up to more than 70 percent.
Yet the German coalition government has just approved a budget for next year that cuts support for Ukraine in half and gives Defence Minister Boris Pistorius an overall 1.2 billion-euro ($1.3bn) increase in the budget – far short of the 6.7 billion-euro ($7.2bn) increase he asked for.
Christian Schlaga, Germany’s ambassador to Estonia from 2015 to 2019, said it “is barely covering the cost from wage rises”.
He believed German politicians’ overcautiousness was creating a dangerous feedback loop of false reassurance.
“It needs to be underlined in a much stronger way and more often that if Ukraine falls and the Russian army stands on the border with Poland, we have a serious problem,” said Schlaga.
“If the government went forward strongly with such an argument, then the public would also respond to it with a greater understanding of why we actually need to do what Mr Scholz says is necessary.”
Calls to ‘anchor the Zeitenwende at home’
Germany has a constitutional prohibition of high deficits, meaning higher defence spending would have to come from politically sensitive social programmes.
Social Democrats, like Cremer, are against that.
“I think it would be a mistake to try to play off Zeitenwende against social security,” he said. “We can only anchor the Zeitenwende at home and create a resilient society if we understand security holistically – we need to think of investments in defence as intrinsically linked to investments in infrastructure, which is falling apart, and in social security.”
Schlaga thought otherwise. “As long as we are told by politicians that whatever we need to do, this will not affect our social spending, we are on the wrong path.”
These disagreements are emblematic of the fundamental choices Germans are facing for the first time in their post-war history. They have been swaddled in NATO, an organisation created in 1949 to protect Germany, whose army had been disbanded even as the country lay dissected by the Iron Curtain.
“The Bundeswehr was always integrated within NATO. It was never to operate on its own throughout the Cold War. It never would have been fully functional as a stand-alone force,” said Graf.
That has led to reliance on US strategic direction.
“Germans are very risk averse. That will really be the litmus test for the coming years – whether the Germans will finally accept the role of leader. And I don’t think they will,” said Graf.
“I don’t think that this change will come quickly enough considering the challenges we’re facing. Other countries … the Baltic states, they should provide Germany with the strategic guidance it would otherwise lack.”
Tallis agreed that events were overtaking Germans’ capacity to change their mindset, and other NATO allies like France or the UK may end up taking a leadership role among Nordic and Baltic states and in Eastern Europe, where concern over security is immediate.
“[The Baltics] are moving on and they’re saying, ‘regardless of what you do, we are going forward, we’re setting the pace’,” he said. “The big message to Berlin is, no one’s waiting for you.”
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