Germany needs to stop apologising and defend its record with Russia

The UK may have been the target of international ridicule in recent weeks, as we saw off our shortest-ever serving prime minister – who had, nevertheless, found the time to crash the economy. But our plight is still better than that of Germany. At least we were, for the most part, only being laughed at; albeit with a sometimes triumphalist and condescending edge.

Germany is being seriously vilified by many in the United States and Europe, and even the entente with France is not what it was. Olaf Scholz – approaching his anniversary as chancellor – went to Paris for lunch with President Macron this week, and left without the customary joint press conference. Everything was fine, they both said; except the signals strongly suggested otherwise.

The reason for Germany’s discomfort can be summed up in two words: Ukraine, and Russia. Germany is felt by those countries most enthusiastically supporting Ukraine not to be pulling its weight, and in particular not to be sending military assistance in the forms and in the quantities that it could and should.

The complaints began even before the Russian invasion, when Germany was mocked by Ukrainians for offering nothing more than defensive helmets, citing limitations on arms exports enshrined in German law.

Now, the complaints are that Germany is not showing the requisite urgency in its help for Ukraine, and specifically that it is blocking the supply of battle tanks. Germany’s leaders are also accused of showing insufficient solidarity. Where, it seemed, Boris Johnson was practically commuting to the presidential bunker in Kyiv, it was only this week that Germany’s president (and one-time foreign minister) Frank-Walter Steinmeier, took the night train from Berlin to Kyiv.

Scholz himself has made only one trip to Ukraine since the war broke out, and that was a joint visit with Macron and Italy’s then prime minister, Mario Draghi, in June.

This, though, is to cut a long and complicated story far too short. Some of the complexity relates to Germany’s problematic history with Ukraine. Underlying the current complaints, however, is an argument about Germany’s more recent relations with Russia, which boils down to this: how far are Germany’s policies over the past 30 years, if not the past 60 years, responsible for the perilous state of European security, if not for the war itself?

Having visited Germany in recent weeks, and having taken part in conferences with delegates from all over Europe and the United States, I would say that there is, in fact, barely an argument. There is, rather, a furious blame game being played out, in which Germany and Germans are being attacked with more venom than I can remember in many decades of visiting and writing about that country.

Through the late spring into summer and autumn, Germans with impeccable political, diplomatic and academic credentials have been having to sit and listen as representatives of countries a fraction of the size, wealth and achievements of theirs tear into Germany’s foreign policy record and insist that they, and not Germany, were uniquely right – about the threat from Russia, that is.

We always knew – say the Poles and the Balts, and their cheerleaders from further West – what we were dealing with in Russia. We warned you. But you just ploughed ahead with your insistence on dialogue and trade for your own selfish ends. We even tried to save you from yourselves, in trying to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. But you didn’t listen, and now look what you have done.

The whole of Europe now faces an energy crisis because you foolishly made yourselves dependent on Russia. You never even tried to commit two per cent of your GDP to defence – as Nato stipulated – despite being the richest country in Europe. You downplayed Vladimir Putin’s serial acts of aggression, and even after he snatched Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, all you could think about was mediating some sort of negotiated settlement. You completely misread what was happening.

A similar blame game is going on inside Germany. In public forums and in the media, something akin to an ideological and generational witch-hunt is in progress, with the hawks and the relative “youngsters” – including Germany’s Green foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock – capitalising mercilessly on what they see as the shameful mistakes of their elders. Angela Merkel, who was lauded as an international stateswoman when she left office last December, is now almost a non-person in her own country.

What is more, the response of those Germans thus vilified has mostly been to sit there and take the drubbing. Some go so far as to apologise for getting everything so wrong and landing the world in this mess. Scarcely, it seemed, had older Germans felt free to stop apologising for the Second World War, than here was the next generation and the one after that feeling obliged to apologise all over again for another war.

But you know what? The invasion is not their fault, it is Russia’s. And I really wish that, rather than apologising or taking the flak in glum silence, they would mount a defence. Because there is a defence to be made, and it is they – the Germans of the Cold War and Unification generations – who should be making it, before this revised version of history solidifies against them.

First, let’s hear some recognition for Olaf Scholz, and the comprehensive policy shift – known as the “Zeitenwende” – he announced three days after Russia’s invasion. His coalition government at once suspended the start of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline (which has since been sabotaged, though it is unclear by whom).

Even before Russia halted gas exports to Germany, Berlin had reduced its imports by 75 per cent. It has filled the country’s gas storage capacity ahead of time, postponing the planned mothballing of nuclear and some coal power stations to make do. Scholz also announced a historic rise in defence spending.

All this amounts to a massive reorientation of Germany’s economic and security policy, which has led to forecasts of “deindustralisation” and penury. But so far, even as he warns of sacrifices, Scholz has carried the country with him.

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Not that Germany’s critics are cutting him much slack for such a speedy and effective shift. They prefer to dwell on what they see as Germany’s past misdeeds, and their central charge that Germany’s desire for cheap energy and a quiet life with Moscow – far from promoted – but in fact jeopardised European security. The judgement of history will take time, but it has to be asked whether the Cold War would have ended when it did (and as peacefully as it did) without Germany’s then-controversial policy of Ostpolitik, the West’s policy of detente under the Helsinki accords that followed, or the arms control agreements of the 1980s.

And when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, was it really such a mistake for Germany to want stable relations with a stable Russia, and do what it could to those ends? Was this not in the interests of the East and Central European countries, too? And did it not make sense – not just for Germany, but for other Europeans – to buy, or continue buying, Russian energy?

Geography alone made this a mutually advantageous arrangement, and one that made Russia as dependent on the European market, as Germany and the others were on Russia. Germany was, in fact, less dependent on Russian gas than is often claimed, with gas accounting for less than a third of Germany’s energy mix, and supplies from Russia accounting for at most 55 per cent of that. But that is by the by.

It was an arrangement that stood to benefit all concerned – and still could, when the war is over, on one condition: that this would be a pan-European agreement that guaranteed everyone’s security, including that of Ukraine and Russia (the very agreement, as it happens, that Russia has been asking for pretty much since the fall of the Berlin Wall).

The point is that Germany has a defence of its policies towards Russia over the past half-century, and it should be making it. It is abject to find so many Germans – including those who have done much over the years to keep the peace in Europe – accepting blame for misdeeds that are not theirs. Merkel, I am pleased to say, is becoming a little bolder. “If diplomacy fails,” she said recently, “that does not mean it was wrong”.

Indeed – and even failed diplomacy is a great deal better than war.