Financial Times
June 26, 2011
I get so many pamphlets sent to me by think-tanks that most of them go unread. However, one that I’m really glad to have picked up is a brilliant effort from the European Council on Foreign Relations called “The New German Question“. The ECFR is committed to greater European unity and that belief runs through the pamphlet. But it does not prevent the authors, Mark Leonard and Ulrike Guerot, from asking some really penetrating and difficult questions.
The pamphlet starts by observing that “from Greece to Libya, Germany has been seen as increasingly evasive, absent and unpredictable.” It notes – “To many it appears that an increasingly powerful and independent Federal Republic is renegotiating the two fundamental principles that have guided its foreign policy for decades: European integration and the western alliance.”
The authors see a number of factors behind this shift. German exasperation with the euro-crisis means that “many Germans now want to be saved from Europe” and “the reflexively pro-European discourse among Germany’s elite has disappeared.” Second, there has been a generational change. The current set of German leaders do not have personal memories of the war. And then there is the fact that – “Germany’s economic base has been shifting away from Europe towards the so-called BRICs.”
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