“I’ve been to Vidal Sassoon,” she says, running her hand through hair that has been freshly shorn into a skull-hugging pixie cut.

Her husband, practically gagging, says, “Don’t tell me you paid for that.”

Of course he does. There’s something about very short hair on a woman that feels like a slap in the face — to expectations, or the patriarchy, or even just to the husband who liked her hair long. This latter preference isn’t so hard to understand; long hair connotes not just femininity but youth, vitality. fertility. A woman with closely cropped hair has been stripped of something vital, even sacred. It’s why women condemned to the guillotine would have their hair cut off first, before their heads; it’s why women who slept with the Nazis during the Second World War were dragged into the public square and forcibly shaved.

Suggested reading

Female ageing is the ultimate horror story

By Sarah Ditum

As such, the most radical thing of all is a lady who has lopped off all her hair by choice, and they have long been objects of fascination in both fiction and in history, seen in their choice of hairstyle as representative of something greater: spiritual purity, sacrifice, empowerment. The short-haired woman is Joan of Arc, or the wife from The Gift of the Magi, or Fantine from Les Misérables; she’s Gwyneth Paltrow debuting a chic blonde chop to mark the end of her relationship with a cheating bastard in Sliding Doors; she’s the child star who marks the end of her Disney era with a punk-rock fauxhawk.

Whatever the circumstances, it’s understood that a woman who cuts her hair short must have a reason for doing it, and that the reason can never be “because it looks good” — which a howling chorus of male commentators invariably squirm out of the woodwork to announce that it certainly does not. The news cycle surrounding every celebrity pixie cut follows this same pattern: there is the debut of the haircut itself, followed by the wave of backlash from men demanding to know why this woman, and women in general, insist on ruining their (that is the men’s) lives by getting haircuts that they (that is, the men) find less than desirable. If feminists have done much to push the notion that short hair represents an explicit rejection of the male gaze, certain men have no doubt helped it along by treating these haircuts as something women inflict on them. When Emma Stone flaunted a pixie cut on the red carpet in January of this year, the most viral response was from a man on X who wrote, “Women, I can’t stress this enough, gay hairdressers love this and women that are competing with you love it because it knocks you down multiple pegs. Men hate it.”

That said, women’s hair has also always been at least somewhat entangled with politics. In the Twenties, they bobbed their hair in a conspicuous act of rebellion against traditional norms; in the wartime Forties, short hair was a practical necessity reflecting women’s entry into military service or factory work; and since the sexual revolution, the crop has served as a signpost for everything from liberal politics to alternative sexualities, revealing not just the contours of a woman’s scalp but also her disdain for gender norms and male-centered beauty standards.

More from this author

America’s baby boom is doomed

By Kat Rosenfield

And even as there’s little left today that western women need to be liberated from, a dramatic haircut still registers as symbolic, rebellious, and hence worthy of notice — particularly when a bunch of women in one political space do it all at once, which brings us to the phenomenon known as the Power Bob.

The latest iteration of the Power Bob comes from Britain’s Labour Party, in which several women have lately been observed sporting the same hairstyle: chin-length or so, blunt, and usually (not always) with bangs. It is a haircut that practically begs to be (and often is) accompanied by the modifier “no nonsense” — although this has always struck me as a bit of a canard, all things considered. Spending two hours and a few hundred dollars so a stranger can give you the artisanal version of something you could replicate yourself, albeit crudely, with about 10 minutes and a decent pair of scissors: if this does not meet the definition of “nonsense”, what does? That these haircuts also require regular professional upkeep — a pixie, allegedly the hallmark of a low-maintenance woman, requires its wearer to return to the salon every four weeks lest she start looking like Anton Chigurh — represents more nonsense still.

But of course, that’s not the kind of nonsense we’re talking about. The Power Bob is not about eschewing frivolous expense or silly wastes of time, but the intrusion of male desire into one’s personal and professional life. And in this, it succeeds wonderfully at projecting the desired vibe. The shortness, the bluntness, and the generic unflattering-ness of this haircut signals a total lack of interest in male attention; however, and crucially, it is not so butch that it suggests you might be open to come-ons from members of the same sex, which would be nonsense of a different color but nonsense nonetheless. The Power Bob wearer is like the archetypal Pam of whom the late Victoria Wood so memorably sang, a woman who doesn’t hate men or sex — it’s just she finds the entire endeavor to be simply uninteresting. Not me, not my scene, I prefer a game of Rummy and an Ovaltine!

In this, the Power Bob suggests something interesting about the archetypal girlboss, particularly as compared with her male counterpart. It has always been understood that for men, the allure of power — and one of its benefits — is that having it makes you more attractive to women. For women, on the other hand, the greatest hallmark of power is to be so utterly uninterested in men that you intentionally adopt an aesthetic that excludes you from the sexual marketplace. It’s also a notable shift from the moment in which women were expected to demonstrate leadership by mimicking men, even aesthetically; consider the power suits of the Eighties, whose structured fit and massive shoulder pads gave the female wearer the same inverted triangle silhouette as your average Marvel superhero.

Outside of the long-running adventure comic Prince Valiant, the Power Bob haircut is most decidedly not a man’s haircut. Instead, the power comes from the fact that it is a haircut men do not like — and that the wearer knows this, and doesn’t care.

And yet, if the association between short hair and female empowerment is easy enough to understand in historical context, it also seems clear that the contemporary link really only persists because we want it to. The Power Bob isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is the notion that women with political aspirations must cut their hair to achieve them; a cursory internet search reveals a trove of articles about the “political bob”, most centered explicitly on Hillary Clinton’s signature hairstyle during her run for US President in 2016. It’s enough to make you wonder if the notion that women can’t be sexually attractive and also be taken seriously in politics is less a sad fact than a self-fulfilling prophecy, a holdover from a brand of feminism that has long since faded from relevance.

Surely it is significant that peak Political Bob discourse not only occurred during a failed campaign 10 years ago, but centered on a female candidate whose biggest claim to fame was losing to a boorish, leering, reality TV playboy who was formerly an owner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant. Certainly, it’s hard not to notice that the second Trump administration is a veritable buffet of women in high-level positions — some of whom look the part of the short-haired asexual girlboss, but many of whom have tresses befitting a Disney mermaid, as well as eyelash extensions, contouring, and faces visibly lifted and plumped by injectables. And while some might say this merely signals the President’s preference for a certain aesthetic, the sheer physical diversity of women in politics at present — in the US and around the world — suggests that we’ve actually arrived at last at a moment in which if you are a woman in politics, it simply doesn’t matter what you look like. For every Angela Merkel there’s a Sanna Marin; for every Nancy Pelosi, a Giorgia Meloni.

And when it comes to the Power Bob, the greatest irony might be that this hairstyle — once a hallmark of women’s liberation — is on the cusp of becoming as dated and traditional as the pantsuit with linebacker shoulder pads paired with sensible low heels. A hairstyle preferred by dinosaurs who don’t realize that times have changed, that femininity is no longer a political liability, and that if a woman still faces certain unique concerns when it comes to seeking political power, the length of her ponytail is no longer one of them.

It’s true that the two leaders do get on quite well on a personal level. Donald Tusk, Poland’s premier, is probably the most pro-German politician you can find in Poland. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a more pro-Polish German chancellor in recent times than Friedrich Merz. The two are members of the same party in the European Parliament, and yet they both keep messing it up.

Tusk has a reputation for making serial misjudgments. In the UK, he is best known for his unhelpful interventions in the Brexit referendum while president of the European Council. Misunderstanding Britain’s internal political dynamics when making the case for Europe back in 2016, he ended up driving doubting Remain voters into the Brexit camp.

Last week, we had another one of those Tusk blunders — in the form of a tweet about Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea gas pipelines which were blown up by Ukrainian commandos in 2021. Responding to Germany’s request to extradite one of the men allegedly involved, Tusk wrote: “The problem with Nord Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built.”

In one respect he is right. Poland has long argued that the pipelines made Europe too dependent on Russian energy. Germany massively damaged Europe’s security interests by seeking private commercial deals with Russia back then, even after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.

But to condone such violent destruction is an act of political madness. Imagine someone had said: “The problem is not that President X got assassinated. The problem is that he or she was elected in the first place.” You would presumably be appalled, regardless of your political position in respect to the president in question. Mercifully, nobody was killed when the explosions ended the gas supplies to Germany overnight. And luckily the sabotage didn’t leave Germany without power — it was a mild winter and the government did a good job managing the transition to new suppliers.

But the destruction was unequivocally a criminal act. The pipelines had been legally constructed and commissioned. They were private property. And we now know, thanks to the German prosecutor, that a group of operatives with links to the Ukrainian military and secret service are suspected of carrying out the sabotage. It was, without a doubt, the military operation of a state. From Tusk’s comment, then, you would think that Poland now officially condones an act of terrorism.

But Tusk wasn’t the first Polish politician to support the violent destruction of the pipelines. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s current foreign minister, was an MEP at the time of the explosion, and he tweeted: “Thank you, USA”, in what turned out to be a mistaken reference to the US as the force behind the explosions. Given such comments, and given what we now know about the explosions, it is politically impossible for Germany to adopt pro-Polish positions.

More from this author

Europe’s reckless warmongering

By Wolfgang Münchau

The Germans, though, are as much at fault when it comes to provoking its neighbor. Despite his emollient diplomacy towards Poland, Merz’s first political act after being elected chancellor in May was to erect border controls to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Acting unilaterally, the premier ditched the rules of the Schengen passport-free travel zone by invoking emergency clauses over immigration, causing chaos in Poland. His reasons for doing so were barely credible, and some would say even risked breaking EU asylum law. After all, the last big wave of immigrants came from Ukraine in 2022, after Russia’s invasion. The numbers had stabilized. For now, Poland and Germany both have one million Ukrainian immigrants. But this is a far bigger load for Poland, which has only half the population, and a fifth of Germany’s economic output. To close the German-Polish border to stem the flow of immigrants constitutes a naked act of beggar-thy-neighbor politics.

But, then, this is the same mindset which caused Nord Stream to be built in the first place — it’s Merkel’s mindset. She and Gerhard Schröder both masterminded the deal and after leaving office, Schröder even became the head of the consortium that built it.

Merkel, meanwhile, might no longer be politically active, but she has reappeared on the scene to defend her record and stoke internal discord within the EU. In an interview with the Hungarian media company Partizán last week she inflamed the Poles by blaming them for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “In June 2021, I felt that the Minsk Agreement was no longer being taken seriously by Putin, and this is why I wanted a new format in which we, as the European Union, would speak directly with Putin,” she said. “This was not supported by some. These were mainly the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it.”

There were good reasons why Poland and the Baltic Republics did not support another Merkel-led diplomatic initiative. They saw it as another way for Germany to maintain its toxic relationship with Russia to the detriment of Eastern Europe. I thought at the time that Poland’s objections to Merkel’s suggestion were reasonable.

Suggested reading

Has migration broken Schengen?

By Michal Kranz

But virtually all of Merkel’s later foreign policy initiatives were failures. She will go down in history both as one of the architects of the Russian-German political romance, and as a leader who failed to arrest Germany’s still ongoing economic decline. I criticized her often over her refusal to resolve the eurozone’s crisis for reasons of political expediency. I see this failure as the quintessential cause behind the EU’s political weakness today.

These growing fractures in key relationships binding the EU together will have an unavoidable and significant effect on national politics. The current investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage is a case in point. As Poland deliberates over Germany’s extradition request for Volodymyr Z, one of the suspected Ukrainian perpetrators, Tusk’s comments appeared to exonerate him. This has enormous potential for blowing up in the faces of the German and Polish leaders, and it plays straight into the hands of the AfD, which is currently outpolling Merz’s CDU/CSU. For the Right-wing nationalists, deeply critical of Ukraine, it is a story that will keep on giving. The German court trial will reveal a lot of unpleasant details of the operation. There will be a lot of emphasis on the links between the perpetrators and the powers that were behind it. I don’t for a moment believe the story that this was a privately funded operation. This trial could have a profound impact on German public opinion.

As things escalate, we will inevitably see the rise of bilateral tensions over Ukraine’s EU accession. Germany’s current coalition supports it, but on one condition: the EU budget has to be reformed first. Germany does not want to have to bankroll the reconstruction of Ukraine by itself. If the Germans get their way, this would invariably be at Poland’s expense. Right now, Poland is the biggest net recipient of the EU budget, and Germany the biggest net contributor.

For the EU to continue to function as a serious geopolitical force, then, a repair in the German-Polish relationship is a minimal requirement. But the way both sides are behaving at the moment suggests this is not going to happen. If they remain unresolved, though, these current political squabbles could prove explosive.

Almost exactly 10 years have passed since 24 August 2015. On that day, the German government, headed by Merkel, suspended the so-called Dublin Protocol, which stipulates that asylum seekers must be processed in the EU country they first enter. It was a response to the waves of refugees coming into Europe, fueled by the Syrian civil war, and which were overwhelming bureaucratic systems across the bloc. Especially in light of her country’s Nazi past, Merkel felt she had no choice but to act on what she called a “humanitarian imperative”. Germany’s decision effectively made it legal for anyone to enter Germany, so long as they said they were claiming asylum.

According to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, nearly 1.1 million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015 alone. For context: that number was 25 times higher than in 2011. Syrians made up the single largest proportion that fateful year, at 40% of the total, but they were not the majority. Other people from the Middle East, mostly Iraqis and Afghans, but also from the Balkans and North Africa, comprised the remainder. Nearly 70% were male.

A year later, the center-left newspaper Die Zeit looked back on the night of 4 and 5 September, when Merkel decided to fully open the borders and bring asylum seekers in on trains, as “the night Germany lost control”. For one thing, the liberal journalists lamented, “the government admits that not a single refugee who arrived on that weekend or in the days that followed was screened by security officials.” Germany had no idea whether it was admitting snotty-nosed children from war-torn Aleppo — or terrorists and sex offenders. Over the next decade, Germans swiftly discovered that they had opened their gates to all of these and more.

More from this author

Will East Germans ever feel at home?

By Katja Hoyer

The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”

The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs.” When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.

In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up.” Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.

The same poll, from January 2025, showed that 68% of people wanted Germany to take in fewer asylum seekers. The problem was that while Merkel was chancellor, all the way up to 2021, there was no effective way for this majority to express their skepticism at the ballot box. The architect of the refugee policy hogged the center-right slot on the political spectrum. The other parties sat further to the Left. Even Christian Lindner, the leader of the small libertarian FDP, called Merkel’s decision “right and justifiable”.

Merkel understood this dynamic. In 2015, she tried to frame the influx as a temporary crisis that the country had to overcome together. “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”), she famously told her compatriots. By December, however, she admitted at a party conference that “even a strong country like Germany would in the long run be unable to cope with such a large number of refugees.” In March 2016, the EU duly struck a deal with Turkey to return migrants and show domestic voters something was changing. Yet with the German political establishment reluctant to change, the intake continued. Today, there are at least 3.3 million asylum seekers in Germany: some 4% of the population.

The majority that worried about the numbers was never going to stay silent forever. With Merkel defending what was essentially a Left-wing migration policy while leading the major center-right party, a powerful vacuum emerged for a more radical alternative. It was filled by a political newcomer: the Alternative für Deutschland or AfD.

In December 2015, Alexander Gauland, a leading figure in the AfD then as now, called the migration crisis a “gift” and “very helpful” to his then two-year-old outfit. He was right: the AfD, which started on a libertarian platform but is now focused on immigration, first entered the German parliament in the election of 2017 with 13% of the vote. Today, it is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Recently, it has even topped some polls, with around a quarter of the electorate supporting it.

The meteoric rise of the AfD is a direct response to German immigration policy since 2015, with many here feeling their country has changed irrevocably — and without their consent. Take crime. Official police statistics say 42% of suspects are foreign nationals. Even if you discount being in the country illegally, that still leaves 35%.

Such statistics have come in for criticism. One study, released earlier this year, found that “migration and asylum have no systematic impact on criminality.” But many people feel and see unwelcome change in their immediate environment. This summer, sexual harassment and assault of women and girls in German lidos have triggered a heated debate. In June, one case made the headlines when girls aged 11-16 reported to have been groped by four Syrian men. According to figures from the Federal Criminal Police Office, there were 423 sexual crimes reported in public swimming locations last year; nearly two thirds of suspects were non-Germans.

One can attack the veracity of those statistics: but what’s certain is that Germans feel less safe. In a survey taken last year, only a little more than half of people said they felt safe in public spaces. Two years earlier, it had still been 75%. This is likely also connected to a number of high-profile, violent crimes and acts of terrorism committed by men who came to Germany as asylum seekers. This began with the Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016 in which 12 people were killed by an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia who had entered Germany during the refugee crisis in 2015. From there, the grim reports have continued, from a mass stabbing at Solingen, in August 2024, to the shocking story, in Aschaffenburg, of an Afghan asylum seeker who stabbed a toddler to death earlier this year.

Suggested Reading

Angela Merkel: mother of German decline

By Thomas Fazi

No doubt, radicalization and psychiatric issues played a role in all these cases. But that won’t make people feel any safer. The fundamental problem remains that asylum seekers weren’t checked, with the government’s focus being on their safety and not that of the German public.

Beyond the questions of safety, meanwhile, Merkel’s experiment has transformed German life in other ways. Politicians have constantly stressed that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working. Nonetheless, the sheer numbers admitted since 2015 make integration difficult both for them and the rest of the country. Nearly half of benefits claimants in Germany are non-nationals. Often this is due to bureaucratic hurdles as well as language and culture barriers. Regardless of the reasons, seven-in-10 Germans think the state is “overwhelmed”.

People see this in their everyday lives. On average, 30% of school children now have what Germany calls a “migration background”; in some places, notably in certain parts of larger cities, it’s 80% or more. Apart from language issues in overstretched classrooms, this has a bearing on culture too. Some schools have switched to Halal-only food in canteens. In Berlin, a gay teacher was abused by children for years. At his primary school, where 95% of students come from migrant families, he was told he would “go to hell” and that “he was a disgrace to Islam”. Some kids boycotted his lessons. His complaints to school and city authorities remained ignored until he took them to the media.

This cultural shift is visible right across Germany. After the October 7th attacks, Hamas supporters celebrated on the streets of Berlin, handing out sweets to passers by. For obvious historical reasons, the connection between antisemitism and immigration in Germany is a highly sensitive and contested field, but existing figures suggest that there is a link. In 2020, a study found that 40% percent of Muslims in Germany held antisemitic views; the same was true for just 5% of Protestants.

To quote Merkel herself, then, “there was a before and an after.” Germany has changed forever and there is no turning back the clock. But that still leaves the future. The current German government under Friedrich Merz — a long-term inner-party rival and critic of Merkel — is attempting a two-step approach to move forward. On the one hand, it is implementing stricter immigration policies. National border controls have been reinstated, and family reunification rules have been suspended for certain asylum seekers. Though there are a number of reasons behind this trend, Germany has seen a 50% decline in asylum applications in the first half of 2025. 

The second, and much more difficult, step will be the integration of recent arrivals who are likely to stay in Germany. The case of a school in Ludwigshafen in western Germany has triggered a debate on how the children of immigrants can be better supported to learn the skills needed to integrate into German society. There, nearly all students are from non-German backgrounds while a quarter of them lack the required basic skills to advance to the next grade. Education Minister Karin Prien has put the idea of an imposed “migration quota” for schools on the table to distribute children with poor language skills and those lacking other required skills, such as holding a pen, or have difficulty sitting in a chair for extended periods. But she received immense criticism for this, and the debate over integration rages on.

Policies like these are important for voters to feel that a line has been drawn under Germany’s unlimited approach to asylum. Had Merkel followed her initial instincts, when she argued that opening the gates was the only way out of a once-in-a-generation crisis, many Germans would likely have forgiven her. After all, they came out in droves to feed, house and support genuine refugees. The problem came with the abdication of control. The borders remained open, and the lines between asylum policy and general migration were blurred. Arguments around labor shortages, demographic imbalance, and cultural diversity were all introduced, as though Germany only had two choices: no immigration or uncontrolled immigration.

What is clear, anyway, is that the current German government will have a hard time tackling the problems Merkel unleashed. Yet, as the AfD rises and cultural divisions widen, the tenth anniversary of her decision may be the last chance for the German establishment to look back, take stock, and finally change course.

The extent of Europe’s current defense vulnerability is perfectly illustrated by the F-35 fighter jet. Sold to us by the American defense company Lockheed Martin, eight countries are involved in its manufacture and 14 NATO member states use it. They all cooperate on matters like training, and maintenance.

But according to the magazine Stern, the contract with the Germans stipulates that the Americans have the right to withdraw support for delivery of the aircraft, and maintenance at any time if the President decides to invoke national security interests. There is talk among European security officials that the Americans might even use something called the “kill switch” to immediately deactivate the planes, should their erratic President see fit to do so. While there is no credible evidence that such a thing even exists, the US certainly has many other ways to frustrate its use in the field — including refusing to service them or supply parts. Meanwhile, European defense ministries are committed to the jet as it allows them to remain under the US nuclear umbrella. France, the only nuclear power in the EU, doesn’t have sufficient capacity to provide the scale of defense services to other members of the EU that the US has been willing to do until now.

More from this author

Will Trump trigger a global meltdown?

By Wolfgang Munchau

So, where does that leave Europe? What they are agreed on is the plan is to increase military spending. The EU will follow Germany’s example and partially exempt the defense budget from the fiscal rules. But the truth is, no amount of investment will wean the EU off its American dependency any time soon. It will take decades to close the immense defense technology gap.

To build entire industries from scratch takes time. You need defense companies, supply chains, and know-how. Europe is far from the cutting edge of 21st century defense technology and its expertise in that sector has been diminished since the end of the Cold War.

A graphic example of what happens when you lose industrial know-how can be seen in the civilian nuclear sector. Germany used to build the best nuclear power stations in the world but had changed by 2023 when it closed the last of its own plants. That same year, the country only had eight professors active in nuclear research — there were, by way of comparison, 173 professors in gender studies. This is what happens when you drive down industries. They can’t just be switched back on.

The same applies for defense. The US is miles ahead of us thanks to decades of investment into digital-era technologies. From the Manhattan Project onwards, American military investment and innovation has pioneered civilian spin-offs: the transistor in 1947, the integrated circuit a decade later, and the communication technologies in the Sixties that morphed into the technology behind the internet. When the US was investing in AI, the Europeans were fussing over the Green Deal. We spent our peace dividend on social transfers. As a result, the German military still uses the fax machine and we are similarly in the dark ages when it comes to building ballistic missiles, AI-powered satellites, and electronic warfare.

It is laughable, then, to think we could possibly match Russia’s defense capabilities in the next five years. Even with investment in place, given the weakness of our industry, we would have to spend it on defense imports from the US. At which point, action is thwarted by Europe’s age-old problem. Politics. There are no indications that political majorities in Berlin or Paris are willing to trade off welfare spending to pay for US arms imports. Italy and Spain are already recusing themselves from re-militarization because they are far away from Russia, and because they have much less fiscal scope.

Even the more realistic goal of a gradual Europeanization of defense spending over a period of 10-15 years would go beyond anything Europe has done in living memory. Key to their current position is the fact that the EU is not a military alliance. Defense is explicitly excluded from the single market. The UK is not in the EU, and yet it is indispensable in the construction of any functioning European security architecture. But Europe, obdurate as ever, launched a €150bn defense fund with the participation of Japan and South Korea, and without the UK. This tells us that they are still in business-as-usual mode.

Another obstacle to military greatness is Europe’s demographics, and its lack of young people willing to join the military. There is now growing support in several EU countries to reinstitute the draft. Interestingly much of this pressure comes from politicians of the Left, who themselves avoided the draft when it was in place, and who opted for social work instead. But even if the draft were brought back, that would not suddenly present Europe with the specialist troops they need to drive battle tanks and fly F35 fighter planes. I heard of a young man who wanted to join the Bundeswehr a decade ago but was rejected on the grounds that he was overqualified. He was told that preference was given to people from difficult social environments.

Our current predicament dates back to the woman once celebrated by pro-European liberals as the leader of the Western world, Angela Merkel. She left a long legacy of unsolved problems, including that of a depleted Bundeswehr.

But of all the terrible decisions Merkel took, by far the most consequential, the repercussions of which we are feeling now, was her refusal to accept a strengthening of the EU’s institutions during the eurozone financial crisis in 2012. For the briefest of moments that year, there was pressure on EU leaders to agree a timetable for a single European sovereign bond and a fiscal union. The sovereign debt crisis led to an increase in interest rates in several European countries that would have invariably led to an implosion of the eurozone if it had been allowed to continue. Merkel decided in the summer of that year that she did not want to pick a fight with the conservatives in her party. As a result, the EU was left trapped in a dependency on the US dollar, on US financial markets, and on US defense. If the EU had started the long process towards a fiscal union in 2012, it might have been better equipped to respond to the geopolitical shocks of this decade.

Instead, it was left to Mario Draghi, then president of the European Central Bank, to roll out a backstop to prevent the eurozone from imploding. That accomplished the technical job of containing the rise in interest rates, but it was also the point at which the battle for a political union was lost. In the years since, the EU has only become more fragmented.

Suggested reading

Rearmament is a noble lie

By Aris Roussinos

By 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine, the debate about further integration was fading. In 2023, the European Parliament did propose a reform of the European treaties, mostly about voting rights and changes to how the EU works internally. But even those pathetically insufficient ideas have since been dropped.

It was only this year, 11 years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and three after his invasion of Ukraine, that the EU started to panic. With the return of Trump, EU leaders finally realized that the combination of their under-investment in defense and their over-reliance on the US had left them dangerously exposed to global shocks.

There is a cliché about the EU that if only the crisis were big enough, Europeans might wake up and do the right thing. They had a financial crisis. They had a pandemic. They had Putin. They did not wake up. It reminds me of the Parable of the Drowning Man, about a devout Christian minister, trapped in a flood, refusing successive rescue attempts by boats and then a helicopter, all the while praying that that God would come and help him. The man drowned, and when in heaven, he asked God why he had refused to help. God responded: “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

The EU has not drowned quite yet. It is at a point where it can choose between stepping into a US-made helicopter, or a European-made boat. My guess is that some Europeans will choose the boat. Others will choose the helicopter. And some will make no choice at all.

The reality is that, in many respects, Merkel paved the way to today’s crisis. Her advocacy for stringent austerity measures, implemented both across Europe and within Germany after the 2008 financial crisis, ushered in over a decade of stagnation and underinvestment. Her policies left Germany’s infrastructure — bridges, roads and railways — to crumble; her doubling down on Germany’s neo-mercantilist, export-driven economic model, especially during the euro crisis, stifled internal demand by compressing wages and encouraging precarious employment, while leaving the economy overly dependent on exports.

By pursuing an industrial policy that emphasised traditional manufacturing sectors — automobiles, heavy industry and mechanical parts — she left Germany lagging in the high-tech revolution. By phasing out nuclear energy, she deprived the country of a clean and cost-effective energy source. By opening the door to over a million asylum seekers, she created serious challenges in social cohesion and public safety. By embracing a paternalistic and TINA-driven approach to politics, exemplified in her concept of “market-conforming democracy”, she starved the German democratic discourse.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, Merkel remained one of the world’s most popular politicians upon her retirement in 2021 — both at home and abroad. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Merkel was often hailed by the Western liberal establishment as the torchbearer of the global liberal order and even as the “leader of the free world”.

More from this author

Von der Leyen's authoritarian plot

By Thomas Fazi

Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Merkel’s legacy has come under increased scrutiny. She has been heavily criticised for maintaining good relations with Russia and allegedly fostering “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. “No German is more responsible for the crisis in Ukraine than Merkel”, Politico bluntly declared.

Her mammoth memoir, Freedom, is an attempt to salvage that reputation, the title encapsulating her opinion of herself as a defender of the liberal world order. Merkel uses its 720 pages to staunchly defend her record across issues such as austerity, nuclear energy, migration and Russia. On most topics, however, she deploys moral and psychological arguments, leaving the reader wanting for a deeper analysis of the broader economic and structural dynamics at play. Hence her management of the euro crisis was purely aimed at saving the blessed European project, with no mention of the way in which it benefited German banks. Similarly, her open-door immigration policy is justified on humanitarian grounds, with no acknowledgment of how it expanded Germany’s pool of low-wage labour to the benefit of domestic capital.

Merkel’s account of the Ukraine crisis, however, is the exception — probably because Merkel herself admits that, on this issue, her approach had little to do with morality and idealism, but was rather guided by hard-nosed realism, or realpolitik, as she puts it.

More than a decade ago, it was already clear to Merkel that the global balance of power was shifting away from the West towards the then-emerging Brics bloc, and that the “the United States struggled with relinquishing power”, blocking demands for the reform of international institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. Merkel favoured a more pragmatic approach, advocating for cooperation based on mutual interests, even as she acknowledged the profound ideological differences between Germany and non-Western countries like China.

The same logic applied to Russia. Merkel recalls how many Central and Eastern Europeans “seemed to wish that their gigantic neighbor would disappear from the map, simply cease to exist”. While she understood this sentiment, she also recognised a fundamental geopolitical reality: “Russia did exist and it was armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. There was no wishing it away geopolitically, and there still isn’t.” One might not have liked Putin, but “that didn’t make Russia disappear from the map”.

Merkel recalls delivering an opening speech, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, less than two years into her tenure as chancellor in which she highlighted the need to “seek dialogue with Russia despite our many differences of opinion”. Following her remarks, Putin delivered his now-famous speech, in which he vehemently criticised the inequities of the US-led unipolar order. Alluding to the Iraq War, he spoke of “an almost uncontained, hyper use of power”; he also vehemently condemned the missile defence system that the US planned to install in Europe. Unsurprisingly, he also criticised Nato’s eastward expansion.

While acknowledging that Putin’s speech was self-serving, Merkel admits that there were points that weren’t “completely absurd”: America’s invasion of Iraq, for example, and the failure to reach an agreement on updating the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Her grasp of the risks involved in ignoring Russia’s security concerns became a defining factor in her decision to block George W. Bush’s proposal to offer Ukraine and Georgia a formal pathway to Nato during the 2008 Bucharest summit. She understood that Russia viewed Nato membership for Ukraine, in particular, as an absolute red line — also due to the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea — and that Putin would have responded aggressively to such a move. Indeed, she argues in the book that, if Nato membership had been offered to Ukraine, war would have broken out even earlier at a greater military disadvantage for Ukraine. In light of subsequent events, this is hard to dispute.

But Merkel also makes another important point, noting that Nato should also be concerned about its own security risks when drawing countries into the alliance — whether formally or de facto. On this point, the risk of nuclear war that looms over the continent today has also proved Merkel right. In the end, she blocked the official pathway, but found herself with little alternative but to agree to the final communiqué, which declared that “these countries will become members of Nato”. Viewing this as a necessary compromise, she also recognised that the damage had already been done. By merely opening the door to the possibility, the alliance had fundamentally altered Russia’s military-strategic calculus. This effectively invited Putin to take pre-emptive measures to prevent what he now perceived as an inevitable outcome. As he warned Merkel: “You won’t be chancellor forever, and then [Ukraine and Georgia] will become NATO members. And I’m going to prevent that.”

A few months after the summit, Russian forces invaded Georgian territory. This followed an assault by the Georgian military — funded, armed and trained by the United States — on South Ossetia, which borders Russia. Although relations between the West and Russia grew increasingly strained from this point onward, Germany continued to deepen its economic ties with Moscow. In 2011, the 1,200-kilometre Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was inaugurated, linking the Russian coast near Saint Petersburg to northeastern Germany. The agreement had been signed in 2005 by Putin and then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, just before the elections that brought Merkel to power.

Merkel defends the deal on straightforward economics: gas transported via pipelines was significantly cheaper than liquefied natural gas (LNG). Furthermore, the route eliminated additional transit fees associated with pipelines running through countries such as Ukraine and Poland. She also highlights that, as early as 2006, both the European Commission and the European Parliament had officially designated the project as “a project of European interest”, emphasising its role in promoting the sustainability and security of Europe’s energy supply.

From Merkel’s perspective, strengthening economic ties with Russia was not just an economic necessity but also a geopolitical imperative, as Europe had a vested interest in minimising the risk of conflict. In this context, economic interdependence was seen as a form of peace diplomacy. However, such an approach required other European countries — and, most crucially, the United States — to address Russia’s legitimate security concerns as well. As events in Ukraine would later demonstrate, however, the US had other plans.

Interestingly, Merkel offers little commentary on the critical period between the 2008 Bucharest summit and the 2014 Western-backed coup in Ukraine — or even on the coup itself. Germany, she insists, alongside other countries, had been working on a plan to defuse the increasingly violent protests. However, the protesters rejected the proposed agreement, ultimately forcing the democratically elected president to flee the country. Reflecting on the turn of events, Merkel admits: “I had trouble understanding what had happened in the previous eighteen months”.

This is surely disingenuous. While it is plausible that she was not directly involved in the regime change, she openly acknowledges her role in bringing Ukraine closer to the European Union. This, however, proved equally destabilising for Ukraine, as it compelled the country to make a zero-sum geopolitical — and even “civilisational” — choice between the West and Russia. This heightened the political divisions in the country, which ultimately resulted in the Euromaidan events following president Yanukovich’s decision to reject the proposed EU-Ukraine agreement and instead choose Russia as his country’s most important partner.

The eight years between the 2014 regime change in Kyiv and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remain a subject of intense speculation. It is widely known that Germany and France played pivotal roles in brokering the Minsk agreements in 2014-2015, which were intended to bring an end to the civil war in eastern Ukraine. Among other things, they proposed constitutional reforms in Ukraine, including provisions for greater self-government in certain areas of the Donbas region.

However, the Minsk agreements were never fully implemented, and this failure ultimately contributed to the escalation of tensions that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Throughout the conflict, each side has blamed the other for the collapse of the negotiations. Russia has consistently argued that Ukraine was never genuinely committed to implementing the terms of the agreements. But what about the Western powers, particularly France and Germany, who acted as the brokers?

Suggested reading

Why Germany is stuck in the slow lane

By Ian Birrel

In 2022, Merkel gave an interview that seemed to lend some credence to Russia’s interpretation of events. Speaking to Die Zeit, she stated that the Minsk agreements were “an attempt to give Ukraine time” and that Ukraine “used this time to get stronger, as you can see today”. Many interpreted this as an admission that the Western parties involved in the negotiations — including Merkel herself — were never genuinely invested in securing a peaceful resolution. Instead, they saw the agreements as a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for a military solution to the conflict. I am not convinced.

I have always read Merkel’s comments as an attempt to retroactively justify what critics perceive as her irresponsible appeasement of Russia. The US might have had a vested interest in escalating the situation in Ukraine — in part precisely as a means of driving a wedge between Germany and Russia, a longstanding US geostrategic imperative. But what conceivable interest would Merkel have had in passively enabling a full-scale conflict between Ukraine and Russia, especially when such an outcome would inevitably dismantle the German-Russian economic ties that she had spent over a decade cultivating?

It was no surprise, then, to find that in her book Merkel strongly defends her efforts to secure peace — or at the very least a ceasefire — in Ukraine. Her approach was grounded in the belief that “a military solution to the conflict, that is to say a Ukrainian military victory over the Russian troops, was an illusion”. She advised Ukraine’s new government that a resolution would not be possible without dialogue and diplomacy. This, she emphasised, did not mean “that Ukraine must not defend itself when its territory is invaded, but ultimately — and incidentally, this is not the only part of the world where this is true — diplomatic solutions must be found… I could even go so far as to say: there will be no military solution.”

However, it quickly became evident that the US had a different agenda. When President Obama informed her of plans to supply Ukraine with at least defensive weapons, Merkel voiced her “concern that any delivery of weapons would strengthen the forces within the Ukrainian government who hoped only for a military solution, even if that offered no prospect of success”. In her view, such actions risked emboldening extremist and ultranationalist factions within Ukraine — a development that, arguably, aligned with US strategic interests.

Her account also reveals that Putin was resolute in his desire to reach a diplomatic solution. However, it became increasingly clear that “the Minsk agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on”. Powerful forces — within Ukraine, the US and even Europe, particularly hawkish nations like Poland — were advocating for a military resolution to the conflict. Over time, these voices only grew louder.

Merkel, however, continued to go against the grain by further deepening Germany’s ties with Russia through the construction of a second gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Despite repeated efforts by the Trump administration to halt the project, Merkel remained steadfast. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she has faced relentless criticism for allegedly creating “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. Yet, in her book, she contends that US opposition to Nord Stream 2 was not driven by concerns for Germany’s security interests but rather by American economic ambitions.

“In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies”, she writes. “The United States was chiefly interested in its own economic interests, as it wanted to export to Europe LNG obtained through fracking.” This sheds further light on what the Americans’ motivations may have been in escalating tensions in Ukraine: did they view it as a way of bringing the pipeline project to an end?

In 2019, Zelensky was elected on a platform promising to bring peace to Ukraine, largely by implementing the Minsk agreements. And it’s clear from Merkel’s account that she believes Zelensky took his mandate seriously, at first at least. However, he soon came under intense pressure from ultranationalists in Ukraine not to implement what was deemed a “capitulation”. At the Paris summit, later that year, Macron, Zelensky Putin and Merkel collectively committed in writing to the full implementation of the Minsk agreements — but in the end Zelensky refused to accept the agreed text.

The pandemic, she writes, was “the last nail in the coffin of the Minsk agreement”. The absence of in-person meetings made it virtually impossible to resolve the lingering differences. And, by 2021, the agreements were dead. Nevertheless, shortly before leaving office, Merkel made one final attempt to broker peace by proposing a summit between the European Council and Putin. While Macron supported the initiative, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania opposed it, and the meeting never materialised. Merkel paid one last farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021, just months before the conclusion of her tenure.

Two decades of mutual encounters lay behind them — “an era during which Putin and, with him, Russia, had changed from a position of initial openness to the West to one of alienation from us”. And though Merkel does not state it explicitly, she evidently attributes at least part of the responsibility for how events unfolded to the attitude of Nato countries, particularly the United States. Her account makes it equally clear that she was steadfast in her commitment to avoiding war — and, frankly, there is little reason to doubt her sincerity.

This stance aligns not only with Germany’s economic and strategic interests, evident in her efforts to advance Nord Stream 2, but also with her understanding of the catastrophic consequences of a military conflict between Nato and Russia — “one of the world’s two leading nuclear powers along with the United States, and a geographical neighbor of the European Union”. This is a scenario that should be avoided at all costs, she writes. For her, along with that older generation of European politicians, this was not merely a matter of strategic calculation but basic common sense — two things that appear to be largely absent in the post-Merkel era.

A striking example of this shift can be seen in her successor. After the Ukraine invasion, Olaf Scholz drastically reversed Merkel’s Russia policy, announcing plans to wean Germany off Russian gas entirely. Scholz not only immediately halted the launch of Nord Stream 2; his government was also allegedly informed about a Ukrainian plot to blow up the pipeline and chose to remain silent. The dramatic economic consequences of this decoupling are currently playing out painfully. This approach would have been more logical if it had at least been accompanied by diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions in Ukraine. But this was not the case; indeed, Scholz waited over a year — several months after the outbreak of the war — before initiating any direct communication with Putin.

Would events have unfolded differently if Merkel had remained in power? Probably not; the forces she was up against were formidable and entrenched. But it’s difficult to imagine that she would have allowed Germany’s interests to be trampled over so blatantly, especially by its supposed American ally. Indeed, her entire tenure appears to have been guided by a persistent effort to balance Germany’s strategic interests with its transatlantic ties. If anything, her greatest shortcoming was failing to recognise that these goals had become fundamentally incompatible. Yet, it is emblematic of the paradoxical times we live in that, despite the many questionable decisions Merkel made during her chancellorship, the one aspect of her legacy that is most criticised in official Western discourse is the one thing she was unquestionably right about: trying to avoid war with Russia.

The truth is, when such a stench gathers, it is all but impossible for a government to decontaminate. It happened to the Tories in the early Sixties, Labour in the late Seventies and then again to the Tories in the Nineties. Regardless of the personal strengths of the prime ministers at the time — and the weaknesses of their opponents — there comes a time when the public and the media can only wrinkle their noses in disgust. When this happens, a different transformation takes place on the other side of the political aisle. Suddenly the leader of the opposition changes into that altogether different beast: a prospective prime minister.

“Whether the government is as good as dead or not” wrote Guardian’s Peter Jenkins in 1977, two years before Margaret Thatcher’s defining triumph, “the psychological moment may have arrived at which people begin to look at the Tory leader in a new way…” There are dangers in such moments of course. Back in 1977, for instance, Jenkins noted that “the sweet promise of success may… give release to her high-spirited instincts which lie naturally a good deal farther to the right than she cares to let on”.

How true that would prove. Yet before she became prime minister she would keep these instincts in check. From 1975 to 1979, “caution and ambition [were] the two reins of her passion”, as Jenkins put it.

Today, something similar is true of Keir Starmer, though perhaps it is not his own high-spirited instincts he’s worried about revealing but those of the party he leads. Either way, it is certainly true that, like Thatcher before him, Starmer has led his party with skill and restraint, reining the Labour party to his own ambition.

Consider, as evidence, this week’s carefully managed but effective reshuffle, sidelining enemies and promoting ideological allies. In many ways, in fact, Starmer’s leadership is more effective than even Thatcher’s at the same stage in the electoral cycle, having now demoted almost anyone who has challenged his authority while also forming a degree of ideological cohesion in the process. It would take Thatcher much of her first term — and a foreign war — to truly stamp her authority on the party.

The big winners from this week’s reshuffle were obviously the Blairites. Six of his shadow cabinet are not just Blairite by inclination — they were actually special advisers under Blair himself. This is quite a turnaround for Starmer, whose instincts have always appeared to lie much further to the Left than Blair. In 2010, for instance, when the Labour party was agonising over whether or not to return to the Blairite playbook with David Miliband or to begin its journey of rejection under Ed Miliband, Starmer was in Team Ed. When Jeremy Corbyn’s behaviour became too much for many Labour MPs to swallow, Starmer held his nose and gulped down his responsibilities, rising to shadow Brexit secretary and remaining in place throughout Corbyn’s leadership. There is a steel to Starmer which is perhaps more revealing than anything else — a discipline we should take note of.

More from this author

Inside Tony Blair Inc.

By Tom McTague

Like Thatcher, then, Starmer has his eyes on the prize. He became Labour leader only three years ago, standing as the soft-Left candidate, able to bring all wings of his party back together again. Instead, he has completed an extraordinary takeover, expelled the former leader, and asserted his total dominance over the party from the Right. As Blair noted, Starmer is attempting to do in one term what he, Neil Kinnock and John Smith tried between 1983 and 1997.

Today, the defining reality of British politics is that Labour is running away from the Tories in the polls. As it did for Wilson before 1964, Thatcher before 1979 and Blair before 1997, an air of inevitability has set in. But there is one crucial difference, which is a problem for Starmer. In each of these watershed political moments, when a rotten smell attached itself to the government of the day, the opposition offered a simple diagnosis of its cause — and a treatment plan.

In 1964, Wilson painted the Tories as stuffy old amateurs blocking the professional modernisation of the country that only he could deliver. In 1979, Thatcher argued that she was the country’s last chance to reverse the spread of collectivism that was choking Britain. In 1997, Blair was able to define the Tories as corrupt ideologues clinging to a set of old dogmas that no longer worked, destroying public services and Britain’s influence in the world. The country had 24 hours to save the NHS and to restore its influence in Europe.

A year out from the next election, Starmer’s story about the cause of Britain’s problems today — the original sin behind our woes today is not entirely clear. And this is important. As Boris Johnson told me, people live by narrative; they understand the world through stories which make sense of the chaos. It is the job of politicians to shape that national story to their advantage. In Britain, we always complain about our poor productivity and failing public services, while bemoaning our national decline. All this only becomes deadly for a government when it culminates in a collective sense that it is all linked and the government is to blame. We are living in that moment. But why have things gone wrong?

You might say the rot began with austerity in 2010, and that, at heart, the economy is not fundamentally broken, but has been strangled by dogmatic cuts which must now be lifted. In this account, Britain can slowly start to breathe again once adequate resources start flowing into public services. Once they do, the potholes will begin to disappear, schools will no longer be dangerous, doctors will stop striking and the new green economy of the future will flourish. I think of this as the Lion King story: all that needs to happen to save the Pride Lands is for Simba to return and put things back in harmony.

Suggested reading

Comrade Starmer has never had class

By Ashley Frawley

To others, though, the problem is much more fundamental — usually in one of two ways. Either the rot began in 2007/08, an explosion which revealed that the British economy was never as strong as it looked, or in 2016, when Britain chose to leave the EU. For increasing numbers of people — particularly on the Left — it is Brexit that remains the great wound to the body politic, from which no recovery is ever truly possible until it is reversed.

But which of these stories does Starmer believe? It is still not entirely clear. In The Way Ahead, his 2021 pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Starmer offered a kind of amalgamation of these three stories. “After the global financial crash,” he wrote, “the Conservatives’ reckless economic approach failed to deliver growth or repair the public finances.” This is standard Labour fare, tracing the crisis back to 2007 and its aftermath — though not the conditions which allowed the crisis to be so destructive to Britain in the first place. But for Starmer, the Tory response to the 2007 crisis can then be broken up into three “distinct but related” periods. First, the Tories used the global financial crisis as “a smokescreen for rolling back the state”. This then led to “a lazy, complacent veer from patriotism to nationalism” which resulted in our “botched exit from the European Union”. And finally, to maintain some popularity amid the general economic failure, the Government attempted to “import American-style divisions” into the country. As analysis, it is not very subtle, but it is revealing.

Logically, the period Starmer wants to unwind stretches back to 2010. Starmer wants to re-grow the state and to somehow end divisions about social and cultural questions. And yet now we have a fundamentally different economic and diplomatic settlement thanks to Brexit so we can’t just unwind the clock. What, then, is Labour going to do about this?

Starmer has five “missions” as he calls them: to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7; to make Britain a “clean energy superpower”; to build an NHS “fit for the future”; to make Britain’s streets safe; and to “break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage”. These missions are a kind of amalgamation of Thatcher’s “five tasks” and Blair’s “five pledges”.

But at the heart of it, an obvious question: can these missions be achieved outside the EU? If so, why did Starmer and his entire shadow cabinet go to such lengths to avoid leaving in the first place? If you can have the highest growth in the G7, great public services and energy independence, who cares about Erasmus or a few extra queues at passport control? Is Brexit at the heart of our national decline or not? You don’t need to be an expert to know that pretty much everyone in the Labour party thinks it is.

Suggested reading

How Keir Starmer betrayed the North East

By Michael Crick

It is painfully obvious, given who Starmer promoted this week, that the party believes the problems facing Britain simply cannot be addressed without a fundamentally different relationship with the EU. If you were to ask the shadow cabinet privately whether they believed Brexit was a mistake that can only be mitigated and not exploited for Britain’s benefit, they would all surely agree. So how could we possibly sustainably grow our economy faster than France and Germany over the long term?

Take Hilary Benn, now shadow Northern Ireland secretary. It was Benn who gave us the “Benn Act” of 2019, barring the government from ever leaving the EU without an agreement. If Labour wins power, he will be responsible for the constant negotiation with the EU now required to make Northern Ireland function. Does anyone seriously doubt that Benn long ago concluded the only way to manage this situation is closer alignment between the UK as a whole and the EU? And so the inevitable question once again rears its head: if the UK voluntarily aligns with EU law, why not rejoin the EU to have a say over that law?

None of this is a major problem for Starmer now. Even though Thatcher was disciplined and measured in opposition, she was still seen by many as too ideological, lightweight, divisive and “shrill” — yet she still won. A tired and visionless Wilson won in 1974. You don’t have to be Blair in his prime to win power. What’s more, the Conservative Party is now so clearly devoid of a narrative of their own it may hardly matter.

And yet I think the lack of a clear Labour narrative goes some way to explaining the lack of hopeful anticipation in the nation at large. It is not clear what exactly Labour believes needs to be undone and, therefore, what will be fundamentally different. Starmer is offering quiet, incremental improvement — better management, leading to more economic growth and, in time, more money for public services. Part of this package will be a closer relationship with Europe and a greener economy, though one that will have to come into being more slowly than previously imagined because of the state of the public finances.

In some senses, Starmer reminds me of Angela Merkel more than any British political figure. Whether in terms of personal style, charisma, political nous or vision, she did not seem particularly impressive before becoming Chancellor in 2005. She was belittled by Gerhard Schröder, who would sometimes greet her speeches in the Bundestag with mocking laughter. Some of her advisers were far more economically Right-wing and there was just a general sense that she did not have a feel for public opinion. She was not a great campaigner, made near-fatal mistakes, and was seen as too stern and moralistic. Like Starmer, she had no obvious grand vision. But she won and governed for 15 years. What, though, has Germany got to show for it?

Today, that political settlement has dissolved. Germany’s reliance on Russian gas has devastated its industrial economy, while the surface tranquillity of the Merkel era is a distant memory. Alternative für Deutschland, a far-Right populist party, has been the beneficiary of this chaos, surging in the polls to become the second-most popular party in Germany.

To understand this reversal of fortunes and what it means for Europe and the world, Freddie Sayers spoke to Wolfgang Munchau, former co-editor of FT Deutschland, and founder and co-director of Eurointelligence. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Does the rise of the AfD represent a return to Germany’s far-Right past?

Wolfgang Munchau: If you look at the European far-Right parties, the AfD is quite special. Most of the far-Right parties are led by strong leaders: Le Pen, Meloni, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. They’re shaped in the image of their leaders. That’s not the case with the AfD. So if you wanted to draw some historical parallels with the Nazis in particular, they are very different in that respect. I often forget the names of the leaders — they have joint party chiefs — and they keep changing. There are lots of internal rebellions against them. This is a party that’s been very insurrectionary against its own leaders.

But they are on the far-Right: they have goals that I would consider incompatible with constitutional law. For example, one of the goals they recently pronounced was not only Germany’s exit from the EU (which is legal), but the disbandment of the EU, which is obviously not something that a country can do. Some members of the party have been outwardly antisemitic. I wouldn’t call the party officially antisemitic; it’s not like this is an antisemitic platform. But it has neo-Nazis in it.

FS: Fringe parties always attract fringe figures. Is it fair to judge a whole party — or in the case of the AfD, 20% of the general population who say they might support them — by just those few characters?

WM: No, I don’t think you can. It’s not helpful to characterise any party with a word or adjective. They are on the far-Right, that is clear. They’re not a conservative party. Would I call them fascist? No, and I don’t call Meloni a fascist either. She obviously has roots in the far-Right, in the fascist movement in Italy. But she has moved away and from what we see she governs from the centre-right. The AfD is different in the respect that its policies are very different from someone like Meloni, if you take Meloni as the other far-Right party, the one that actually succeeded to get into government. They want Germany to leave Nato, they want Germany to leave the EU — and the euro, of course.

FS: The original energy for the AfD came out of the immigration issue, particularly in 2015 when Angela Merkel accepted over a million refugees. How has the party’s support developed since then?

WM: 2015 was the moment when its support first grew. But by the 2021 election that had already ebbed away and the party was mostly occupied with internal strife and power struggles among party members. It only ended up at 10% at the 2021 election, which is only two years ago. What happened between 2021 and today is that the party doubled its vote, not much in West Germany, but dramatically in East Germany. To go from 10% to 20% in all of Germany means it had to do extremely well in East Germany, and in some parts of East Germany it is now the largest party. It has won its first mayoral election. It has won its first regional election. Previously, with a system of proportional representation, when you are 20% and nobody wants to form coalitions with you, you can have a lot of MPs and councillors sitting around, but you’re never in power. That is now starting to change — they now have their first people in office.

FS: You’ve previously written that East Germany is the German parallel to flyover country, the industrial heartlands that have been suffering over recent decades in places like the US and in Britain and other countries. That suggests that economics is a big part of the AfD’s appeal.

WM: This is the reason why the AfD is now gaining support. Germany’s economic performance is weak at the moment, for reasons that have to do with Germany’s economic model. The general storyline is that Germany did really well until recently and now it’s doing really badly. But the roots of that date back a long time ago. Germany made itself dependent on Russian gas and, as a result, it also made itself dependent on industry, because that was its strongest sector. It had huge export surpluses — Germany had a current account surplus for many years of 8% of GDP, which for a large industrial country is just mind-bogglingly large.

Suggested reading

How the AfD won over Germany

By Lily Lynch

FS: That was made possible, is it fair to say, by the European Union?

WM: That’s right. We have an internal market, and the currency also helps Germany, because what Germany always does when it is in a monetary union with others is it tries to obtain a competitive advantage by reducing wages, so that costs relative to others are lower, and they can’t adjust because the exchange rate is fixed. For Germany, the fixed exchange rates have always worked like a charm. Another huge factor was that this was the heyday of the fuel-driven car, of the diesel car, the heyday of oil heaters, and all the things that Germany did well. And it was also the time of massive globalisation, when countries like China and other developing countries needed equipment, machinery, and machine tools. And they bought them from Germany. Now that they’re in a much more mature phase of their economic development, they need them less. China has now for the first time flipped the trade balance in its favour.

FS: You mentioned energy. Obviously, Germany has been used to Russian gas and meanwhile, it’s been completely winding down its nuclear power. How much are these energy policies driving the AfD and the political instability?

WM: It is certainly one factor. The Greens insisted on the phasing out of nuclear power, and the other parties accepted that this was not something they wanted to fight because in Germany, you tend to lose these kinds of fights. Both Merkel and the SPD favoured the phasing out of nuclear power and it happened this year. The last power station was switched off in April. And it makes no sense. Because now all the Russian gas has gone and nuclear power is switched off and Germany has increased the share of electricity coming from coal — especially from brown coal, which is an incredibly dirty version — and CO² emissions are going up again.

FS: So by that account, voters can be legitimately angry — it feels like an own goal?

WM: It got worse earlier this year when the Government introduced the domestic heating bill. You’re going to have the same coming in the UK: the switch over from traditional gas heating and heating systems to heat pumps. And heat pumps work very differently from gas heaters. They’re more like air conditioning systems in terms of technology and the way they’re made. And the Government introduced an initial law that would force every homeowner to install a heat pump starting from January next year. I think there was a deadline for 2030 for existing homes, next year’s deadline was only for new homes. They’ve since watered it down a little bit, but still — how much does it cost to change your house’s heating system? Depending on the house, between £20,000 and £50,000, paid for by the homeowner.

FS: Who has £20,000-£50,000?

WM: Quite — especially East Germans, whose house values may not be much higher than £50,000. The government handled this terribly. And the rise of the AfD came in waves, and this was the last wave — the mishandling. That’s where it came from, from 15% or 16% in support to about 20%.

FS: Do you see this as a rejection of Left-leaning, idealistic but impractical, policies whose real-world effects are starting to be felt?

WM: I would say it is not fundamentally an issue of the Left vs Right. It is an issue of three incompatible parties in coalition trying to compromise — any two of them could have managed it better. For example, had this been Britain or the US they would not have given themselves the same fiscal constraints, which led to chronic underinvestment. This was a country that, when I grew up, was a high-tech country. Today, it’s a low-tech country. It’s struggling with digital technologies, it’s not investing in modern industries. Which is why its dependency on the old industries has become stronger, including its dependency on old diesel cars.

FS: That giant car industry is especially vulnerable now, because they’re not as good at manufacturing electric cars as they were at petrol cars. China has overtaken them.

WM: To put it mildly. The Germans were shocked to see that China came out of nowhere and within three years, China became the largest car exporter in the world. And German companies are struggling to sell their cars in China. That was a big surprise to them. The Chinese actually like their own cars. They are cheaper and they have features that the Germans cannot offer. And the reason for that is that China has the role in the electric car industry that Germany had in the old car industry, where Germany owned the supply chain.

It wasn’t just that the cars were made in Germany — that was almost the minor thing. Germany also owned the factories in the Czech Republic and Spain and many Eastern European countries, and bought them in Asia and then the United States. It was a giant network of suppliers. They championed just-in-time production and they owned the whole thing. Now, China owns the supply chain of the electric car. The batteries, the rare-earth magnets, and all the things that matter for lithium — the new gold. The Germans panicked and got Intel to build a factory for chips. But it’s still essentially geared towards cars. This is a country that had the facility and the ability to be a major player in the digital world and has given up on that.

Suggested reading

The end of Germany's open borders

By Maurice Frank

FS: So where does the blame lie for this? Can we make the case that the whole settlement for those decades was inherently fragile, and Germany above all was naive to think it would last forever?

WM: That’s right — and at the root of it is a system of neo-mercantilism, a reliance on industry for exports and a government that follows the wishes of industry. You remember the diesel scandal where they introduced cheating devices — the reason this came up in the United States and not in the EU was that the EU was looking the other way. The EU testing of cars was defunded, basically, compared to the United States.

So the German government helped companies — indirectly, maybe unwittingly — helped companies commit crimes. And it also adjusted its foreign policies according to corporate needs. The foreign policy of Germany was a business-driven foreign policy. It was not driven by geopolitical or other security interests, it was business-driven, and this has changed with this government. Germany’s model was dependent on globalisation, the type of globalisation which we had from 1990 to about 2020, and it was already fading in the years running up to Covid. Germany was dependent on the Russian gas flowing forever, and on globalisation lasting forever.

FS: These populist backlashes, the rise of parties like the AfD, are in some way understandable, angry reactions to decades of naivety and incompetence.

WS: That’s exactly what it is. It’s the result of a country’s economic model running into the ground. If you work for an industrial company that supplies the car industry, you know that your job isn’t going to be secure. There are a lot of fears about the future. And rightly so — if you’re trained to be a mechanical technician, you are right to be worried because the country may not be able to support enough jobs for this particular, highly specialised segment.

FS: What might happen next? Because the whole world order that we’ve been used to for all these decades is built on countries like Germany fulfilling these roles.

WS: The irony of the situation is, the stronger the AfD gets, the harder it is for governments, because under systems of proportional representation, it is difficult for centrist parties to form classic coalitions of the Left or Right. No one would ever go into a coalition with the AfD. So there’s the hard Right, and there’s also the Left Party, which might disappear. But there’s a prospect of another Left Party coming, which is specifically focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, a party of the Left that’s anti-Nato, anti-weapons deliveries for Ukraine. There is a lot of support for that in Germany. The country is really split on this.

FS: Do you have a sense of what proportion of the population shares those doubts about the policy in Ukraine?

WM: I think it’s about half? There was a recent poll asking about the next stage of weapons, deliveries of cruise missiles, and there was a strong majority against. Now that’s a specific question. The other polls that I’ve seen were in the 50/50 area and weakening. A bit like in the United States, it started with very strong support, and the support is still there, but it’s weakening, though it’s not flipped completely. But the longer this goes on, the harder it will become.

Suggested reading

The rise of Europe's military austerity

By Thomas Fazi

FS: Could you not make a similar argument there that voters are seeing the impacts of that policy — on energy prices, on dividing the world economy, on bringing in a kind of new Cold War situation with Russia and China — and they don’t think it’s worth it?

WM: Oh, absolutely, that’s exactly the reason. They are making the connection between the support of Ukraine and the fact that they know that Germany is dependent on China and Japan and Russia. And they see that this is a policy, or a change in the world environment, that is not in Germany’s favour. Voters are not entirely stupid. When they vote for the AfD or for parties that are opposing this, they may be dependent on that old structure, or they may have known nothing else. There is a sense that this is now interrupted, and it is interrupted due to politics, and the Government is doing something unreasonable by supporting Ukraine.

FS: So it’s rational whether you agree with it or not.

WM: The AfD captures a lot of that. But there may soon be a party on the Left led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a very sort of maverick politician, who has left or who is on the verge of leaving the Left Party, who may be forming a new party of the Left. And that party was also on opinion polls at potentially 20% of the electorate.

FS: What programme might a new party offer that might capture wider support?

WM: I think the least likely programme is the one that I would suggest, which is: we’re going through a transition and it’s going to be hard. We need to remedy the lack of investment in modern technologies and we should accept that the future doesn’t lie in machine tools. So we should deregulate our bureaucracy and let companies be companies, and deregulate their taxes, and while we may not subsidise them, we will certainly leave them to flourish. And the country has enough talent, so they should be able to figure this out. What I’m suggesting is very boring in many ways — I think it would work, but it’s not going to happen.

But if there were a Trump-like character with a “Germany First” approach to industrial policy, something like what Gerhard Schröder was. I always thought of him and Berlusconi as the first European populists. They were centrists and there was nothing extreme about them in terms of their political views. They were just very pro-business. And I think some characters like that could re-emerge, to say: “This has been a mistake, the support for Ukraine, our support for the United States.” I think it would start off with becoming more US-sceptic.

The Germans hated Trump so much that they thought anyone who came after him was good. And they didn’t quite see how dangerous for them Biden would be. First of all, there is the anti-China policy that is really not in Germany’s economic interest. The US Inflation Reduction Act is a massive programme of subsidies for companies to leave places like Europe to resettle in the United States. A programme like this is causing enormous difficulties for German companies. Volkswagen, instead of investing in a massive factory in Germany which they had planned, are now doing this in the United States. There’s an awful lot of stuff like that happening.

What I could see happening is that a character would come in opposition to the United States, and I think that would probably be the focus, in saying: “We’re not a geopolitical nation, we are not good at this stuff. Let’s trade, let’s do what we’ve always done, and let’s be friends with our companies and let the needs of our industry dictate where we stand politically.” A pragmatic view. And if the war ends, it’s not our business who runs Russia or China.

FS: That would have huge ramifications for the world, if a party became popular in Germany that was explicitly saying: “Let’s just be pragmatic. Let’s make friends again with Russia. Let’s make friends again with China. Let’s worry about our economy and our energy prices and our industrial heartlands first, and leave international adventures to one side.”

WM: Exactly. I think they would probably phrase it the way you do, not in the Trump language. It would be basically what Merkel did. It’s not fundamentally different. Merkel sort of dabbled in geopolitics, but ultimately, that was the policy she deployed. Her big shortcoming, for which she’ll be remembered historically more than anything else, is the fact that this economic decline that Germany’s seeing now has its root in policies that she undertook but that didn’t have immediate consequences. During the Eurozone crisis, we always talked about kicking the can down the road, and used metaphors of that sort. But that is exactly what happened. Everything they did resolved none of the problems. There was always a long timetable for everything.

FS: If this current decline trajectory continues, what do you think happens to Germany and to Europe, without a strong Germany at its centre?

WM: People often make the mistake when of thinking Europe will blow up. I always get questions from the Eurosceptic British media like “Does this mean they will leave? Is there going to be another Brexit?” The biggest danger to the EU is not that it blows up. It’s not going to blow up; we’ve seen with the UK how difficult it is to leave. And if you have the euro as your currency, it will be 10 times as difficult to leave. I don’t think any country can do it.

The much bigger danger for the EU is that it becomes toothless and ineffective.

FS: We talk quite often about the West being in decline, but it sounds like Europe in particular is going to face a tough future.

WM: It’s going to be a tough period, that’s for sure. These periods end and countries have gone through periods of decline and then recovered. The UK was an example in the Seventies and Eighties. I can’t exclude that we strike lucky at some point again. But this is going to be a difficult period, and what makes me particularly sceptical is that I don’t see anyone who has an idea, a bright idea, of how to solve the problem, even if that person was only a fringe political figure. Most of the political debate is between people who want to subsidise industry and want to subsidise green technologies, but there’s never somebody who tries arrest the decline to see how one could change and innovate this economic model, or reform this economic model. It’s all the same, again and again.

There is a decline in the Western dominance in the world. And the EU being very dependent on the US for its protection but also dependent for globalisation for its economic success is in an impossible position. And it hasn’t even started to discuss what it needs to do to survive in this new world.

Suggested reading

Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

FS: Hearing you talk about the likely trajectory of Europe, it puts the Brexit question into a slightly different colour. Big picture, at least in the UK we are at liberty to make a radical new economic pivot if we want?

WM: Except that you don’t! There would have been one valid and good Brexit argument that I would have accepted: “We will do Brexit because we can improve on the economic model. We can do this differently.” That’s not happening. I think this is the great tragedy of Brexit. The UK’s economic model was shaped by the government of the Eighties, with development zones, and it’s very much geared towards the Single European Market. You probably remember Heseltine, the Thatcher government, trying to position the UK as the prime location for international investors that were entering the European Single Market. The Blair administration continued this process of European business integration. And that was the business model: the City was the Eurozone’s banker in the UK. The UK didn’t want to join the Eurozone, but it wanted to be the bank of another currency zone.

One could have conceivably thought of a new age, a digital model, but the UK still has the same old rules— on data protection laws, for example, and many others. And that’s to do with the fact that British governments did not focus on this, given that the UK has a strong foundation in science and technology, just as Germany does, they could have used these strengths to forge a new business model around these ideas. That didn’t happen, and that’s why we’re reading stories of Brexit being a disaster.

FS: It is too late now?

WM: It’s not too late, it can be done. I said I don’t see anyone in German politics who actually focuses on the economic model, but I don’t see this in UK politics either. A prime minister who thinks he can reduce inflation, or an Opposition which basically wants to do the same thing as the Government is doing — but nothing that pertains to this debate. Whatever the differences are, it is not essentially about the economic model.

FS: If you were a betting man, which of Germany and the UK do you think will be in a relatively stronger position in 10 years’ time?

WM: I would say the UK.

Europe, Maxence argued, was a myth “that was worshipped all the more strongly the more distant it seemed”. At that time, it was associated with Aristide Briand, who led five French governments after the First World War. A “United States of Europe”, according to this “Briandist” vision, represented an imminent future that would relegate conflict between nations to the past. Today, this vision is the political alibi most eagerly used by Emmanuel Macron.

Macron’s neo-Briandism is based, above all, on the belief in “couple franco-allemand”. But lately, relations between France and Germany have fallen into a crisis. The annual government consultations between the two countries, scheduled for the end of October, have been postponed until January next year. Yesterday, Germany foreign minister Annalena Baerbock travelled to Paris to try and recover the situation, holding meetings with her French counterpart and, unusually, Macron himself. But whatever their outcome, she will be unable to rescue a relationship which has always been defined by French foreign policy delusions.

Central to their discussions was defence co-operation — a key part of the neo-Briandist dream of “strategic autonomy” — on which a rift has opened between France and Germany. In March, under the auspices of the French presidency, EU heads of state signed a declaration in Versailles pledging increased investment in European defence. A stark rebuttal of this French vision came with Germany’s decision to buy F-35 fighter jets from the US, though there are signs of cooperation over the development of the new FCAS fighter jet system. Meanwhile, the project of a European anti-missile shield, put forward by Scholz, also disregarded the work of the French aerospace company Thales and its Italian partners on the existing Mamba anti-missile system. But perhaps the greatest injury was caused by the German proposal for “harmonisation of arms exports within the EU”, which would have meant a ban on sales to non-EU and non-Nato countries, depriving the French of important customers.

China is the other issue fracturing the Franco-German couple, symbolised by Scholz’s visit to Beijing earlier this month. He went in defiance of Paris, which not only intended it to be a joint trip, but also wanted it to take place later so as not to grant legitimacy to Xi right after his propagandising Party Congress. Scholz’s actions here should not come as a surprise. He embraces the vision of German businessmen, who believe that Germany needs China, rather than strategic autonomy. In the very first phone conversation between Scholz and Xi, they agreed that economic relations between the two countries must deepen. This direction in Berlin’s policy was further confirmed by the recent sale of shares in the port of Hamburg to the Chinese.

But perhaps nothing has undermined the myth of the “Franco-German couple” more than Scholz’s rescue plan for German industry. Its scale — €200 billion — has frightened the French and other European leaders, who fear it will further compound Germany’s industrial advantage. Paris’s anxiety stems from the fact that it does not have the resources to respond to Germany’s neo-mercantilist challenge. A source close to Macron stated bluntly: “they want to crush us”. Liberal philosopher Pierre Manent noted immediately after Macron’s election in 2017 that the French “want to marry the Germans”, and called this desire “strange”. If this behaviour continues, he presciently warned, France would risk complete economic, political and intellectual vassalisation. But the French subordination to Germany did not begin with Macron — it is one of the prevailing narratives of modern French history.

More from this author

The failure of May 1968

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

A key step towards this vassalisation was the adoption of the euro. The terms France agreed to amounted to a gift to Germany, so determined was François Mitterand to draw Germany into an integrated Europe, whatever the cost. Oskar Lafontaine, one of the SPD’s leaders, admitted years later that the euro was a system that favoured his country’s economic power, as German-exported goods would have been much more expensive without the common currency. French elites believed that the monetary union would provide a magical incentive for structural reforms and saw the euro just as the Italians did: a vincolo esterno, an external constraint forcing them to adapt. They did not anticipate that the only thing they would have to adapt to would be Berlin’s demands.

France’s position vis-à-vis Germany worsened further in 1997, when Paris introduced a 35-hour working week. The then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder described it as “excellent news for German industry” and, beginning with the Schröder era, German unilateralism and neo-mercantilism became explicit. A period of fait accomplis was inaugurated by the Hartz reforms, which Schröder did not discuss with European partners. Imposed soon after the introduction of the single currency, they tipped the scales of the eurozone permanently in favour of Berlin (although some do question their importance).

Again, in 2011, Merkel did not talk to her counterparts when she decided to abandon nuclear power, which “destabilised the French nuclear industry”, as pro-nuclear campaigners have put it. But the most striking example of Berlin’s unilateralism came in 2015, when Merkel single-handedly decided that Europe should open its borders to an unprecedented influx of migrants. Despite this, Macron remained a firm believer in the myth of the “couple franco-allemand”. During his first campaign, he promised reforms to restore trust with Germany, and travelled to Berlin on his first visit after assuming office. In 2018, during his speeches at the Sorbonne and in Athens, he went so far as to propose that the “couple” transform the EU into a tighter federation. Merkel, however, showed no enthusiasm for these ideas, never substantially addressing them.

In an interview with The Economist in the autumn of 2019, the French president restated his position, arguing that Nato was in a state of “brain death” and that the EU’s task should be to regain “strategic autonomy”. And more recently speaking to Les Échos, Macron repeated his credo: “I believe in the strength of the couple franco-allemand and in our ability to implement an ambitious strategy.”

Suggested reading

Is revolution brewing in France?

By John Lichfield

But Macron’s true attitude toward sovereignty is historically ambiguous, and undermines any of the grand gestures he makes. In 2010, when he sat on the Commission for the Liberation of French Growth set up by then-President Sarkozy, he proposed getting rid of France’s nuclear deterrent. “It serves no purpose. Germany doesn’t have it,” said Macron according to Marc Endeweld’s book, L’Emprise. And while today Macron considers reindustrialisation as inherent to strategic autonomy, over the years he has been an important actor in the deindustrialisation of France.

He is not the only culprit here, and this process began long before him, during the economic shocks of the Seventies. But it accelerated from 1995 to 2015, driven both by neoliberal politics and the myth of Europe. A case in point is Pechiney, world leader in the transformation of bauxite into aluminium. In 2000, as Nicolas Dufourcq explains in La Désindustrialisation de la France, it was strong enough to wrest control of its market through consolidations. However, the European Commission blocked these attempts and thereafter Pechiney went into decline.

A lack of assertiveness to protect Pechiney was accompanied by a particular intellectual climate among French elites. They had allowed themselves to be captivated by the ideology of “fabless”, whose main propagator in France was Serge Tchuruk, then CEO of Alstom. He argued that the days of industrial manufacturing were over, and claimed that a new age of post-industrial economy and society without factories was beginning, with companies only involved in design and production outsourced. Dufourcq, himself an entrepreneur and currently the director of the Banque Publique d’Investissement, argues that this had a deplorable effect: by the Noughties, Parisian elites were clueless about real industrial strategy.

This is Macron’s intellectual background. And he has followed its example: when he held the office of finance minister, Alstom was sold, the phone company Alcatel was bought by Nokia, Technip (an engineering and construction company in the energy sector) ended up in the hands of the American FMC, and Lafarge, specialising in building materials, became the property of the Swiss Holcim.

More from this author

America has captured France

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

The fate of Alstom is emblematic. It was one of the most important French conglomerates, the main contributor to France’s post-war reconstruction, whose extensive operations — from railroads to nuclear — can only be compared with Germany’s Siemens or the South Korean chaebols. Even before Macron was appointed finance minister, he piloted the Alstom case from his position as secretary to President Hollande. Back then, he commissioned an analysis from the US consulting firm AT Kearney, whose recommendation was to sell Alstom to General Electric. When minister Arnaud Montebourg tried to voice his opposition and proposed a partial nationalisation of strategic assets, Macron reportedly countered: “We are not in Venezuela!”

In 2021, in an act of contrition, he announced the repurchase of a portion of Alstom. The price the French will come to pay will be higher than what they sold it for. And this brings to mind Jean-Pierre Maxence’s other remark about Briand. He was praised, the French writer notes, for being capable, “but his ability consisted primarily in feigning victory whenever he suffered defeat”.

Macron’s neo-Briandist delusions obscure his underlying powerlessness. In 2018, IFOP conducted a multiple-choice survey asking who holds power in France. Remarkably, 54% of respondents pointed to the “financial markets”, while 49% chose “multinational corporations” and “the president” equally. The French public senses that the office of the president, despite the immense prerogatives with which the institutional framework of the Fifth Republic endows him, no longer commands the destiny of the country.

Contrarian sociologist Emmanuel Todd argues in his Les Luttes des classes en France au XXIe siècle that France has entered “a fascinating and fictional era”, which he calls “La Grande Comédie”. It has as much to do with real politics as The Phoney War had to do with real war. The main task of the French political system has become to organise fictions concealing the fact that the President has lost his influence over the course of national affairs. Judging by Macron’s recent statements about the Franco-German couple and Europe, the great comedy will only continue.

What is euphemistically termed the “cost of living crisis” is simply the first ripples of the historic shift of wealth and power from Europe and North America to the great Asian power blocs. The rising costs of energy and food resulting from the war in Ukraine will be dwarfed by the plummeting living standards that the great confrontation with China will usher in. The basic underpinnings of middle-class consumption in the West will go, and we will not see them again in our lifetimes. Britain is no more prepared for this cataclysmic correction of the global economy than Germany is: indeed, by many important metrics, our state capacity is already significantly worse.

As the sociologist and political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo observes, the result of the economic consensus of the past four decades is already such that “the remaining members of the middle class in the West, what we could refer to as the ‘middling class’ due to the precarity of their position, are facing the prospect of proletarianisation, or déclassement — being progressively stripped of the traditional tokens of middle-class status, such as home ownership, savings and a good salary following a good education.”

This has brought us the Right-wing populist upsurge of the past decade, and the parallel drive towards “millennial socialism” among newly-proletarianised university graduates, with all the cultural pathologies their distress carries with it. Yet in their “war on woke”, the Conservative party is campaigning against the morbid symptoms while refusing to treat the cause.

It is beyond dispiriting, then, that the candidates displaying themselves in the Conservative leadership contest not only have no meaningful solutions to offer for the hard years ahead, but do not even seem to discern the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Instead, all the potential successors scrabbling around their podiums for Johnson’s crown have retreated to the safe space of Thatcherite dogma, promising to shrink the state just when the state’s protective hand will be needed more than ever.

Suggested reading

Why would the young vote Tory?

By JAMES SEAN DICKSON

How much state is even left to shrink? Try to get a GP appointment; try to get the police to attend an incident of crime, let alone provide justice. Crime is rampant, incomes are shrinking and education is worthless. Our external borders are now purely notional, and the union’s survival is doubtful. We already pay Scandinavian taxes for Mediterranean public services, and all the candidates are offering is a further diminution of state capacity. If Conservatives do not relearn how to run it, then the state will collapse, and deservedly so. As Hobbes wrote: “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.” To see Britain through the hard years ahead, we need a leader able to harness the protective power of Leviathan.

Yet instead, all we have seen from the hustings are the last dying rituals of Thatcher’s cargo cult, as the candidates rattle through the empty mantras of the old religion, desperately trying to placate the unquiet ghost of a woman born a century ago. Look at Truss, literally cosplaying Thatcher in Moscow; listen to Sunak promising a “grown up conversation”, when it’s the consensus of the sensible grownups that has given us decades of stagnation and decline. Where even the supposed “last neoliberal” Emmanuel Macron has nationalised France’s energy giant EDF to see his country securely through the near future, our own Penny Mordaunt signed away 5% of Britain’s electricity capacity to avoid ruining the view from just one affluent constituent’s seaside cottage. None of these people even understands the turbulent future ahead of us, let alone presents a plan to seize it for the nation’s good. No wonder None of the Above is still the best-polling candidate: the party’s future is still imprisoned by its recent past.

But the old gods have no power in the world ahead of us. We have entered a new era, in which only the strongest and most capable states will survive. As Gerbaudo notes, “many leaders have come to see the neoliberal state as a rudderless vessel, incapable of weathering coming global storms. The issue that divides them is what new course should be set by the ship of state.” If Conservatives do not meet this challenge, then their political enemies will, using the state to cement into law all the arcane and pernicious maladies of late-stage liberalism they already display.

More from this author

Boris Johnson's squandered chance

By Aris Roussinos

It didn’t have to come to this. There are other Tory traditions, other Conservative modernities which the party could draw on in an age of permanent crisis. Instead of its shrunken historical memory that goes no further back than the oldest millennials, the Conservative party has a strong culture of capable leadership fit to guide the nation through a period of crisis and decline, and to transmute the coming years of lead into gold. Instead of competing to dress up in Thatcher’s mothballed clothes, we need a candidate who can bring the vision and good governance of Britain’s postwar leadership: we need a new Harold Macmillan.

It was Macmillan, as his biographer D.R. Thorpe observes, who led Britain from the “immediate post-war world of deprivation to the years of plenty”, writing in his diary: “We must be bold; caution is no good. All our political future depends on whether we can combine prosperity with stability.” Drawing on his experience heading the Ministry of Supply during the darkest wartime years, Macmillan “understood the machinery of government and knew… how to crank it into action.” Deployed by Churchill as housing minister, with a mission to build 300,000 new houses every year, Macmillan exceeded his quota, crushing Labour in the process.

The party then understood, as it declared in its 1951 manifesto, that “Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by crowded houses. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.” Back then, the central plank of Conservative messaging, shown regularly in the newspapers and the cinema newsreels, was Macmillan “handing the key to a semi-detached house to a grateful married couple with young children”. A party that stood on this pledge today, and delivered, would win a landslide: it really is that simple. Yet instead, held captive by boomer NIMBY interests, the best offer that the most ambitious Conservative contenders are making today is the weak nudge of “street votes”, the chosen gimmick of thinktankers ideologically fearful of the state’s slumbering power.

Suggested reading

The PM we shouldn't write off

By Tim Bale

Compare this timidity and intellectual bankruptcy with the vigour and ambition of Britain’s postwar leadership. Ordered to provide homes, Macmillan built millions of them. As Thorpe records, “Macmillan reorganised his ministry on a war footing — Action This Day… Red tape was cut to the minimum and brick-making mobilised on a massive scale. Macmillan had no truck with excuses.” The result was a happy, prosperous and secure electorate, with the middle- and working-classes united in support for a Conservative government that gave them security and the opportunity for family formation, the basic building blocks of a conservative worldview.

The party, then, was led by giants: but more, it was led by conservatives, and not by Manchester Liberals in conservative clothing. Which candidate today would declare, as Anthony Eden did to a roaring crowd at the 1947 conference, that “We are not a Party of unbridled, brutal capitalism, and never have been. Although we believe in personal responsibility and personal initiative in business, we are not the political children of the ‘laissez-faire’ school. We opposed them decade after decade.” As Eden observed, “Conservatism regards the family as the basic social unit — and the sanctity of family life as vital to the health of the State.” The reverse was true then, as it is now: the state is integral to the health of the family, and without a capable state willing and able to nurture stable, prosperous and content family life, there is no future for either the party or the nation.

To achieve this requires the state’s intervention in the market, and not just fearful sacrifices to the fickle gods of free trade. As another giant of postwar Toryism, Rab Butler, declared in 1947: “the term ‘planning’ is a new word for coherent and positive policy. The conception of strong government policy in economic matters is, I believe, the very centre of the Conservative tradition. We have never been a party of laissez-faire. Conservatives were planning before the word entered the vocabulary of political jargon.”

Rooting Conservative interventionism in the deepest, paternalist origins of the Tory tradition, Butler noted that “Tories and others set about the task of dealing with the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution by calling upon the power of government to redress injustice… [The State] assumed the functions of protecting the common interest and safeguarding the interests of the weaker members of society.” In his 1971 memoirs, Butler observed that “I had derived from Bolingbroke an assurance that the majesty of the State might be used in the interests of the many, from Burke a belief in seeking patterns of improvement by balancing diverse interests, and from Disraeli an insistence that the two nations must become one.” That belief in the majesty of the state, and its unique capacity to improve the lives of the British people, is the very heart of the Tory tradition, and it is to that tradition the Conservatives must return.

More from this author

Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

On his triumphant accession to the Conservative leadership in 1957, Macmillan quoted Disraeli by saying: “We must be conservative to conserve all that is good and radical to uproot all that is bad.” Yet the party that now exists has conserved nothing of value: for it to survive now, Thatcher’s baneful legacy must finally be uprooted. Seeking to guide Britain’s threatened democracy between the twin hazards of Fascism and Communism, Macmillan — long MP for the mining town of Stockton, and the publisher of Keynes — observed, in 1936, that “Toryism has always been a form of paternal socialism”. The party of today cannot shy from this vision: better a protective father, stern in defence of his sacred duty, than Thatcher’s feckless mother, of whom Macmillan sadly observed in 1984 that “First the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go…’”

The roots of Britain’s precipitous decline lie in the chronic under-investment in scientific research, state capacity and basic living standards that Thatcher’s revolution brought in tow. The supposedly drab and dreary Britain of the postwar era was far more vigorous, creative and prosperous than the ruin we currently inhabit. Instead of shrinking the state, the state’s budgets have ballooned beneath the costs of PFI contracts and outsourcing to companies parasitic on the nation’s wealth, even as its capacity has withered to almost nothing.

This isn’t just a Tory failing. As the political theorists Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri observed in 2020, “even if the Labour Party had won the 2019 elections, it would have inherited a regulatory state apparatus that was both intensely bloated, in terms of sheer bureaucratic size and complexity, yet substantively weak, with the ostensible ‘levers of power’ in central government scarcely connected to hollowed-out front-line services. Moreover, this was a state that both main parties had a hand in creating, both under the Conservatives (1979–97, 2010–) and New Labour (1997–2010), reflecting their convergence around a neoliberal policy set.” The Thatcher revolution promised a path out of national decline, but the cure turned out far worse than the disease: the result is that my generation is poorer than my parents’, and my children will be poorer still.

Soon Britain will just be a gloomy Italy, halfway between museum and nursing home, with nothing to offer the young but emigration, helplessly buffeted by the storms ahead. For us to survive the coming trial, as dramatic and treacherous as the hard years of the Thirties, the ruling party must finally lay Thatcher’s spirit to rest, sealing her tomb beneath the foundations of a new era of security and, in time, prosperity which only a strong and capable state can nurture. The platforms Johnson’s aspiring successors have offered us so far are unfit for the pressures of today, let alone the trials of tomorrow. As the Conservative party proclaimed in 1947, “The world is topsy-turvy. Raw materials are scarce. Stormy weather must be foreseen. There must be a hand on the helm.” The era of the Thatchers, Blairs, Clintons and Merkels is already crumbling into dust: to lead us through a future whose first ripples are already causing crisis, the Tories must reclaim their strong, paternal role as the party of the state.

It is true that at British airports signs, in English and Ukrainian, offer information. But Britain barely figures on the refugee trail. We send weapons to Ukraine, and donors give money, but as yet, for shameful political reasons, the British people have been mostly unable to help the people of Ukraine. Germany, a state shaped by Angela Merkel, one of the few leaders of her generation who was both capable and decent, has helped hundreds of thousands. And there they were, women and children and old men and pets, in an old dim waiting room in Munich, where a Catholic charity was giving out food and coffee and tea.

Cristina comes from paradise: Odessa was paradise, she said. Truly, paradise. She worked in cosmetics and says her life was “perfect” before the war. “When the bombs started I called my friend and I said, ‘Am I crazy? I know I don’t follow the news but have we got Nazis? Where are the Nazis?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s the Russians, it’s Russian propaganda.’”

Cristina speaks six languages. A few weeks ago, when she first arrived in Munich — via Romania, Hungary and Austria — she translated between other refugees and the German authorities for 48 hours non-stop. She helped about 800 people, awed German officials told her afterwards. With her pencilled-on eyebrows, piercings and air of mighty charisma, Cristina struck me as a kind of punk angel. She is most proud of engineering a family’s escape from Mariupol as it was encircled and devastated by the Russian army.

Suggested reading

How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She is a fair distance from paradise now, sitting in the spring sun on the steps outside the old waiting room, but at least she is safe. “The Germans are strict but they are really good,” Cristian says, chain smoking. “If you can complete six stages, all the forms, you can get a house or a room or somewhere to live.”

Having settled her own family, found herself a room and completed a self-assigned mission to get a Ukrainian child with cancer in his chest, whom she met in Romania, to a specialist German hospital, Cristina returned to the station to help more refugees. The only time she came close to crying was when she described the welcome refugees receive in Romania:

“They just gave us everything. For the children they had made this room, this massive room, full of every sweet and cake and chocolate you can imagine. It was like a dream or something! And they got all the children together and they gathered them outside the doors and they just opened them and said there you are — it’s all for you. Romanians are incredible.”

The Austrian ticket inspector who combed refugee trains stuffed with fleeing women and children — all of whom had been issued special tickets by the authorities — extorting €160 per person in cash, on pain of ejection at the next station, is incredible in another way.

The worldwide refugee population was around 82 million, according to the UNHCR, before this war drove another 10 million from their homes. The average time it takes a refugee displaced by war to return to their country of origin varies by conflict and era — in cases of protracted catastrophe, it can be 21 years. Many will never return. A young woman I interviewed in Munich, a sales manager with a cat and a dog, who had left with six members of her family, said she would never go back to Ukraine. Her husband was fighting the Russians. She hopes he will live to join her in Germany.

Suggested reading

How Ukrainian women will suffer

By Julie Bindel

And then there are the children. It is not the babies, toddlers or the little ones you worry about. Their needs are basic and immediate and they travel well, on the whole. It is the plight of the slightly older children, eight or nine and upwards, which gets you.

There was a girl at passport control in Ukraine who was about ten years old. She was wearing a smart jacket and ear warmers. She was in charge of an adult’s suitcase, the wheeled kind you pack for a week away, and also a carrier bag. With her, waiting in the line for people emigrating on foot, were her mother and grandmother.

In a booth, two young female soldiers were handling two lines at once — people coming out of Ukraine, and people going back in. Most of the soldiers at that border near Siret were women, and they looked shattered. There was an uncertain atmosphere all around the border. The sky looked grey and bitter and all I could see of Ukraine was a low ridge, tall trees and rooks.

That girl was being so good. She must have been good for weeks, I thought, ever since the war began. It’s not right, is it, for a ten-year-old to feel she has to behave so well for weeks and months?

In a sports hall a few miles from the border, back in Romania, I interviewed a group of children who are all national and international standard swimmers. They and every refugee I spoke to began their stories in the same way.

“At five in the morning the bombs started.”

Until that point, no one I interviewed had believed the Russians were really going to attack.

Suggested reading

Britain's shameful bureaucracy trap

By Jacob Reynolds

Most of the swimmers came from Kyiv and the surrounding region. Their coach had called all their families, a few weeks into the war, and offered to take the children to Romania, where they would be safe, and where they could swim.

They had been assembled in the sports hall to receive backpacks put together by volunteers from the Packed with Hope Campaign. The backpacks contained books in Ukrainian and English, head torches, water bottles and other useful things. There was an extraordinary stillness about the children. In the huge hall they chose to sit grouped tightly together. They regarded Gracie, and her Romanian co-organiser Gabriela Popescu, in a searching, almost unblinking way. They did not fidget or whisper, as any group of British 12 to 16-year-olds would.

When we spoke, they looked at me with a sort of steadiness: it was as though you were another thing in a long line of other things that had paraded through their vision during the course of the weird and terrifying and lonely dream it seemed their lives had become. They all held that measured, assessing, held-together look you see in paramedics and nurses and A & E doctors, the look of someone who has to be strong and calm and philosophical on some level. I had never seen that look in a child’s gaze before. I can see all their faces so clearly now.

The best English speakers were asked to talk to me — I was recording a Radio 4 programme about the road between Britain and Ukraine, the road to the war. I asked them normal things: what are you most interested in studying? What do you plan to do beyond school? They were all pale. One was interested in history, and one in mathematics, and they all said they wanted to continue their studies.

One, one of the oldest, Igor, said that in two years, when he turns 18, he will go back to Ukraine “to fight the fucking Russian pigs and help throw them out of the country”.

I was so glad he said it, and that he got to say it into a BBC microphone, though I doubt we shall be able to broadcast it. The children’s eyes seemed to change as he said it and they nodded and seemed to rouse and draw even closer together. That is something else they have learned, I realise now. They have learned hatred, and because they are still so young and still innocent, they may not even know it yet.

Igor was tremendously articulate, his English was excellent, and as we bade friendly farewells I punched him on the arm and said, “You should be a bloody politician mate!”

He laughed. It was the only time I saw any of them laugh.

Those unforgettable words, written in 1945, remained buried in the German psyche. A bottomless sense of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich meant that for decades many Germans (mostly in the western half) harboured a deep suspicion about their own culture and country, a fear that a militarist, nationalist, murderous Germany could rise from the ashes of the war.

Hence, for decades, Germany pushed pacifism and disarmament coupled with trade and dialogue, a policy that took off with social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the late Sixties and Seventies, as West Germany began to import natural gas from the Soviet Union. When, in 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who had lived in Dresden and was a fluent German speaker, replaced Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, Germany doubled down on Wandel durch Handel (change through trade). Volkswagen opened a large factory in Kaluga south of Moscow in 2007.

In 2011 — under the watch of ex-chancellor Angela Merkel — the Nord Stream 1 Baltic pipeline began to inject Siberian gas directly into the veins of German industry — circumventing transit countries like Ukraine, robbing them of revenue. Until the day of the invasion, Germany somehow imagined the controversial Nord Stream 2 would still open.

In December 2021, Putin phoned Merkel to thank her for “many years of fruitful cooperation”. In hindsight, what he meant was: thank you for filling my war chest. A day earlier, the Russian president had written to the incoming social democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz: “I count on engaging with you in constructive dialogue and working together on current issues on the bilateral and international agenda.”

In mid-February, as the Russian troop build-up suggested that Putin was really planning the unthinkable, Scholz took his turn at the end of that six-metre table in the Kremlin to talk diplomatic solutions — and flew back to Berlin, hopeful.

Then, on February 24 the sky fell in. Putin’s invasion of a large sovereign country two borders away (as the crow flies Kyiv is 748 miles from Berlin) shattered every illusion. The entire West was duped, but no country was more duped than Germany.

Germany was lost for words. The vocabulary required to describe what had happened lay beneath the ruins of the country’s beliefs about itself, Russia and the world. As Armin Nassehi, a sociologist at the University of Munich, wrote on February 25: “We seem to be completely blank to Russia’s aggression, not only militarily but also intellectually and conceptually.”

More from this author

Test article

By Aris Roussinos

The Germans had failed to fathom that, nearly 80 years after the Second World War, the existential threat to Europe would come from elsewhere. As the scale of Putin’s plans for Ukraine sunk in, Germany’s political consciousness began to shift. It was now clear that the support of Europe’s economic powerhouse for Ukraine (5,000 helmets!) had been shamefully inadequate. On Sunday February 27, Olaf Scholz — who up to that point had been viewed as a bland, ineffective chancellor — stood before the Bundestag and announced the most profound about-face in German foreign and security policy since World World II.

“In view of the turning point Putin’s aggression represents”, he said, “our standard is: What is needed to secure peace in Europe will get done”. A €100 billion defense fund for this year alone, twice the size of the annual military budget. Massive modernisation of the arsenal, structural reform of the decrepit, poorly organised armed forces. Germany would, for the first time since WWII, send weapons into a crisis zone. From now on the budget would surpass 2% of GDP — just as a blustering Donald Trump had demanded. A few sentences transformed Germany into the world’s third largest military power in terms of expenditure, surpassing Britain and France.

MPs cheered. Some cried. Scholz had turned Germany’s understanding of itself on its head. The widespread delusion that a country of 80 million smack in the middle of the continent could remain an over-sized Switzerland died for good.

Naturally, left-wing SPD backbenchers and their Green counterparts made their outrage heard but the leadership of the two left-of-centre parties stands behind the Scholz proclamation, as does the yellow partner in the “traffic light” coalition, the pro-business FDP. Unsurprisingly, the centre-right CDU is on board.

“In less than 96 hours”, wrote Die Zeit, “the political coordinates have shifted. The SPD has thrown 30 years of foreign and security policy overboard, the Greens have finally said goodbye to pacifism, the FDP has said goodbye to austerity at all costs and to the idea that the energy transition should not cost the state anything — and the CDU has said goodbye to the certainty that 16 years of Merkel were 16 good years”.

More from this author

Angela Merkel was no saint

By Maurice Frank

This government’s central project, climate neutrality, has been derailed. The idea that Russian gas could serve as a stop-gap measure until enough renewable energy sources came online was one more shattered illusion. The Green economy minister Robert Habeck must now cobble together a path to carbon neutrality that slashes dependency on Putin’s fossil fuels. To keep the lights on, Habeck, of all people, is mulling an extension of coal and nuclear plants. Security trumps climate.

Another observable effect is a fraying of the political edges. The Right-wing populist AfD is fractured and weakened. Their previous admiration for the Russian president isn’t a good look, neither is ranting about “globalist” institutions such as the EU and Nato. Their whining about “corona dictatorship” comes off as puerile when an actual dictator starts a war.

Meanwhile, members of the small Left-wing party Die Linke, with its roots in East German communism, have also struggled to condemn Putin and suppress their anti-Nato instincts. Some still insist that the alliance’s eastern expansion is to blame for the war, but they’re getting lonelier by the day. This line of thought resonates with ever fewer Germans. As one commentator wrote: if Poland weren’t in Nato, the Russians wouldn’t stop until they reached Słubice on the German border.

More from this author

British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

A minority of Twitter leftists warn of a new German militarism and the dangers of “shifting baselines” — the implication being that a better-funded, more effective Bundeswehr could result in aggression originating from Germany itself. In the minds of such people, Germany will always have an authoritarian, bellicose core, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A dictator has spat in Germany’s face and is threatening the stability of its neighbourhood. “We have an enemy again, who turns the gaze on ourselves”, writes Nassehi, meaning Germany has finally woken to the obvious fact that it is a mature, responsible democracy firmly anchored in Europe. That neighbouring countries such as Poland celebrated Scholz’s sea change boost is significant.

A friend close to the SPD leadership explained that Scholz’s defense initiative will be deeply embedded within European structures and in coordination with Germany’s allies. It’s light years from the old German militarism.

Has Germany banished its ghosts once and for all? Was this the final milestone on its path to normality? There are grounds for scepticism. The VW plant has closed but Russian gas still flows through Nord Stream 1. One could argue that Scholz didn’t really change his mind, but was strong-armed by allies. Some point out that throwing money at the neglected Germany military won’t solve its structural problems. A writer in Berliner Zeitung says Germany’s “toxic pacifism” will rage on beneath the surface.

Ten days into the war, Germany is a changed country, no question. What another ten days could do, is anyone’s guess.

Soft-power tools are honourable and often pragmatic methods of conflict prevention and, at times, resolution. Just look at America’s Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, or the foreign aid provided today by the wealthy West to smaller and poorer nations.

However, as we are now seeing, it is deluded to conclude that evil men can be stopped by soft power alone. In the days since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been reminded of the necessity of having a well-funded and well-trained military. It has also become clear that we need to abandon our irrational energy policy, which imagines meeting Europe’s energy needs exclusively from ‘renewable’ sources.

Nevertheless, a key battlefield in the conflict playing out in Ukraine continues to be overlooked — and that is immigration policy. This is, of course, nothing new: just as soft power has been divorced from hard power, so immigration policy has been divorced from national security, even though it has been a destabilising factor in Europe for at least a decade.

Both sides of the immigration equation — the push and pull factors — dramatically affect Europe’s national security. The unyielding flow of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia remains a source of civil unease. Social cohesion and national identity have become incendiary issues in polling stations across Europe. Intolerance towards immigrants is high and extremist parties remain popular. At the same time, radical Islamist extremism and the constant threat of terrorism still linger.

Add to this the burden on local resources — on housing, healthcare, education and policing — and it’s hardly surprising that the status quo exacerbates resentment towards immigrants, while undermining trust in the political class. It is no accident that Putin and other adversaries have been using misinformation and disinformation to support anti-immigrant parties and other groups on the far-Right.

More from this author

We deserve better than these weaklings

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

What is less well-known, however, is how immigrants have become a tool of war — one that is increasingly deployed by cruel, inhumane autocrats such as Putin.

Since the start of this conflict, at least half a million Ukrainians have crossed into neighbouring countries; according to the EU’s latest warnings, that figure could rise to seven million. To put that in perspective, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, roughly 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. But even then, there was no exodus to the EU; the refugees simply relocated to other regions within the country.

This time, however, it’s unclear if Putin will leave any Ukrainian territory for them to flee to. And make no mistake: this is all part his plan. Indeed, Putin has become the world’s leading advocate of hybrid warfare. In 2016, US General Philip Breedlove, Head of Nato forces in Europe, recognised this, warning that “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponising migration from Syria”.

Yet in recent years, it’s been in Libya that Putin has pursued his most fierce — and secret — weaponisation of migrants. There, Russia exploits its increased presence by collaborating with militias to foster and facilitate crippling migrant flows into Europe. By deploying Russia’s ‘private’ military companies in the region, Putin all but controls the most significant routes for mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe — and therefore has the power to cripple economies and sow societal division.

Take Khalifa Hafar, the commander of the Libyan National Army — a nominal national force that is really an amalgamation of local militias. Hafar is currently trying to rebrand himself as Libya’s next President, but in reality is nothing more than a Russian-speaking warlord who benefits from the support of at least 1,500 Russian mercenaries associated with the Wagner Group.

More from this author

Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

What would drive Putin to dirty his hands in the chaotic, tribal world of North African politics? As Mark Grey, Adjunct Professor at the U.S. Army War College, has observed: “Large tribes control vast territories in the region, operate beyond the control of nation states and ignore borders. Just as Italy pays militias to curtail migration from western Libya, Russia can pay tribes and militias to just as easily encourage and facilitate migration as control it.”

The impact this has on the West must not be ignored; and neither must the failure of our leaders to recognise it. Europe needs immigrants and immigrants need Europe. Years ago, as this mutual need became apparent, European leaders could have developed a rational system to manage the issue. Instead, they found themselves unable to escape an ideological impasse: one moment, they issued virtue-signalling declarations of solidarity and compassion for immigrants; the next, they made panic-stricken concessions to populist parties. How else should we characterise Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 wild reception of Syrian refugees, followed just a year later by her €6 billion EU deal with the President of Turkey after he threatened to open the floodgates?

For too long, Europe has maintained a contradictory stance towards mass migration from poor countries, lurching from compassionate rhetoric about asylum seekers to the development of an elaborate and ineffective system of migration management. But as the recent days — indeed, the recent years — have shown, with the advent of hybrid warfare and the abuse of migrant flows as a weapon to blackmail Europe, it is time not only to review minor features of the existing system but to overhaul the entire framework.

What needs to happen is not easy, but it is clear. Some of the measures we should take have dominated discussion for years, but are yet to garner widespread political support. For instance, for all the outcry they inspire in Western countries, border walls and fences do have their uses. When used appropriately, they not only deter crime syndicates and people traffickers, but also aggressive autocrats such as Putin. If EU countries had a functioning immigration system, the Kremlin’s use of hybrid warfare would be rendered ineffective.

More crucially, we need to simplify the international and European treaties that govern migration flows and those seeking asylum. And as the current crisis demonstrates, this requires the West to integrate immigration policy into the broader national security agenda. It should be an issue for the defence departments, rather than interior and justice civil servants. Whether we like it or not, mass immigration is now a military weapon. And it should be treated as such.

Suggested reading

Test article

By John Lichfield

Obviously, this won’t be remedied overnight. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created a unique opportunity to question all the sacred cows of European policy. Four short months ago, it was unthinkable to have a serious conversation in Germany about the retention of nuclear energy. Now, faced with the stark reality that energy is inseparable from national security and the foolishness of having to depend on Putin, we are witnessing a welcome change in attitude.

The same must happen with immigration policy. Yes, there must always be a place for compassion — and it’s encouraging to see the EU and UK welcome Ukrainian refugees where they can. But if we really want to incapacitate Putin, that won’t be enough.

Immigration is now one of his most effective weapons. It may once have been unthinkable to overhaul international and European treaties to address this. But a new and harsh reality dictates otherwise.

This was in striking contrast to her public image during the Greek debt crisis, when cartoonists depicted her in SS uniform resplendent with swastika. But those cartoons were for the masses only. The European political elites, all of them, happily voted with the Merkel government when it came to disciplining the Greek dissidents. They were as eager as the Germans to keep European monetary union alive. Merkel has left Europe to a political class to whom she has not only taught the trickery of two-level politics — national and supranational — but whom she has also, in part, brought to or kept in office. It is a political class that has bet its future on a Europe built around German hegemony.

In many parts of Europe, it is still considered a pleasant surprise to see a German who is soft-spoken with good manners, a wide heart and a big purse, smiling rather than shouting. This proved useful in her rise to becoming informal ruler of the continent. It also helped that she was a woman — someone who could be pictured as a nourishing mother as opposed to a punishing father.

But other things were more instrumental in her rise. When she took office, in 2005, major developments had recently taken place, and major decisions made, which certainly eased her career progression. In the Nineties, centrist political parties, of the Right as well as the Left, had been programmatically emaciated by the advance of neoliberal globalisation. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been unable to reconcile ever more rapid capitalist modernisation with its traditional commitment to paternalist social protection. This left an ideological vacuum that would give her unprecedented room far for manoeuvre once she became leader.

It also helped that her main rival, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was breaking apart over the Third Way social policy reforms of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder — in particular Agenda 2010, which cut unemployment benefits and increased the pressure on people to accept job offers. Not only did the Agenda weaken the SPD for decades, but it spared Merkel, once she had ascended to the chancellorship, from having to implement the neoliberal reforms she had promised as opposition leader. Instead, she could allow the SPD, her partner in three coalition governments, to try to work out reforms to the Schröder reform, thereby reminding its constituents that it was responsible for policies they hated. Merkel, for her part, could claim for herself rising levels of employment and the balancing of the federal budget.

Rising employment and declining fiscal deficits weren’t just a result of the Agenda, though. Merkel’s third and most important long-term advantage was the work of the European heads of government who had created European Monetary Union in the Nineties. It is worth remembering that the common currency was a project not of German but of French and, to a lesser extent, Italian elites, who had hoped that a currency shared with Germany would force neoliberal restructuring in their own countries while protecting them from German financial competition. As it turned out, the former goal was defeated by domestic opposition, while the latter evolved into a Plan B: the southern member states would extract monetary and fiscal policy concessions from Germany in exchange for remaining in the union.

Suggested reading

When will Germany grow up?

By Katja Hoyer

For Germany, on the other hand, the monetary union was an economic godsend. It made the country the growth pole of Europe, the centre of a liberal economic empire. It also firmly established the preservation of the euro as Germany’s paramount national interest.

Unlike others in Germany, Merkel understood early on that preserving the monetary union would require side payments to its losers. These did not necessarily have to be financial but could be symbolic, for instance by occasionally allowing her colleagues on the European Council to outvote Germany. At home, Merkel had to overcome opposition to what the German public was always prone to see as excessive concessions to profligate southerners. To avoid conflict between domestic and European political needs, most side payments, especially the more expensive ones, had to be made under the counter, through complex operations deep in the bowels of that monster technocracy, the European Central Bank.

This does not mean that there were no tough negotiations on the magnitude of compensations due. Merkel tried to keep the price Germany had to pay as low as possible. But she also understood that the cost had to be sufficient to keep the currency union together. The transfers did not need to solve the continent’s structural imbalances. Their main purpose was political: keeping pro-EU governments in power by helping them fend off challenges from anti-euro parties and movements; providing them with the material and ideological resources to reward their supporters and thereby preserve ‘political stability’.

Very early in her tenure, Merkel realised that the central concern of German policy in Europe had to be defending monetary union against the disappointment of its original proponents. This required keeping alive the impression that the EU was run, if not by all members alike, then at least by a French-German “tandem”, and not Germany alone. Four French Presidents — Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron — had to be reassured on this score.

Suggested reading

British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

French aspirations for ‘European sovereignty’ — meaning French sovereignty extended to Europe as a whole — and for a shared ‘strategic culture’  —meaning the EU adopting French military doctrine and ambition — Merkel could satisfy only symbolically. In reality, German national security remained firmly in the hands of the United States and NATO. To keep both the US and France happy, German foreign policy had to rely on rhetorical obfuscation and double-dealing, disciplines in which Merkel excelled. German troops were sent to both Afghanistan and Mali, and would have had to be sent to other places as well had the government not had the excuse that under the postwar German constitution, out-of-area military missions have to be formally approved by the Bundestag.

Domestically, Merkel’s main project was to build a hegemonic neo-bourgeois political centre, with her party in the driver’s seat. Early on, she decided on the Greens as ideal partners who could inject urgently needed new blood and close the generation gap from which older parties suffer in a world of fast cultural change. In the end, however, the alliance with the Greens failed spectacularly. Shutting down nuclear energy after Fukushima and later phasing out coal pleased the Greens but raised the question of how to secure a growing energy supply. The answer was making Germany dependent on Russian gas, to the dismay of the United States. Russian gas also is resented by the Greens, with their “value-driven” idea of foreign policy. While she went along with Western sanctions against Russia over its re-possession of the Crimean Peninsula, Merkel at the same time founded her energy and climate change policy on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a project that her Green friends want to abort, as do her French friends, who are eager to sell their nuclear-produced electricity to Germany.

Similar difficulties and domestic-international complexities arose after Merkel’s decision to open the German borders for one million mostly Syrian refugees in 2015. While her refugee policy once more endeared her to the Greens and the new middle class, it divided her party and reinvigorated a then declining Alternative für Deutschland. It also forced her to negotiate an agreement on behalf of the EU with the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, in which Europe paid him considerable sums of money to act as the EU’s gatekeeper, preventing Syrian and other refugees from crossing into Europe. Also to control immigration, Germany insisted on a quota system in Europe for future refugees, knowing full well that it would be unacceptable to most other member states as it would involve a de facto Europeanisation of the German asylum regime. The result was passionate opposition in Eastern Europe and a split in the EU just as in the German electorate.

Suggested reading

Angela Merkel was no saint

By Maurice Frank

Merkel’s migration policy was one reason why the recent Green advance was accompanied by a decline of Merkel’s own party such that in the 2021 election, the CDU/CSU became too small to form a successor government. In the end, the neo-bourgeois centre that Merkel had intended to build was to consist of a three-party coalition under the leadership of the SPD and a chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who as Merkel’s finance minister had done his best to learn from her. As the new government was sworn in, the outgoing chancellor was so alienated from her party that she seemed quite content to see her office turned over to a Social Democrat.

For her successors, Merkel’s will be a hard act to follow. Her manner of leadership by evasion — deferring decisions, delaying moments of truth, papering over conflicts with ambiguous rhetoric, substituting opportunistic improvisation for strategy and suppressing uncertainty by a public display of optimistic equanimity — requires specific personal skills. The same holds for Merkel’s extraordinary ability to get away with abruptly reversing decisions and making conflicting promises to different constituencies. From Merkel, two or three generations of European statesmen and stateswomen learned that leadership in the crises of today means nothing more and nothing less than making yourself appear optimistic enough to satisfy public desires for public displays of optimism.

Now, however, this may no longer be enough. Merkel’s equivocally friendly stoicism is unlikely to serve the next German government, or a German Europe, as well as it served her. During Merkel’s tenure, there was always enough money around to keep most of her partners reasonably happy — enough slack, in cash and time, for making the incompatible appear compatible. That this is no longer true was indicated, among other things, by the recent German coalition agreement, which could come to pass only because the parties deliberately abstained from discussing finance.

Suggested reading

Angela Merkel saved the West

By James Hawes

But financial issues will soon assert themselves whether the parties want to discuss them or not, as the monetary union and the pandemic do their work, and German domestic needs make themselves felt. Note that already before Covid struck, there was a crisis of German physical infrastructure. Moreover, the new government, unlike Merkel’s Grand Coalition, will face an opposition in CDU/CSU that it cannot exclude from public debate on principle — as Merkel and all the rest excluded the AfD. This means, among other things, that questions will be asked and have to be answered on Germany’s ability to pay to keep “Europe”, meaning the monetary union, alive by keeping pro-EU governments in control in the south. For this, the ECB will have to invent ever more extravagant methods of direct state finance, including holding interest rates down close to zero in spite of rising inflation and cutting government debt by “fiscal repression”.

The list of unresolved problems Merkel leaves behind is long. It extends from the future fiscal and monetary constitution of the eurozone to Europe’s ever-increasing public debt, the relationship of the EU and its member states to the two hostile global superpowers, the United States and China, the European and especially the German relationship to Russia, the tension between German Atlanticism and French Europeanism, the status of national sovereignty in the EU state system, the future energy supply of Western Europe, and asylum and immigration policies, national and European. More issues could be listed, each urgent, some critical, none easy to resolve.

In a few years’ time, Merkel’s tenure may be remembered as a golden era when pious wishes still helped — a time when hard decisions could still be successfully postponed, dilemmas hidden by optimistic denial and benevolent neglect, and contradictions reconciled by all sorts of pocket money, borrowed or printed. Now, by contrast, things are about to get serious.

And that greed could prove fatal. China’s “civilisation state”, deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, represents the most profound philosophical challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War. But our oligarchs choose to ignore this, preferring instead to genuflect to Beijing for financial gain.

The cost of such avarice is slowly coming into focus: China’s economy may surpass the US by as early as 2028, and by some measurements already has. Of course, China deserves credit for its remarkable performance, which is mostly thanks to the efforts of its citizens, in particular its rural migrants, the key fodder for the country’s dominant manufacturing base.

But the Middle Kingdom’s ascendency would not seem as inexorable if not for the efforts of the West’s ‘kowtow crowd’, a group of self-interested cheerleaders and enablers of China’s autocratic state. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened that the USSR would “bury” the West. China’s President Xi can count on the West burying itself.

Some of this can be traced to naivety and an underestimation of Chinese capabilities. Rather than recognising a potential threat, our political and financial elites saw a potential economic partner and huge market. China was still a poor, developing country; when welcomed into the World Trade Organisation 20 years ago, it dutifully supplied cheap products to a welcoming market. In the meantime, it was hoped that exposure to the West would create an increasingly liberal China.

Yet for at least a decade, particularly since Xi Jinping assumed control of the Communist Party, these assumptions have been proven fatally wrong. Xi and the Party have clearly made clear that their ambition is not any old seat at the table, but the one at its head.  

Given what seems a clear and present danger to the West and its East Asian allies, one would expect our ruling class to seek ways to fight back. Donald Trump may have been a blustering fool but at least he saw, and identified, the threat. President Biden, to his credit, has also proposed some steps to reinforce US competitiveness, and there is rare bipartisan consensus, including on the Left, to resist China’s hegemony.

Yet prospects for standing up to China from the White House are limited. As recently as 2019 Biden, a stalwart cog in the Washington consensus, minimised the Chinese threat to our economy, recently claiming, incredibly, that: “you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” More worrisome still has been the Biden family’s close business ties with Beijing. The somewhat dissolute Hunter, in particular, has profited hugely and gained expensive gifts working for the Chinese. Most recently, he helped a Chinese firm to corner the cobalt market, a key component in the administration’s  green energy strategy.

But kowtowing is hardly a partisan phenomenon. Prominent figures from both parties, including former GOP Speaker John Boehner, and many connected Washington think tanks receive funding from Beijing. Even members of the Bush family have cosied up to CCP apparatchiks, including one with strong ties to that country’s rising military.

Europe’s leaders, if anything, are even less committed to confronting the Chinese challenge. Some, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, seek to play the US against the Chinese civilisational challenge by treating them as moral equivalents of their long-time American allies. Meanwhile, Beijing is busily extending its presence on the continent with infrastructure investment to weak European countries such Greece, Hungary, and Romania.

Nowhere is the ineptitude of the Western policy towards China more evident than in climate change. Like its human rights record, China’s environmental footprint should be a source of embarrassment and condemnation. While the West hamstrings itself with its eco-commitments, China, not mandated to reduce its carbon emissions till 2030, continues to build coal plants to maintain its industrial engine. By 2030, when China will be able to shift to nuclear and other alternatives, the West will be effectively de-industrialised, and hopelessly dependent.

But such dependency is nothing new. For decades American companies have been handing Beijing the basis for economic hegemony: since 1990 US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned from under $10 billion annually to $419 billion last year. China’s ratio of imports to exports was four to one in 2018. This has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — while costing an estimated 3.4 million job losses in the US since 2001.

Meanwhile, these corporate kowtowers actively promote China’s model. Apple, for instance, props up and profits from China’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Acting as if it were its own country, Apple has essentially negotiated its own $275 billion deal with China, promising to keep production there while assisting with the country’s unhidden goal is to supplant the West as a tech leader.

For its part, Wall Street, even amid the threat of government interference, plays its part the kowtow crowd. Ray Dalio, founder of giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and self-promoting author, has dismissed China’s repression of its Uighur population as the result of a “sacrosanct” desire for sovereignty. Even powerful figures such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan have decided to publicly apologise after upsetting the CCP. It’s in their interest, after all. Xi knows fully well that Western investment bankers and tech companies will do his bidding, as long as they get what Mafia dons may call “a taste”. China may be miffed if US diplomats boycott the 2022 winter games, but they can be sure that the corporations and investment bankers will likely be there, heads bowed on the floor.

All of this is made even more humiliating by the fact that China’s rise may not be as unstoppable as its Western admirers believe. China’s economic growth rate is slowing, its bloated real estate markets are showing signs of implosion, and industrial production has slowed to the lowest level since 2004. Meanwhile, its tech and innovation sector is being pummelled by continued government crackdowns.

More serious still are demographic forces. By 2050, China is projected to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2050 it will be roughly 20% higher than that of the US; 15 years after that, according to the South China Morning Post, China’s population will be very old and about half its current size.

None of this suggests resisting China will be easy, particularly given the disposition of our rulers. But it does mean it’s possible.

That is the real tragedy of the kowtow crowd. Just as in the Thirties, their prostration only makes their adversary stronger and more confident. Inevitably, it will be the rest of us, and future generations, who pay the price.

What form did this ‘high ground’ take? According to the Harvard student who introduced her 2019 commencement speech at the Ivy League college with a litany of her good deeds: “She has passed Germany’s first minimum wage, closed Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear explosion, promoted marriage equality, led progress in tackling climate change, and opened her country to over one million refugees from the wars of the Middle East.”

Merkel’s junior coalition partners the Social Democrats would no doubt roll their eyes if they heard that; the policies listed by the Harvard student were all theirs. Take the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Merkel, a conservative, actually opposed it for all of her career, but, sensing a shift in the Zeitgeist, let it pass through parliament in 2017.

But that was typical Merkel. She always let the public mood determine her policy choices: she was the first German chancellor to receive a weekly detailed briefing on opinion research from her press department. Perhaps that’s why she was synonymous with dithering, sitting on the fence and remaining quiet on key issues — so much so that a neologism was spawned: merkeln, the Langenscheidt dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. “To Merkel” is defined as “to do nothing, make no decisions, issue no statements”.

It was not her strong convictions that endeared her with German voters. It was her lack of them. She is the opposite of a visionary; once asked what she associated with Germany, she said “well-made windows”. Not Germany’s rich cultural heritage, not its landscapes, not its football squad, not even its robust Grundgesetz (a set of basic laws put in place after the war, essentially a constitution). Far more important are its… well-sealed windows.

Suggested reading

Why Macron snubbed the EU

By Peter Franklin

So, is she really the “liberal West’s last defender”, as the New York Times would have it? Much of the ‘moral compass’ talk is based on Merkel’s momentous decision to open the German border to more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015. No doubt it was an event of historic importance that changed Germany and Europe forever. But was it really on par with Willy Brandt’s epic 1970 genuflection in Warsaw, as some have suggested? Or, as some commentators said at the time, a monumental, healing gesture that showed the world that Germany had finally shaken off its Nazi baggage and become a force for good? Not quite.

Only two months before she opened the borders, Merkel had appeared at a townhall-style event called Living Well in Germany, in which she engaged with a group of teenagers from across the country. There, Reem Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee who spoke flawless German and had stellar marks in school, expressed her fear that her family would be deported, extinguishing her dream of attending university in Germany. Without a hint of empathy, Merkel told her that if everyone like her stayed, thousands of other refugees from the Middle East and Africa would flood into Germany, something the country couldn’t cope with. When Sahwil began to cry, Merkel said: “But you’ve done really well for yourself. Let me give you a stroke.” (Something she actually did.)

When, just two months later, tens of thousands of Syrians were passing through Hungary and Austria towards Germany, Merkel first considered taking a hardline approach and mobilising thousands of police officers to secure the southern frontier. Opinion polls, however, suggested most Germans favoured a compassionate, welcoming approach. So without consulting EU partners, she opened the borders. Within days, she was shooting selfies with young Syrian men.

In a matter of months, however, Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) started to haemorrhage support. And the supposedly moral Merkel was soon replaced by her old pragmatic, shape-shifting political self. She tried to export the refugee problem to the outer borders of the EU and brokered a dodgy deal with the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stem the tide of human beings fleeing across the Aegean. To placate the conservative wing of the CDU, she spoke at a December 2016 party conference of banning the burqa — to jubilant applause. She also started to take a harder line on the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers who had committed crimes, even to war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.

Suggested reading

When will Germany grow up?

By Katja Hoyer

But for many it was too late. The massive influx of refugees was the boost the odious, far-right AfD had been waiting for. Largely thanks to Merkel’s shambolic immigration policy, the party is now a permanent fixture of German politics and commands a majority in two eastern states.

Merkel’s political contortions extend well beyond immigration, however. On climate policy, too, she has been immensely disappointing. Granted, she had a few successes on the diplomatic stage, such as persuading Russia’s Vladimir Putin to sign up to the Paris Agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing Germany’s climate footprint, her governments’ actions have been woefully half-hearted. Following a tiny slump during the pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions are up again, and it looks unlikely that Germany will hit its target of a 65% drop in emissions from 1990 levels.

Meanwhile, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Merkel rushed to fast track Germany’s plan to drop nuclear power. Yet renewables haven’t picked up enough to fill in the gap in power production. Instead, Merkel has pushed for the Nord Stream pipeline (admittedly initiated by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now even sits on the operator’s board) through the Baltic Sea, enabling Germany to pipe in Russian gas directly without paying fees to those pesky middlemen such as Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Did her moral compass slide off deck?

And then, as always in Germany, there is das Auto. Successive Merkel governments have been slavishly beholden to the car industry. How else are we to explain Dieselgate, where it took the US authorities — and not the corrupt or incompetent German regulators — to reveal that Volkswagen was installing software that enabled its cars to cheat during emissions testing. Sales of German cars fell briefly. But few heads rolled.

Instead, Merkel merkelled: she held ‘diesel summits’ at which the hitherto extremely profitable carmakers — the perpetrators — begged for and received mountains of cash in the form of subsidies and government-funded customer incentives to prop up demand for electric, petrol and — yep — diesel cars of the slightly cleaner variety.

Suggested reading

Angela Merkel saved the West

By James Hawes

But Dieselgate was, for the most part, unexceptional. The Merkel years were defined by scandals of incompetence and corruption, none of which, incredibly, stuck to the chancellor herself. She had a knack for outsourcing difficult decisions to commissions, for delegating hot button issues to her foot soldiers. It was always easy for the press to point a finger to one of her flailing ministers. She remained aloof from the mudslinging — while working on her ‘moral compass’ act with earnest speeches and high-profile international negotiations.

Yes, she was Germany’s first female leader, and the first chancellor from the East. But the fact that she was a protestant pastor’s daughter in a communist country — a tale of humble origins spun in every English-language profile — didn’t make her the deeply moral politician so many made her out to be. Rather, during the Trump years, when it felt that the world was being taken over by blustering male populists, her plodding, unflashy style made her stand out. Against that backdrop, her measured mediocrity was mistaken for a moral virtue.

That probably isn’t what Obama had in mind when he spoke of her saintly principles. But let’s not forget that even saints are only human.

But, although it seems to have slipped the minds of the EU’s finance ministers at their meeting yesterday in Brussels, the truth is that the scope of the bloc’s support package has been wildly overblown. The IMF puts the EU’s discretionary fiscal stimulus at a paltry 3.8% of GDP — a figure dwarfed by the massive discretionary fiscal stimulus of 25.5% of GDP in the US.

The same chasm between narrative and reality can be seen with the much-vaunted Europe-wide “recovery fund” known as Next Generation EU (NGEU). Despite the fanfare, it amounts to barely 5% of the EU’s GDP. What’s more, the funds will be disbursed over the course of six years, resulting in, at best, a fiscal expansion of around 1% of GDP on average between 2021 and 2024. And that’s compared to a GDP loss for the EU as a whole of around 15% just in 2020.

Predictably, the funds come with very strict troika-like conditions attached. They are conditional on compliance with the European Commission’s infamous country-specific recommendations, which in the past have consistently demanded that governments cut public spending — especially on social expenditure (particularly pensions), healthcare and unemployment benefits. This is ultimately what the NGEU is all about: increasing Brussels’s control over the budgetary policies of member states and strengthening the EU’s regime of technocratic and authoritarian control. It’s the EU doing what the EU does best.

So overall we can say that the pandemic has not resulted in any radical rethinking of policy at the European level. Neither has it resulted in any structural change. Indeed, the old fiscal rules are set to be reinstated in 2023. Even though there’s much talk of “reforming the EU’s fiscal rules”, the truth is that everyone knows that serious treaty reform is off the table — as Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice president of the European Commission, has repeatedly stated.

Suggested reading

Ireland's Brexit blackmail

By John Lloyd

It’s not just the opposition of the so-called frugal countries — the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, the Baltics and Austria. Anyone who expects a change of heart from the new German government is also bound to be disappointed. Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel’s successor, is, as Wolfgang Münchau has noted, “a staunch fiscal conservative, on a par with his predecessors, Wolfgang Schäuble and Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat behind the debt brake”.

Moreover, regardless of who takes over Jens Weidmann’s role at the Bundesbank, growing inflationary pressures in Germany — in September, inflation hit a 29-year high of 4.1% — mean that fiscal hawks will easily gain the upper hand in the debate. Regardless of the actual cause of inflation (which is largely a result of the massive supply chain disruptions happening around the world), German fiscal hawks will blame it on overspending — with cuts being the only solution.

So, all things considered, we can expect a return of austerity to Europe in the near future. Indeed, it is already taking form. Mario Draghi’s Italy is a case in point. In the current debate, the EU’s most indebted country is often presented as a champion of flexibility and European fiscal reform. However, the reality is quite different. Italy’s latest budget report forecasts a huge deficit reduction — from 10% to 4% of GDP (more than 100 billion euros) in little over a year. Italy’s age of austerity, then, seems far from over.

Suggested reading

Europe's war on sex

By Debbie Hayton

A return of austerity to Europe as a whole would be devastating, especially given that many countries are still recovering from the post-2008 austerity shock therapy. That experience didn’t just prove to be a colossal failure in economic terms but also led to nothing less than a social and humanitarian catastrophe, particularly in those countries that were subject to the “economic adjustment programmes” (EAPs) demanded by the EU-led troika: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy (which was never officially in an EAP but saw the imposition of EAP-like policies by former European commissioner Mario Monti, who came to power through an EU-orchestrated “soft coup”).

Numerous reports over the years have confirmed that the budget cuts and tax hikes implemented in these countries disproportionately hit the poor and are directly responsible for a dramatic rise in inequality and unemployment levels (especially among the youth), as well as rates of suicide, poverty (including child poverty), severe material deprivation, homelessness, social exclusion and distress. Even a report from a few years back by the European Parliament’s own employment committee claimed that “the austerity policies and the structural reforms imposed in the troika countries have led to a real social tsunami of massive unemployment (it has tripled in some countries) especially among young people, the closure of hundreds of thousands of companies, mainly SMEs; and a sharp rise in poverty and social exclusion”. These policies have in many respects undermined the very material bases of democracy, leading to social and economic instability.

In recent years, some countries have introduced measures to cushion the effects of austerity. In Italy, for example, the Five Star Movement-League government that emerged from the 2018 elections — which was first and foremost a rebuke of the parties that had administered the disastrous austerity policies — introduced two major policies that went in that direction: a “citizenship income”, a form of income supplement for poor households, and a pension reform lowering the retirement age.

More from this author

Italy's vaccine passport power grab

By Thomas Fazi

Both those policies are now under threat from the techno-authoritarian government led by Draghi, who is, let us not forget, one of the chief architects of the EU’s post-2008 austerity framework. A new reform raising once again the pension age has already been announced, and the ranks of those in the Government calling for the abolition of the “citizenship income” continue to grow.

This would leave millions of families with no support whatsoever, in an economy that has been ravaged by 18 months of pandemic. But punishing the poorest and weakest members of society for crises they have not caused — first the financial crisis, now the Covid crisis — has long been standard policy, in Italy and elsewhere. As the saying goes, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

How so? Because she has saved her one true love: the West. The real, European West, that is, not the “West” of wild, freebooting Ayn Rand-style fantasies which burst out when Communism fell (remember those “Ulster Scots” values which Anglosphere scribes so adored in the early 1990s? Remember Steve Bannon and his “we are all Leninists” ravings?). She understood what the West really means.

How could she not, with her life story? Unlike almost everyone else in East Germany, she was there not because of bad luck and barbed wire. Her father, a pastor, moved of his own free will from Hamburg to the East shortly after her birth in 1954, becoming a senior figure in the Lutheran Church there. This is less surprising than it sounds because the Lutherans, with their strict demarcation of worldly and spiritual realms (meaning that in practice they never seriously criticise the state) have been welcome helpmeets to rulers in eastern Germany ever since the Teutonic Knights embraced Luther, broke with Rome and founded their very own new state: Prussia.

The Wall went up when she was seven. She must have grown up knowing that she could have been a West German. As a distinctly talented young scientist working within the insane ideological bounds of Marxism-Leninism, she must have felt every day, directly, the effects of Papa Merkel’s deluded utopianism. At 35, she lived the triumph of the West not only as simple, literal freedom but also as mental freedom, at last, from the structural mendacity into which millennial ideas inevitably descend.

She swiftly embraced the CDU, that quintessentially western German party, directly descended from the Catholic Centre Party which had been founded specifically to oppose Bismarck’s Prussianisation of the West. It understands, and she understood, that the historical uniqueness of “the West” is not untrammelled, individual “freedom” but the principle that deals are cut and power shared between great institutions, neither of which will ever yield total domination to the other. This paradigm — the ultimate guarantee of freedom — goes back to 754AD, when Europe was rebooted from the Dark Ages in the great bargain of St Denis: the Frankish dynasty got the sanction of Rome, while the Church got worldly lands and Germanic muscle to defend it. Ever since, call it what you will — Church and State, King and Parliament, Checks and Balances — the principle stands against every heady fantasy, Left or Right, of some perfect society.

This is the key to Merkel’s instinct for seeking out the centre ground. She realised fast and early what all sane people eventually learn: that noisy idealism is not a virtue, but a curse, and that quiet, deal-making realism is not the absence of conviction, but its pure expression. No political lesson could be more different from the dire mix of grandstanding in the moment and backstabbing in the dark which our own Big Beasts learn in the gilded testosterone snake-pits of Eton and the Oxford Union.

Yes, she has been very lucky. It is almost comical now to recall the way that under Helmut Kohl, Germany was regularly written off by triumphant Anglosphere pundits as a dead weight on the European economy and even (declared The Economist in June 1999), “the sick man of Europe”. All that was changed by the Social Democratic/Green governments of 1998-2005, who modernised things in a thoroughly Blairite way (they even called their new, and far less generous, social security offices “Job Centres”, in English, by way of blatant homage).

Suggested reading

British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

And yes, she made breathtaking mistakes. Her 2011 decision to close all of Germany’s nuclear power stations in the wake of Fukushima was either a kneejerk reaction, or a cunning plan to win over Germany’s Green voters. The need to replace nuclear led her to keep filthy brown coal power stations open and to support the Nordstrom gas pipeline which feeds German industry’s maw directly from Russia. As a result, Germany is incredibly vulnerable to energy blackmail from Moscow, Putin’s regime has been mightily succoured, and the average German citizen now produces getting on for twice as much atmospheric carbon as the average Frenchman or Brit.

When she unilaterally decided in autumn 2015 to open Germany (and thereby, in practice, Europe) to mass immigration from the Middle East and elsewhere, one can only imagine that she was trying to recapture the moral high ground from the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, who had been telling the world that in the wake of the financial crash she was acting like some kind of economic Nazi (images of Merkel sporting a Hitler moustache were seen all over southern Europe and even in Ireland).

As the rest of Europe predictably failed to follow her high-minded, high-handed lead, Germany seemed for a while to be tottering on the edge of serious public discontent: just think back to 2016 and 2017, when gloomy liberals and delighted Trump-and-Brexit boosters were both intoning that the AfD was going to break out from its base in the old East Germany and tear into the CDU. Some in Merkel’s party itself were proclaiming that the only way to survive was to “close off the right flank” (die rechte Flanke schliessen) — i.e., adopt the AfD’s policies.

More from this author

How Germany came in from the cold

By James Hawes

History must have been in the mood to make things pretty obvious for once, since it has given us the most perfect mathematical example of how, and how not, to deal with loud-mouthed populism. In 2017, the AfD won 12.6% of the national vote. That is, of course, exactly the same as Ukip won here in 2015. And look now at the tale of these two conservative parties.

The spineless David Cameron felt besieged by the people who eminent Tory predecessors had called “bastards” (John Major) and like “some demented Marxist sect” (Douglas Hurd) — and who he himself allegedly called “swivel-eyed loons”. So he rolled over and gave them the referendum he didn’t want himself, and which was the only way they would ever be able to enact their anti-EU, Anglosphere fantasies. He was blithely sure he would win, and hence become unchallengeable.

The stout Angela Merkel thought otherwise: I have twice been told by a German insider (I can’t name him, but he is undoubtedly of the status to have been the eyewitness he says he was) that at the 2015 G7 meeting at Schloss Elmau, Merkel, Cameron’s best friend in Europe, personally begged him not to hold his utterly needless referendum and “throw away 800 years of parliamentary rule”. But what? Have patience? See things quietly through? Make a rational, cross-party deal for what the vast majority of MPs on both sides agreed was the good of the country? Not he. If Angela Merkel had been Germany’s David Cameron, God alone knows where we would now be.

Suggested reading

The German coronavirus mystery

By Tom Chivers

Instead, she stuck to her guns. She toughed it out. She refused point blank to trim her course in order to pick up AfD voters, or ever to countenance any form of coalition with the populist Right, even when siren voices urged it. The result is that the AfD, far from making any further advances into the old German West, is retreating even in its eastern fastnesses.

She may have made her mistakes, but when the healing sleep of time (as Goethe called it in Faust) has washed away her quotidian errors, she will be remembered as the leader who carried the CDU, not the other way around, and who saved the West in its hour of trial. And as she leaves the stage, irrespective of which coalition Germany ends up with, she will be able to say, like a German Mr Chips, “I thought I heard you — one of you — saying it was a pity Mutti never had any children … eh? … But I have, you know … I have … look, thousands of them – and all of them decent Western Centrists!”

Ave et vale, Angela Merkel, and thank God you were there when we needed you.

Just as Boris Johnson represents everything that British remainers hate about Britain, Angela Merkel embodies everything they love about Germany — the country they regard as the grown-up in the room.

Her fans do have half-a-point. Merkel is the epitome of Germany’s role in the world. But as we’ll see, that’s not something to be proud of. Indeed, the closer you look at her record, the less there is to show for it. 

There’s no denying her staying-power. When she first became Chancellor, in 2005, her opposite numbers in Britain and America were Tony Blair and George W Bush. She certainly hasn’t lacked for time.

Or look at it this way: just one Chancellor (Gerhard Schröder) separates Merkel’s Chancellorship from that of her mentor, Helmut Kohl. However, there were five Prime Ministers between Boris Johnson and Kohl’s contemporary, Margaret Thatcher (and five Presidents between Joe Biden and Ronnie Reagan). Is it any wonder that Germany’s leaders look down upon their allies with a certain Teutonic superiority?

Suggested reading

The walls are going up across Europe

By Aris Roussinos

With so many terms as Chancellor one might assume Merkel to be a political genius — an election-winning machine in the mould of a Blair or Thatcher. But that’s not the case. In fact, she’s bungled one election after another. 

The first one was 2002. As leader of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel should have been the centre-Right’s candidate for Chancellor. But instead she was out-manoeuvred by Edmund Stoiber — the leader of the CSU (the CDU’s Bavarian sister party).

She had to wait until 2005 to get her first shot at the top job — and she very nearly blew it. A lead in the polls was lost after loose talk about introducing a flat tax. Instead of increasing her party’s vote share as expected, she reduced it. She was only saved by the fact that the incumbent Chancellor — Schröder — lost more votes that she did. 

It was a shattering experience for Merkel — but it taught her two things: Firstly, never to be interesting again. And, secondly, that she didn’t have to succeed in order to win, she just had to do less worse than her rivals. 

And so she became Chancellor — but only by forming a “Grand Coalition” with the Social Democrats. At the next election in 2009, her vote share went down again. Luckily for her, her coalition partners (and main electoral opponents) were pulverised. Moving swiftly on, she swapped them for a new coalition partner — the Free Democrats.

Her second term in office was dominated by the Eurozone crisis. That was when the rest of the EU realised who was in charge. The so-called ‘PIIGS’ — Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain — were forced into austerity measures that made George Osborne’s budgets look positively Keynesian.

Populist protest movements began to stir all over Europe. But Merkel didn’t mind. Her hardline policies were popular at home and at the next election in 2013, she scored her one clear victory — the highest share of the vote for the CDU since the days of Kohl. Yet, as per usual, her allies didn’t fare so well. In fact, the Free Democrats crashed out of the Bundestag altogether.

Shortly before he became Prime Minister, David Cameron asked Angela Merkel what it was like to lead a coalition. “The little party always gets smashed”, she observed through crocodile tears. In 2013, Merkel needed a new little party, having broken the old one. In practice, that meant another Grand Coalition with Social Democrats.

Suggested reading

When will Germany grow up?

By Katja Hoyer

And so we come to Merkel’s calamitous third term in office — and in particular her chaotic mishandling of the refugee crisis. The Syrian civil war wasn’t her fault, of course. Nor is there anything wrong with helping refugees. However, suddenly flinging open Germany’s borders (and then slamming them shut again) was entirely the wrong way of going about it. She destabilised politics at home and abroad — while providing a massive encouragement to the people smugglers.

In the 2017 German general election, the CSU was punished with its worst result since the 1950s and the Social Democrats with their worst result since the 1930s. They still had enough seats to cobble together a not-so-Grand Coalition, but the populist AfD was left as the largest opposition party.

So, with the exception of 2013, Merkel has never received a ringing endorsement from the German electorate. She’s just been in the best position to pick up the pieces of her own political failures.

Then again, holding together a broken system is what she’s all about. That’s not just in Germany, but across Europe — where the system in question is the single currency.

German leaders — and Merkel is no exception — love to preach fiscal responsibility. They’re in a strong position to do so: Germany’s record of balanced budgets compares well to the spiralling debts of other nations. 

The bit that’s left unsaid, however, is that German rectitude is built upon a mercantilist scam of continental proportions. The Eurozone is a distorting mirror whose effect is to make German exports permanently cheaper than they should be and those of weaker economies more expensive. Add to that the trade barriers erected around the Single Market (but removed within it) and German exporters can hardly fail.

The trade imbalance forces Germany’s partners into debt — and thus dependency upon the European Central Bank, conveniently headquartered in Frankfurt. Right how, the deficits of countries like Italy and Spain are entirely financed by ECB bond purchases — which means they must do as they’re told. 

Merkel did not design the Eurozone. She inherited the system from her predecessors. Nevertheless, during her Chancellorship, Germany has exploited its position to reach a level of economic and political dominance that is, if not unprecedented, unusual for having been achieved through peaceful means.  

Very few German politicians are willing to say any of this out loud. One of them is Sahra Wagenknecht, an outlier even within her own Left Party. She has accused her country of “abusing a highly dangerous, half-hegemonic position.”

“Half-hegemonic” is exactly right. Germany dominates, but it doesn’t lead. Under Merkel, Germany’s power has been used not for reform but to embed the status quo — no matter how difficult a position this places her friends in. 

Suggested reading

Europe is waiting for its Napoleon

By Peter Franklin

She is, for instance, directly responsible for Brexit. By refusing to give David Cameron any concession on free movement of people across borders she doomed the Remain campaign to defeat. For her, the theoretical framework of the “four freedoms” was more important than the real world difficulties of an English-speaking nation that was wide open to the impact of uncontrolled immigration. 

Another failure of leadership is Europe’s security. When Donald Trump was elected President, the New York Times breathlessly proclaimed Merkel the “the liberal’s West’s last defender”. Really? Her and whose army? Certainly not the sub-par German military, nor the fabled European Army that Merkel paid lip service to but never had any intention of paying for. Meanwhile Trump has come and gone, and America is still defending Europe’s borders.

Germany’s main contribution to Europe’s security during the Merkel years has been to undermine it. On the one hand Germany joins in with ritual denunciations of Russian and Chinese aggression, but on the other enthusiastically pursues lucrative trading relationships with both regimes. 

There’s no better example of this than the Nord Stream gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. The route is specifically chosen to bypass Russia’s vulnerable neighbours, thus weakening their economic and strategic positions at a time of growing tension. Merkel wasn’t responsible for the first of these pipelines, but it was her government that doubled down with Nord Stream 2, in the face of bitter opposition from Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. 

Germany wouldn’t be so dependent on Russian fossil fuel imports if it had made more progress on decarbonising its economy. For a while this was a policy area on which Germany did, for once, take the lead. Merkel went out of her way to identify herself with the issue, becoming known as the Klimatkanzlerin (“Climate Chancellor”). 

But that went out the window when, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, she caved in to a crazy plan to phase out Germany’s existing nuclear power stations. Not even Japan, where the disaster actually happened, went that far. By prioritising the end of nuclear over the end of coal, Germany will continue spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere until 2038. 

It is now the United Kingdom that leads the world’s biggest economies on this issue — and Boris Johnson who’ll preside over the closure of the last British coal-fired power station in just two years time. 

Aside from global warming, Merkel has bequeathed two final gifts to the world. The first is Ursula von der Leyen — the deeply unimpressive defence minister who Merkel installed as President of European Commission. It was a foolish appointment, as made clear in the shambles of the vaccine procurement programme.

Merkel’s other parting shot is Armin Laschet, her chosen successor as leader of the CDU and candidate for Chancellor. This is a man is so uninspiring that German voters have turned to the dying Social Democrats in desperation. 

The CDU, meanwhile, is set to get its worst ever result — a verdict not just on Herr Laschet, but on 16 years of Angela Merkel. 

Earlier this week, when the White House’s press spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked about this ignominious withdrawal, she refused to concede that there was anything wrong with it: “I would say that this is now on track to be the largest airlift in US history. So no, I would not say that it is anything but a success.”

The long-term consequences of the collapse of Afghanistan will naturally take time to come into focus. But it seems unlikely that they will be associated with “success”. Already it seems inevitable that America’s enemies — in particular China — will have noted how easy it is to push around the world’s superpower. Meanwhile, America’s allies now face challenges of their own; the EU and UK now surely know that they need to be more operationally adept, capable of doing basic things like holding an airport without requiring the support of the US.

Of course, none of this can be predicted with absolute certainty. And yet I strongly suspect that there is at least one consequence that Europe can anticipate as a foregone conclusion: that, thanks to the fall of Afghanistan, in the coming months and years the West will experience a new migration challenge that it is incapable of preventing.

Throughout the last decade, the migration crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by the fact that many European governments and citizens had nothing but sympathy for the millions of immigrants — many of them from Syria — whose homelands have been destroyed by war. Indeed, when Angela Merkel steps down this year, she will largely be remembered for her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees.

Suggested reading

The walls are going up across Europe

By Aris Roussinos

Yet although there have been large numbers of Syrians among those who arrived in Europe in the past six years, Syrian refugees did not make up the bulk of the arrivals. Instead, the Syrian migrants ended up inadvertently becoming the sharp tip of the world’s migration demands. Behind them came people from a bewildering array of other countries; from across Africa, the Middle East and Far East.

Even then, Afghan refugees were certainly among them. I met many myself in the refugee camps of southern Europe. On one occasion, I spent the day with a group of Hazara Afghans, a persecuted Persian-speaking minority group. I remember one of them asking me why Syrians should be given priority over Afghans when applying for asylum in the EU. After all, he said, by that point Syria had only been at war for five years. His country had been at war for 15 years. Should that not be taken into account?

It was — and remains — an important question. One of the most complex aspects of the global migration challenge is the fact that everybody has a competing claim to asylum, and that privileging one group inevitably comes at the expense of another.

In any case, it is striking that six years ago, Germany and almost every other European country reported the same phenomenon, which was that many people said they were Syrians in order to get into Europe. However, once they were inside, very few countries were able to verify this. And for much of the general public it was enough to be told that Europe was responding to a “refugee” crisis rather than a “migrant crisis”.

Which brings us back to the situation in Afghanistan today. In the coming months and years, there will invariably be a steady flow of refugees fleeing the Taliban’s Afghanistan. The hurried nature of the American departure means that there will have been people left behind who have a credible case for asylum in the West. And as the Taliban’s rule once again reasserts itself, they will attempt to flee.

Suggested reading

Europe's guilty conscience

By Ayaan Hiris Ali

At the same time, within the West there will be a prevailing cloud of shame hanging over the way in which Afghanistan has been abandoned. NGOs and other groups will argue that we all have a moral obligation to accept refugees fleeing Afghanistan. As ever, they will not bother specifying where this obligation begins or ends. Many will be persuaded that we are in some way responsible for Afghanistan not being a thriving liberal democracy. They will be told that we are responsible for Afghanistan’s precarious humanitarian situation. And because there will be a grain of truth in this — if nothing else then because of the nature of the exit — it will be exceptionally difficult to reject those claiming to be fleeing Afghanistan.

The problem will lie, as it always does, in the details. No European country or border force has anything like the number of experts required to work out where exactly those entering Europe have come from. The dearth of language experts alone has remained unfixed since 2015. And as a result, no doubt many migrants who are not from Afghanistan will recognise the benefits of pretending that they are.

Some of this will affect America, though its geographic position makes it a less accessible destination. Europe does not have the same luxury. Indeed, one border official I spoke to last week said that the UK is already seeing an increase in the number of people crossing the English Channel claiming to be Afghan refugees. In many cases, this will be untrue. After all, if it were then they got to the UK awfully fast.

But is it so surprising that they would say such a thing? No doubt they are aware that the UK and EU feel morally sordid over the Afghan withdrawal. The smuggling gangs will certainly know this, and will advise migrants on how to use it to their advantage.

Suggested reading

Leavers were right about immigration

By Paul Embery

What will make it more complex still is that politicians and the public cannot have an honest conversation about the impact of this new migrant wave. At times of humanitarian crisis such as these, most Western Europeans do not want to hear politicians being “heartless”. But after their experience of 2015, it seems unlikely that they will want them to be too relaxed either.

The British public, for instance, currently believes that it is their moral duty to take in refugees from Afghanistan. But I suspect that feeling will not last indefinitely. It will take years for us to know how many Afghans decide to flee to Europe. It seems likely, though, that while a significant number will come from Afghanistan, an even more significant number will arrive pretending to be Afghans. And once they see Europe welcoming these migrants with open arms, others will likely follow.

There can be little doubt that those concerned about the safety of Afghanistan’s refugees are well-intentioned. But that doesn’t mean those good intentions won’t be exploited. And when that happens, neither European citizens nor European governments will be capable of dealing with the consequences.

The country’s Westernised middle classes, centred on Kabul, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Shia Hazara, who played a central role in the 2015 migrant crisis, are unlikely to try their chances under Taliban rule, as long as the door to Europe remains open. Already, Afghans make up 42% of the refugees and migrants living in squalid conditions on Greece’s eastern island camps, perhaps an even larger proportion than they did in 2015 when the large presence of Afghan Hazaras was dramatically underreported in the West, distracted by the Syria crisis, despite Afghans constituting a major portion of the migratory flow, including 2/3rds of Sweden’s 2015 arrivals.

But in any case, the Europe of 2021 is not the Europe of 2015, and Europe’s leaders have no appetite for a return of the political turmoil that followed Merkel’s experiment with open borders. Distracted by Brexit and imported American culture wars, Britain’s remaining pro-EU contingent have neglected to follow the developing consensus on the continent, where the hard line on migration for which Viktor Orbán was lambasted by liberal commentators back in 2015 has now entered the political mainstream. 

When asked whether Germany had a duty to open the country’s doors to Afghan migration, even Merkel herself recently responded that “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in”. Instead she encouraged, rather unrealistically, a dialogue with the Taliban so “that people can live as peacefully as possible in the country”. In neighbouring Austria, Chancellor Kurz’s centre-right/Green coalition has responded to the surge in arrivals on its eastern borders with the deployment of the army and angry protests that European migration policy has “failed”, with the country’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer complaining that “we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” and that “it cannot be the case that Austria and Germany are solving the Afghanistan problem for the EU.”

The Austrian government has decisively swung towards the Central European approach of hardened borders and expedited returns to countries of origin, with Kurz stressing that he would not halt deportations to Afghanistan, as Sweden and Finland already have, a reflection of a public mood darkened by recent high-profile crimes carried out by Afghan asylum seekers. Like centre-left Denmark, which is accelerating both its return of refugees to Syria and the search, apparently along with the UK, of third-party countries in Africa willing to host refugees and migrants on its behalf, the new mood in Austria is not the result of the populist Right coming to power, but instead of centrist parties adopting solutions that were in 2015 considered the sole preserve of the radical Right.

Suggested reading

Europe's guilty conscience

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

As in Spain, where the next government is likely to be a coalition between the centre-right PP and the radical right Vox, in Italy a coalition government between the centre-Right and the far-Right looms in the wings. Indeed, Salvini’s Lega is now so outflanked on its Right by the rising power of Georgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, the most popular political party in the country, that it can be considered centre-Right itself, so far has the country’s Overton Window shifted. In France, where Macron has angrily rejected an imported American racial culture war in favour of the country’s homegrown culture war over Islam and the possibility of civil war, the soi-disant liberal saviour from the perceived populist menace has moved so far to the Right that the roughly even chances of a Le Pen victory in the forthcoming presidential election seem almost irrelevant in defining the country’s political trajectory. 

Perhaps it is Greece that highlights best not just the shifting mood in Europe’s external border states, but the shifting mood in Brussels itself. When Erdogan opened Turkey’s land borders with Greece in spring last year, bussing migrants to the border fences in a confrontation that came uncomfortably close to war, Greece’s militarised response unexpectedly won applause rather than censure from the EU hierarchy, as well as the swift dispatch of both Frontex border guards and funds to build an impassable border wall, now being beefed up with EU surveillance zeppelins and drones. Rather than a rerun of the 2015 migrant crisis, when Europe functioned as a ready source of monetary tribute to an embattled Erdogan, last year’s Evros crisis functioned as a dry run for the coming Afghan wave.

After all, when Belarus’s autocrat Lukashenko began funnelling migrants to the Lithuanian border a few weeks ago, Frontex immediately responded with the deployment of border guards, and support for Lithuania’s planned new 550-km border wall — with Estonia even donating 100km of barbed wire to its struggling ally. Once again, the exact same fortification project Orbán was condemned for in 2015 was hurriedly paid for by the EU in 2020, and presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity by 2021. From the Baltic to the Aegean, walls are going up across the eastern marches of the European continent, which will soon define the bloc against the huddling masses straining to get in. Even in Turkey, where the secular opposition CHP party has accelerated its demands to return the country’s three million Syrian refugees within two years and made alarmed noises about the increasing flow of Afghan migrants across the Iranian border, the ruling AKP party is constructing concrete border walls to stem the flow from Afghanistan, just as it has constructed a concrete wall all along its borders with Syria, and deploys lethal force against Syrians trying to sneak through.

Suggested reading

The fate of the 'Anywhere' people

By Robert Tombs

Turkey has become, indeed, the archetype of Europe’s new border guard states, the model for what will no doubt become a ring of authoritarian states bordering the continent’s southern and eastern fringes, whose rulers will be lavishly bribed to keep migrants and refugees from landing on European shores, a relationship somewhere between clients and blackmailers. Like Erdogan, who quickly learned to deploy migrants as a weapon against Europe whenever he was under pressure, Lukashenko has learned the value of Europe’s desire to keep migrants away while not actively being seen to dirty its own hands with the rough business of border management. 

The Moroccan government was equally quick to learn this lesson, recently waving through thousands of migrants to Spain’s North African foothold of Ceuta after the Spanish government granted asylum to a Western Saharan leader, and receiving a handsome bribe to take them back again. Meanwhile, Europe’s only interest in Libya is which faction can most effectively police migrants, just as its only interest in Tunisia’s ongoing coup will be the maintenance of this summer’s border policing deal. Despite the difficulties raised by American financial sanctions, the EU even appears to be eyeing up Iran as one of the potential host nations for the coming Afghan exodus, a dynamic which, if it takes effect, will surely dramatically affect all other aspects of its difficult diplomatic dance with the country. 

So while handing responsibility for keeping migrants out of Europe to regional states may be domestically easier for EU leaders, particularly those from Northwestern and Nordic countries with Green-tinged parties ideologically committed to pro-migration policies, it also offers neighbouring nations handy weapons to deploy against the bloc for their own geopolitical purposes. The great difficulty for European politics is how to balance these opposing tendencies: it is difficult to think, given the steady rightward drift of European politics, that an Open Borders attitude will win out against the simpler solution of a hands-on European effort to prevent migrants entering the EU. 

The expansion of the EU’s Frontex border agency into a 10,000 strong armed rapid deployment force indicates the direction of travel. Indeed, we are already seeing early manifestations of this approach, both in the pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean by the Greek coastguard with Frontex support, and in the growing legal restrictions on the activity of Western European NGO boats blamed for accelerating the migrant flow. Both were placed with the quiet acquiescence of Brussels, despite the protests of Northern European Green parties.

Suggested reading

Why do dictators rise and fall?

By Aris Roussinos

All this is, of course, a dry run for the almost certainly militarised and exclusionary border policing efforts that will grapple with the vast population movements from Africa and South Asia that will attend the coming decades of climate change. Already, Bangladeshis are the largest single national group making the dangerous crossing from North Africa, and it is not difficult to see a desertifying Sahel or collapsing Lebanon adding new sudden crises for European leaders torn between their desire to maintain allegiance to postwar liberal ideals on asylum and the increasing desire of their voting publics to reject them. The avowedly open, cosmopolitan Europe of the 1990s and 2000s is already dead, and even the lame duck Merkel and her ailing CDU party have abandoned the Wir schaffen das attitude of 2015 in the face of the coming wave. 

The British debate over the Nationality and Borders Bill, insular and self-regarding as all British political debate somehow manages to be, therefore ignores this rapidly shifting European context. In some ways, this must be a relief to a Conservative government that has shown itself incapable of satisfying its core voter base’s demands to stem the flow of irregular migration across the Channel: without any action by the UK itself, the EU will find itself drawn towards a Fortress Europe approach that will, eventually, choke the flow arriving on Kent’s shingle beaches. 

Just as France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin demands a Frontex deployment with aerial surveillance assets along the Channel coast, Priti Patel’s border woes will be solved by European leaders without meaningful British input other than funding analogous to the tribute the EU hands in desperation to Erdogan. The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes.

But Germans need not be nervous. This is a chance for Europe’s largest democracy to finally grow out of the nervous political infancy of its post-war decades and embrace a more confident future.

Fortunately, when Germans go to the polls in September, “more of the same” will not on the ballot paper. Even Armin Laschet, the newly elected leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) who is touted as a continuity candidate, has insisted that if his party gets re-elected, it will not stand for the “sixteen years of the past”. But there is a palpable nervousness in the air. Merkel is currently facing a barrage of difficulties which she can afford to kick into the long grass until her departure.

One such issue is the increasing scepticism among Germans about their country’s role within the EU. Like Helmut Kohl before her, Merkel has continued a policy of unconditional support for the European project. Indeed, it is rather fitting that the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will by far have been her longest-serving cabinet minister, with roles that spanned from 2005 to 2019.

Suggested reading

How Germany came in from the cold

By James Hawes

However, a Spiegel survey published last week laid bare that her adoration for the EU is not universally shared: nearly two-thirds of Germans said that their opinion of the bloc had worsened due to its botched vaccine procurement plans. Half of all participants also said their view of von der Leyen had become “decidedly worse”. Merkel, on the other hand, defended the EU’s decisions as “fundamentally right”.

But while Merkel’s unchallenged position in Germany has allowed her to ignore the public mood, her successor will not have this luxury. For it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is an appetite for change, even among conservative voters who are likely to continue to support the chancellor’s party.

That is partly why Markus Söder, the leader of the CDU’s sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) who has publicly criticised the EU’s sluggish vaccine procurement, is already emerging as the most popular candidate to succeed her. A recent survey showed that 55% of Germans thought he was the best candidate for the CDU/CSU to put forward in the elections; only 27% favoured Laschet.

This election goes right to the heart of Germany and Europe’s relationship — and it is triggering a familiar type of political angst, one with deep roots in Germany’s unique historical past. For too long Germans have voted with a risk aversion that has given their chancellors an unhealthy sense of authority and invincibility. It speaks volumes that, at the end of four terms in power, Angela Merkel is still leading the polls as the most popular German politician. In fact, had she not stepped down herself, there is every chance that she would have been re-elected once again in September.

Suggested reading

British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

But while this may seem a sign of enviable consensus — so rare a commodity in an increasingly partisan Western world — the reality is far more complicated and disconcerting. Indeed, beneath the surface of outward stability stews an increasing sense of anger and disenfranchisement, which Merkel’s unchallenged position has allowed her to ignore.

The last federal elections of 2017 laid bare how thin the veneer of political consensus really is. The conservative Union of CDU/CSU came out with a loss of 8.6% while the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gained almost the same amount. Having ruled out working with the latter, Merkel once again turned to a grand coalition with the social democrats (SPD), who had also made staggering losses.

But the 12.6% of the electorate who voted for the AfD are not the only Germans frustrated at the country’s political stagnation. For years, small-c conservatives in Germany have looked on with concern as Merkel pulled their political home, the CDU, further and further towards the centre — most notably with her decision to allow 1.1 million refugees into the country in 2015.

In her typically stoic style, Merkel tried to plaster over the deepening cracks within her party with her slogan, “Wir schaffen das!” — “we can do this!”. There was no need to have a national debate; it was as if her course for the country was an act of God.

This self-image of German chancellors as the ultimate moral and political authority is, of course, an unhealthy and increasingly dangerous relic of the past. Among Western democracies, Germany stands out in the way that its traumatic history has caused its people to value stability over charisma, continuity over change, dependability over showmanship.

Suggested reading

Who will miss Angela Merkel?

By Mary Dejevsky

Nobody embodies this more than Merkel, whose image as the austere and pragmatic mother of the nation has allowed her to rule without needing to fear the political consequences in a way that a British Prime minister would. A survey last year showed that 71% of CDU/CSU voters were against Merkel’s pro-refugee policies, yet her approval ratings remain paradoxically high.

Why are these German voters so generous? I suspect the answer lies in the fact that, from the beginning, West German democracy constantly felt under threat from extremism. In fact, in the first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, voters found an ideal candidate for the challenges the country faced. Unashamedly authoritarian, Der Alte (the old man), as he was affectionately known, led his CDU — under the slogan “No Experiments” — to victory in the 1957 election with the only absolute majority ever achieved in German parliamentary history.

But while a single-minded and reliable leader was arguably a necessary infringement on democracy in the wake of two world wars and the traumatic experience of fascism, Adenauer’s tenure also established an unhealthy detachment of the chancellor from his people. Chancellors can no longer afford to sit on a political pedestal, claiming moral exclusivity and dressing this up as steady leadership.

Yes, at the moment, a large part of the electorate is still willing to give an incumbent chancellor the benefit of the doubt. But this better-the-devil-you-know approach can only go so far. Forgotten and left-behind, increasing proportions of the population will turn to radical alternatives — the 2017 elections were proof that this process is well underway.

Whoever inherits the baton of German chancellorship this autumn needs to take this chance of a new beginning and build a more democratic, more transparent and more approachable office which works with the other elements in the constitution rather than above them. Chancellor democracy had its time and its place, but in 2021 it is an anachronistic relic of a bygone age — and anyone who seeks to hold onto it might pay a dear political price. It is time for Germany’s democracy to trust in itself without a father (or indeed a “Mutti”) figure to cling on to, for better or worse. It is time for German democracy to grow up.

As you may have noticed, the above is a slightly modified excerpt from the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Then, as now, the political establishment was faced with an external threat; and then, as now, they didn’t entirely succeed in exorcising it. Populism continues to haunt European politics. Populist governments in Hungary and Poland retain their grip. And far from fading away, populist movements elsewhere are still making breakthroughs. Only this week, Spain’s Vox party made it into Catalan parliament for the first time.

And yet, earlier fears of a wholesale populist takeover were wildly exaggerated. 2016 — the year of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump — was not the end of days after all. Instead, the political establishment has adapted.

In Greece, the power of the European Central Bank proved more than equal to that of the Syriza government. In France, a centrist movement — En Marche — emerged out of nowhere to see off the hard Left and the hard Right. In Ireland, Sinn Féin has surged in popularity — only for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to put aside their historic differences and form their first coalition. In America, the country’s democratic institutions weathered an attempt by a bad loser President to overturn an election result. And in Italy, the populist government elected in 2018 has been replaced by a technical government headed by Mario Draghi, the ultimate establishment fixer.

Suggested reading

Mario Draghi is no saviour

By Thomas Fazi

The establishment has not killed off populism, but it is learning to live with it. There’s a parallel here with the situation in post-war western Europe, when the main challenge wasn’t populism, but homegrown communism. We forget it now, but there were times in the 1940s and 50s when the French Communist Party was the biggest party in the National Assembly. The Italian Communist Party was another major force — peaking in 1976 with more than a third of the vote.

Despite the scale of the challenge, the communists of free Europe were tolerated — though also deliberately excluded from power, in some parts of Italy with the help of the Mafia. Today’s establishment will hope to do the same in regard to the populists; and, so far, they’re succeeding.

But what if the real enemy isn’t who they think it is?

External threats are visible: the barbarian at the gate, the invading army, the rampaging mob. Only last month, in Washington DC, there was a very literal example of what can happen when the gates aren’t adequately guarded. But not every enemy is to be found outside the city walls — indeed sometimes the threat is from within.

I’m not talking about a fifth column, but rather when a ruling establishment is captured by one of its own — and subsequently remade in the new leader’s image.

The classic example is that of Julius Caesar and the fall of the Roman Republic. Here we see the quintessential features of the internal authoritarian takeover. Firstly, Caesar was a man of action — conqueror of Gaul, invader of Britannia. Secondly, he was already in a senior position of leadership — as part of the first Triumvirate (along with Pompey and Crassus). Thirdly, he posed as the champion of the people — even though the system he would establish was even less democratic than the one it replaced. Fourthly, the new system masqueraded as a continuation of the old. The Roman Republic was not formally overthrown; there was no return to the Roman monarchy and Julius’s successors did not style themselves “emperor” , but rather as princeps — “first among equals”. And finally, once securely established in power, Julius’s heir — Augustus — posed, hypocritically, as a conservative: a champion of stability and of old-fashioned Roman virtue, while ending the republic.

More from this author

The death of the idle rich

By Peter Franklin

Joseph Stalin’s takeover of the Soviet Union followed a similar pattern. He was one of the leading revolutionaries — and one among a number of senior figures vying for influence after Lenin’s death. Stalin won that power struggle — not least by presenting himself as a true man of the people against the Bolshevik intellectuals. Once his rivals had been crushed, he maintained and secured the outward forms of the USSR, while remaking it from within.

Given the horrors he unleashed, I hesitate to call him any sort of conservative, but there’s no denying that his totalitarian system was overtly patriotic in character. It was also, in some respects, socially conservative — earlier revolutionary attempts to redefine fundamentals like the family were dispensed with. To bolster morale in the Second World War, Stalin even co-opted what remained of the Orthodox Church. At the same time, just as Augustus expanded the borders of Rome, so in Stalin’s Russia industrialisation took place on a massive scale and Moscow’s rule was extended far beyond the borders of the old Russian empire.

A third example of the Caesarist phenomenon — and the one most relevant to Europe today — is the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Again, we see a man of action, a supremely gifted and successful military commander. Again, we see that the regime he loyally served was unstable — power shifting back and forth between different factions and individuals. Again, we see a man of the people acting in the name of the people to restore order — and in the process grabbing all the power for himself. Again, there’s no return to the ancien regime, but rather the establishment of a quasi-monarchy with himself as monarch. And again, there’s a weird, but effective, mixture of conservatism and ruthless modernism. While Napoleon had no time for the Jacobin excesses of the early revolution, he also saw it as his mission to cleanse Europe of feudalism and other unenlightened remnants of the past.

The reason Napoleon seems particularly relevant today is because of the parallels between Revolutionary France in the late 18th century and the European Union in the early 21st. Note that I say parallels and not convergences. Obviously, we don’t have guillotines slicing up and down in public squares. Those who fall foul of today’s progressive orthodoxies may find themselves consigned to a “basket of deplorables”, but not to a basket of severed heads.

However, if you take away the violence and focus instead on the underlying power structures — the parallels between Napoleon’s time and our own become apparent. To begin with, the European project is revolutionary in nature — it seeks to replace a long-established system of government (the nation-state) with a jarringly different system (a federal superstate). “Ever closer Union” is not just a slogan, it is a political programme of world-changing significance.

More from this author

Europe shows its true colours

By Peter Franklin

Admittedly, as revolutions go this is a slow one. But, from time-to-time, it takes another lurch forward. The creation of the single currency is the most important development so far. Other lurches include the last year’s decision to empower the European Commission to borrow hundreds of billions of euros, and the transformation of the Frontex agency into a quasi-military border force.

A further example is the vaccine procurement strategy. That this has gone so badly wrong doesn’t just expose the administrative weaknesses of the EU, but also its democratic deficit. Ursula von der Leyen and has not been held democratically accountable for the very good reason that she doesn’t have a democratic mandate. She doesn’t even have regular, EU-wide approval ratings to worry about — after all, what would be the point?

In any case, we shouldn’t forget that she’s not the head of government (to the extent that that EU even has a government). Infamously, the EU doesn’t have one President, but five (of the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of the European Union and the European Central Bank). Even without the complications of incomplete integration, authority within the EU is divided — and thus any hope of clear accountability frustrated.

Coincidentally, the governing body that Napoleon usurped in 1799 — the Directory — also had five members. Only weakly accountable to the elected legislature and divided among themselves, the Directors were in a poor position to cope with the foreign and domestic threats to the revolutionary state. It became clear that authority would have to be placed in the hands of an effective leader or the revolution would collapse — with the restoration of monarchy as the most likely outcome.

Currently, the EU has more room for manoeuvre. Its member-states still retain sovereign control over most policy areas. But the further Europe goes down the path of integration, the harder it will be to retreat to national competences. Crisis situations will have to be dealt with at a federal level — the actions of decision-makers facilitated by untested institutions.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

The EU’s future will not be an easy one. The vaccine fiasco is still far from sorted, and there’s the post-Covid economic recovery to navigate — and the impact of “long lockdown” restrictions on international travel. Populism has not been defeated and will feed on the economic hardships that lie ahead of us. A renewed migration crisis cannot be ruled out — only this time inflamed by fears of coronavirus variants from outside the EU. On immigration and other issues, the challenge from the Hungarian and Polish governments has not been resolved — and indeed could multiply if the hard-Right advances in western European countries like Italy or France.

And, underlying everything, there’s the fact that the engine of EU integration — the single currency — is also a ticking time bomb. We’ve already seen that the EU will do “whatever it takes” to stop the eurozone from collapsing. It is a reminder that, beyond a certain point, integration passes a point of no return.

Okay, but can we really imagine a Brussels Bonaparte taking control of the EU’s evolving federal structures? It needn’t be anything so dramatic as a military coup — and, assuming the continuing absence of a European Army, it couldn’t be. But a consolidation of power within a democratically dubious system of crisis government? That certainly can be envisaged. Indeed, it’s happening in Italy right now.

So a technocrat, then, not a soldier — but a technocrat with broad popular appeal built on a record of “getting things done”.

Would the EU establishment tolerate such a figure — and indeed facilitate the centralisation of authority around a single, undisputed leader? It all depends on the alternative. If the other choices are a chaotic meltdown of the entire system starting with the single currency — or a hostile takeover by a Viktor Orbán-style populist, then a Brussels Bonaparte would be the least worst option.

And that’s the trouble with constructing a novel and weakly democratic system of government. Sooner or later, the question of “whatever it takes” boils down to “whoever it takes”.

Not since Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan has a new administration come to office with so tenuous a grasp of the realities facing the United States — and so evident a determination to flinch from them. Look squarely across those oceans and you find diplomatic, political, and economic drift. An age of alliances? Not on Washington’s terms. As things stand, Joe Biden’s presidency is destined to mark an age of isolation.

Hardly two weeks after Biden’s November victory at the polls, 15 Pacific Rim nations signed what HSBC reckons is the largest trade accord in history, dwarfing anything the U.S. has sought to organise in recent years. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which come into effect by midyear, covers a third of the planet’s GDP ($26 trillion in 2019) and the same proportion of its population.

Who signed it? All 10 members of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan.

More from this author

The generation betrayed by Boris

By Patrick Lawrence

And China. All of America’s bedrock allies and partners in East Asia just agreed an extensive trade pact that can also be taken broadly as a plan to get along with the mainland. This is, in effect, an Asia-for-Asians accord. Not to be missed, it is the first trade agreement that puts Japan and China on the same piece of paper.

In his Senate testimony, Blinken made it clear the Biden administration expects America’s traditional allies to stand with it as it faces up to China. “We have to start by approaching China from a position of strength, not weakness,” Blinken told his interlocutors, “a position of strength when we are working with, not denigrating, our allies.” This is the sort of bureaucratic diplo-speak, wanting in all specificity, that gets Washington in trouble in one instance after another.

The RCEP, however, is a subtly rendered but direct repudiation of this view. The accord, which sets down a variety of economic and investment rules from tariffs to intellectual property, is the Pacific Rim’s declaration that it does not recognise the ideological red lines the US insists on drawing across the region — “techno-democracies” as against “techno-autarchies,” in Blinken’s histrionic terms. These nations evince absolutely zero interest in any kind of Cold War 2.0 with the mainland.

Yet the United States seems incapable of retiring the 20^th century’s binaries into the past and addressing our diverse, multifarious new era. Certainly, its ties with Asia are more strained now than may meet the eye: the continued presence of American troops, to cite one example, has long been a politically contentious question among the Pentagon’s principal hosts — South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

ASEAN’s desire to settle sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea at the negotiating table, as opposed to displays of power at sea, are another. Indeed, they are fully aware that Washington’s obsession with the South China Sea has nothing to do with security, as it claims: it has everything to do with supremacy.

Suggested reading

Europe needs to grow up and defend itself

By Aris Roussinos

And so the Biden administration assumes office at a key moment in America’s trans–Pacific relations. It inherits alliances and partnerships of many decades’ standing, and no one at the far end of the Pacific, not even the Chinese, wants the US out of the region. But continue to get the China question so wrong and Biden’s national security people will severely damage Washington’s trans–Pacific ties, with the result that an incipient isolation will begin to assume a permanent character.

Something of the same obtains in Washington’s trans–Atlantic relationships, which now bear the character of irritated friends discovering they do not have as much in common as they once did. It is uncanny, indeed, how similarly Washington’s predicament unfolds in Europe. In the final days of 2020, China signed a bilateral investment treaty with the European Union that is at least as ambitious as the RCEP. In one interview, Valdis Dombrovkis, the EU trade commissioner, said it provided for “the most ambitious outcomes that China has ever agreed with a third country”. Are the E.U.’s 27 members really going to line up with Washington as it conjures a confrontation with China?

Critics immediately complained that the EU–China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment was poorly timed — a slap in the new American president’s face, a “kick in the teeth,” a “strategic mistake.” Implicit in this is the assumption Europe should continue playing follow-the-leader with Washington and has no business acting in what it judges to be its own interests. However, The CAI, as it is known, was seven years in the making and also bears broader interpretation. It, too, can be read as an indication that the Continent is no more interested than East Asians in Washington’s Sinophobic plans for some kind of decisive, king-of-the-hill reckoning.

It is Russia, however, as well as China, that has caused the Atlantic to grow wider in recent years. While the US has become increasingly hostile toward the Russian Federation, Emmanuel Macron has argued strenuously for some time that Europe must re-engage Russia as a key step toward a more independent foreign policy altogether. Angela Merkel has been less vocal on this point, but it will be interesting to see where her successor, Armin Laschet, lands on these questions.

Laschet is avowedly an Ostpolitik man, favouring friendly ties with Moscow and China alike. Should he take over as chancellor in September, among his early decisions will be whether to defy American objections and proceed with the highly contentious Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is to connect Russian gas fields with German ports and the European market. All signs are he will see through the project, which is now 95% completed.

Suggested reading

Charting the decline of the American Republic

By Ed West

Of course, we should not forget that America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden won the White House  — and, let us not be mistaken, before Donald Trump’s singularly disruptive term, too. Why has the U.S. been so consistently in denial about this? The best I can do is suggest that Washington, after seven decades of primacy, suffers an institutional inertia that prevents it from registering the 21^st century’s defining currents.

Anyone familiar with Washington’s foreign policy cliques understands that they have simply not had to make any fundamental decisions since the 1945 victories, and must learn again how to respond to changing circumstances. The reality is that Washington’s policy cliques just don’t seem ready to accept the multipolar world we all find out our windows. The Nixon­–Kissinger opening to China in the early 1970s stands among the few exceptions to the rule. Yet today’s policy planners condemn that highly imaginative move as a mistake, preferring, in effect, to take cover in the anachronistic thought that America’s place as a global leader is just as it was during the post-war decades.

A year ago Biden published a much-remarked essay in Foreign Affairs under the headline: “Why America must lead again.” This is what the president and his national security people mean when they talk of alliances and partnerships: Let us all work together — we the commanding officers, other nations adjutants following our lead. Barack Obama and his administration — many of whom will now serve under Biden — made the same mistake.

Does this mean the United States will find itself isolated as our new century unfolds? Quite possibly, though it is not inevitable. Isolation, if it comes to be the case, will prove a choice, not a fate. The United States could accept — indeed, participate in — the transformations in motion in Asia and Europe were it willing to do so as an equal partner with others. But all signs indicate that Biden and his foreign policy people have no intention of squarely addressing the complexities of our time, and will insist on sustaining a primacy of a bygone era.

It is almost 70 years since Luigi Barzini published Americans Are Alone in the World. It was a work of admiration for a nation that stood unambiguously above others after World War Two. Now, the noted Italian journalist’s observation has been turned upside down. Unless the Biden administration alters course — an unlikely prospect by any sound reckoning — Americans stand to be alone because they are falling behind.

For those ideologues of the technocratic centre-left, a political quadrant rather cruelly termed “Britpoppers” by our younger conservative internet wags, it is the cult of Angela Merkel that has ended up filling this role. The demonstrative anti-populists have found themselves replicating the tropes and mannerisms of populism for their own purposes, without ever quite realising it. In this inversion of nationalist exceptionalism, it is the Other, Merkel’s Germany, that is a paragon of virtue, a vision of the good which differs in every respect from our own backward and unenlightened Self; where our politicians are venal, corrupt and incompetent, Germany is blessed with a good and wise philosopher queen, selflessly leading the continent to a brighter future. In adulation that would make even the most craven MAGA boomer blush if applied to Trump, Merkel is not merely a fallible centre-right politician, but the “Queen of Europe”, even the “leader of the free world”. 

The journalist John Kampfner’s recent book Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country is perhaps the purest distillation of this uniquely English pathology, with its combination of personality cult and fetishisation of an idealised foreign country. “Much of contemporary Germany’s resilience has been wrapped up in the personality of one woman, Angela Merkel,” we are told, “Many fear life after Mutti. They are right to.” 

It is awkward to read, at a time when Germany’s death rates from COVID are spiralling out of control, approaching those of our own country during the depths of the first wave, that the virus proves beyond doubt that “contemporary Germany is a country to be envied,” that “Coronavirus provided the ultimate test of leadership” and “Angela Merkel, after 15 years in office, rose to the challenge”. 

Suggested reading

10 things I hate about Germany

By Peter Franklin

Comparing this earthly paradise to our own benighted backwater, the first country in Europe to roll out a vaccine, we learn that “Britain provided a case study of how not to deal with a crisis,” where “Germans watched in horror as a country they admired for its pragmatism and sangfroid fell into pseudo-Churchillian self-delusion.” Surely, if we are using a country’s effectiveness at defeating Covid to ascertain the worth of its political system, we should all aim to become techno-authoritarian dictatorships like China, but Kampfner does not follow his own logic to its conclusion: this is not political analysis, but a moral fable. 

This mix of uncritical adulation and self-abasement tells us far more about how English journalists of a certain world view their own country than it does of Germany. Kampfner’s book, like all examples of the type — we think here of Jeremy Cliffe’s vaguely indecent Merkel-worship as the pinnacle of this genre — is a product of Brexit, and of the rage-filled self-hatred it induced in a certain subset of British commentators.

Germany, in their deeply English fantasy worldview, is a “grown-up country” because it has fully absorbed the entire dogma of post-Cold War liberalism, and installed it as its operating system, whether or not it actually works. “Germany is Europe’s best hope in this era of nationalism, anti-enlightenment and fear,” we are told. Unlike us, “the pride [Germans] feel in their country is not of the small-island, flag-waving variety. Instead, they hope they are setting a good example for the world through a clear set of democratic rules.” German politicians do not act out of self-interest, nor appeal to the various fixations and desires of their fractious electorate, but instead are the shining stadt on the hill for the West and the wider world as a whole to look up to.

This is of course nonsense. There’s much to like about Germany, and much the Germans do better than us — on a reporting trip to the supposedly depressed eastern land of Saxony-Anhalt to cover far-right student organisations (unimaginable in this country, of course) a couple of years ago, I was genuinely shocked at how good the infrastructure was compared even to wealthy south-east of England; how efficient the public transport was, how clean and orderly the public spaces were. Its healthcare system is vastly better than the NHS, and we should closely examine why that is, now we’ve stopped banging pots and pans on our doorsteps; its social market economy — though it has taken a battering in recent years, not least from Merkel, who came to power as an outright neoliberal reformer— is rightly prized by our own Blue Labour intellectuals. Yet Germany has its own pathologies too, and such uncritical adulation from our Britpopper contingent conceals as much as it celebrates.

As with China’s Xi Jinping, whose drive for global dominance Merkel still insists can be ameliorated by trade with the German car industry, or Putin, whose Nordstream energy project places the continent under his power to an extent both the Americans and the Poles find unbearable, Merkel’s foreign policy with Europe’s dictatorial rivals is one of selling them loaded pistols to aim at the continent’s head. Yet for Kampfner, even as she subjects Europeans to the whims of tyrants, Merkel is the anti-populist par example, the continent’s moral conscience wrought in stolid flesh. It is a worldview derived from the self-aggrandising fictions of the German pundit class rather than any grounding in reality, and any serious observer of modern Europe would be well advised to reject it.

A more rounded view of Merkel and Germany can be found in the work of the conservative Marxist economist Wolfgang Streeck, a regular fixture in the New Left Review, whose work should be more widely read in this country. His latest book, Critical Encounters: Democracy, Capitalism, Ideas, is an excellent place to start, containing some of his most incisive recent essays. 

In Streeck’s telling, Merkel is not the omniscient stateswoman of liberal fantasy — he mocks her image as “Europe’s Mother Goddess”— but a politician like any other, largely devoid of any meaningful worldview or vision but veering this way and that according to the polls and the headlines. As a “postmodern politician with a Machiavellian disdain for both causes and people,” she is not Germany’s instructive anti-Boris but simply a more stolid, motherly incarnation of the same type, constantly changing tack to suit the demands of German tabloids instead of British ones.

More from this author

'Global Britain' is in for a rude awakening

By Aris Roussinos

Take the 2015 migrant crisis, for example. For Streeck, this was classic Merkel politicking, where her sudden lurch from warning darkly that “the multi-kulti approach failed, absolutely failed” and informing a crying Palestinian refugee girl on television that she and her family would imminently have to leave Germany revolved 180 degrees overnight into inviting more than a million refugees and migrants into Europe, and informing the rest of the continent they would have to deal with the results. As Streeck notes, “day after day the media, whipped into a frenzy by Facebook and Twitter, accused France and Britain of callously denying migrants’ human rights,” forcing Merkel’s hand. For Streeck, Merkel’s gambit was almost purely a reaction to the negative headlines her interaction with the Palestinian girl had created, and was followed by just such another headline-led abrupt change of policy “a few months later, when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn.”

To British admirers of Merkel this was the ultimate in German progressive selflessness, contrasted favourably with Britain, yet the Cameron Government’s plan to triage refugee arrivals according to need, focussing on families, was the better one: it placed emphasis on those who needed our support most, rather than those best able to make the journey by themselves, and by managing the flow carefully over time, it would have allowed for security checks to be carried out on those wishing to come. It would also have allowed for political consent to be obtained within EU member states for a sustained and careful program of resettlement, maintaining both the continent’s political equilibrium and the safety of its people.

More from this author

When will Germany get off its knees?

By Aris Roussinos

Merkel did none of this. Instead she rode roughshod over the border policies of other European nations, leading to a vast surge in right-wing populism across the continent, and, partly, to the Brexit vote the next year. It was not a poster of eastern European labourers Farage chose to unveil in the run-up to Brexit, after all, but one of the new arrivals to the continent summoned up by Merkel’s tabloid-led whims. When the self-adulatory applause of young Germans, congratulating themselves for not being their grandparents by greeting the new arrivals at railway stations, gave way to the rise of the AfD, anti-migrant demonstrations and a handful of terror attacks, Merkel suddenly changed tack, as Kampfner seems not to realise, but Streeck does: suddenly, Greece “was threatened by Germany with exclusion from the Schengen area if it didn’t seal its borders,” he reminds the reader, a cruel and self-interested about-turn Greeks remember all too well. The result was that Greece’s Aegean islands were turned into a vast archipelago of extra-territorial concentration camps for migrants on Germany’s behalf, without Merkel ever getting the blame from her Anglophone idolaters. 

While the German government refuses to admit any more arrivals, and debates sending the ones they have back home, German politicians and NGO workers relentlessly harangue the Greek government for the baleful conditions of the camps Greeks never wanted nor asked for. The image of the German in southern Europe today is not the Swabian hausfrau or Bavarian industrialist of recent stereotype, but the dreadlocked NGO activist Carola Rackete, daughter of a figure in the arms industry, whose family circumstances typify the precise mix of self-righteous indignation and self-interest that characterises Merkel’s Germany.

Indeed, Merkel’s entanglement with the Turkish autocrat Erdogan shows the validity of the new southern European stereotype. Her failed refugee deal with Erdogan, under which he would refrain from allowing migrants to travel to Europe and take back those whose asylum applications which have been denied, was a disaster for the continent. Instead, he has accelerated his use of migrants as a weapon against Greece and Europe as a whole. His aggressive encroachment onto the territory of Greece and Cyprus is enabled by Merkel’s diplomatic cover, even as Germany sells him the high-tech weapons of war he needs to threaten her supposed fellow European citizens, despite their pleading. A hard-nosed case for this state of affairs could be made, purely on the grounds of German self-interest: but to sell it as idealistic internationalism is really too much to bear.

Suggested reading

The German coronavirus mystery

By Tom Chivers

Wolfgang Streeck, hard-nosed realist and Marxist cynic, is closer to the mark when he observes that “Germany has come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is right for Germany is by definition right for all others… Very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto their outside world, and they are puzzled that anyone could possibly fail to see things the way they do.” That our own journalistic commentators adopt this post-nationalist nationalism-by-proxy is even more grating: if we are to become “grown-up” Europeans, we can start by looking at reality, and not self-indulgent fantasy.

In western Europe, Germany’s political journalism is only matched by Scotland under the SNP for fawning paeans to the omniscient leader: it would be genuinely shocking for a British observer to see the erosion of the barriers between editorial and reporting in Germany’s television news as shown by the state-run DW news channel, and the self-righteous lectures its presenters are permitted to give to the viewers: at least in the UK, the iron fist of political partisanship is somewhat hidden by the velvet glove of editorial balance.

Germany’s specific brand of post-nationalist liberalism, devoid of flag-waving, is much admired by commentators like Kampfner; but we are fortunate, unlike Germany, that in our country our armed forces and police services are not penetrated by activists of the radical right, wishing to overthrow the state. Indeed, surely it is Germany’s anti-militarism that has made the elite units of its armed forces so radical: the German far-right intellectual Götz Kubitschek, a former officer in an elite reconnaissance unit, has remarked that in his old regiment the swastika flag was hung up in the mess and radical opinions proliferated precisely because in the rest of German society any moderate national sentiment was taboo. 

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

There is much to like about Germany, and even much to emulate. But there is much to dislike too, and the idea that Germany’s pro-European slant is devoid of self-interest is absurd: as Streeck relentlessly lays out, the Euro allows German industry to remain artificially competitive against external challengers, while its captive market within the European Union has wiped out competition within the rest of the continent, wrecking the export economies of countries like Italy, France and Spain. 

Germany is a country like any other, and its politicians, like Merkel, are just politicians, fallible, weak and self-interested like those of any other country, not cult figures to be genuflected to like a technocratic liberal Willendorf Venus. The parts of Germany’s political economy that are superior to ours are certainly worth examining, and perhaps emulating, as a model: yet to present the country as the ideal in every respect is absurd, and fundamentally parochial. When Brexit is done and dusted, and Trump slinks out of the White House, and Merkel retires to do whatever she will do, perhaps we can hope for a more measured take on Germany from our own liberal commentators, and a greater appreciation of our own unique and hard-won contributions to the international system. 

When the Gilets Jaunes protests threatened to unseat Macron from behind his gilded desk in the Elysée, the extremely heavy-handed crowd control methods employed by the French police were brushed off, if they were remarked upon at all, as the necessary response of the liberal state to urban disorder. Despite the inchoate and ideologically-fluid demands of the protestors firmly coalescing on the side of the radical left before the protest wave finally fizzled out, the Gilets Jaunes were framed as a right-wing populist revolt as if by necessity.

Macron was no longer the last-ditch defence of French liberalism from the radical right: he was the anti-Trump, a liberal strongman willing and capable of keeping the world safe for Washington Post commentators by rolling back the then-seemingly unstoppable wave of populist anger, at the helm of a country more or less interchangeable with Europe as a whole in the American imagination.

It is a marker of how far US commentators have self-radicalised since then that Macron is now the target of the New York Times and Washington Post, after daring to criticise their new race-centric ideological passions, and the complex algebraic equations of moral worth and political validity which derive from them. 

Following a wave of brutal jihadist murders targeting innocent French civilians, it is Macron who is the villain in their eyes, for launching a counterattack against the Islamist insurgency within France. There is only one permissible response to jihadist terrorism for European leaders, it seems, which is to light some candles and resolutely ignore the situation until the next attack: to take any meaningful action to prevent future violence is to find yourself accused of Nazism by the American press which idealised you just a few short years ago. 

Once lauded as the liberal bulwark against Europe’s nativist far-right, Macron is now morally suspect for tackling the continent’s Islamist far-right; Europe’s “anti-Trump” is now only comprehensible as a Trumpian figure in the eyes of the New York and Washington press, but there is increasingly little value in paying attention to the hysterical wailing of American commentators.

Instead, we can more profitably assess how far Macron’s worldview has evolved in the nearly four years since he came to power by reading his latest long interview with the Groupe d’Études de Géopolitiques thinktank, published earlier this month. Macron is fond — perhaps too fond — of sharing his important thoughts with the world in long, expansive interviews, and his latest interview is perhaps the purest distillation of the genre. 

Yet by cutting through the lofty generalities to examine the specifics of how Macron now views the world, we see him as he sees himself, a liberal of the right, and a defender of the French and European Enlightenment against Chinese totalitarianism, the seductive lures of Europe’s radical right, and the counter-Enlightenment obscurantism of both jihadists and Americans.

Macron begins by asserting that the multilateral framework of what is still nostalgically termed the liberal international order no longer functions. “The UN Security Council no longer produces useful solutions today,” he declares, and “some, such as the WHO, find themselves hostages of the crises of multilateralism,” the latter diagnosis surely being derived from the COVID experience. Indeed, he notes, “we have a crisis with the multilateral framework of 1945: a crisis in terms of its effectiveness, but, and it is even more serious in my opinion, a crisis in terms of the universality of the values upheld by its structures.”

More from this author

Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

That crisis, for Macron, is the growing rejection of the very ideological underpinnings of liberalism by the rising civilisation-states of Eurasia, and by the resurgence of political Islam as a force in international politics.

On the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring, Macron observes that what was birthed by the crisis of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa was not the expansion of liberalism on which his predecessor Sarkozy gambled so much, but instead “the return of the mindset of certain peoples and of religion in politics,” and “an extraordinary acceleration of a return of religion on the political scene in a number of these countries.”

The liberal triumphalism of the post-Cold War moment, “based to a great extent, both academically and politically, on a fiction that was the ‘end of history’ and an implicit idea that was the ongoing spread of democracies, individual liberties, etc” was misguided, Macron declares; instead, the clearly observable result is that, contrary to the aspirations of both the Arab Spring protestors and their external supporters, “authoritarian regional powers are re-emerging, theocracies are re-emerging”.

Liberalism is no longer in expansive mode, then, but is instead fighting a defence for its own survival, even in its core European territories: “the fight against terrorism and radical Islamism is a European struggle, a struggle about values,” he declares, where our “struggle today is against barbarity and obscurantism.” The forces of jihadism and autocracy that defeated the Arab Spring abroad now threaten Europe itself even in our own heartlands. Indeed, he continues, “the combat of our generation in Europe will be a combat for our freedoms. Because they are being overturned. And so it will not be the reinvention of the Enlightenment, but we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism.”

The obscurantism Macron speaks of is not purely external: he also warns of a political current within Europe, “a crisis of the post-1968 and 1989 Western societies,” a form of what he confusingly terms “neoconservatism” but which we could perhaps better term “reaction” or neoreaction, “which is challenging 1968,” and which, he declares — no doubt with an eye on the ever-present electoral threat of the radical right — is a rational and understandable response to the failures of neoliberalism.

The Washington consensus which underwrote post-Cold War neoliberalism, Macron muses, “turned into a dogma whereby the truths were: less state intervention, privatisations, structural reforms, opening up of economies through trade, financialisation of our economies, with a rather monolithic rationale based on the accumulation of profits.”

Whatever the benefits for the workers of China and the CEOs of the United States, the result for the middle class across the Western world was disaster: “it has reduced part of our population to a feeling of uselessness, with deep economic and social, but also mental tragedies: our middle classes in particular, and part of our working classes have been the adjustment variable of this globalisation; and that is intolerable.”

More from this author

What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinos

Identifying himself with the “struggle against this mechanism of capitalism,” the former investment banker now portrays himself as a sceptic of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism: but it is perhaps more accurate to say that he sees himself saving liberalism by cutting away its excesses, saving liberalism from itself in the economic sphere in a way analogous to his rejection of the American excesses of liberalism in the cultural and political spheres.

The Washington consensus is dead, he declares, and the time for a “Paris consensus,” no doubt under his tutelage, has begun. What this means in practice is not elaborated on with any degree of specificity — he comes out for a vague form of a Green New Deal — but it is hard to avoid the impression Macron’s economic strategy is subordinate to his already expressed  geopolitical musings.

Indeed, and with a degree of triumphalism, Macron now declares that his vision of European strategic autonomy, so controversial when he first advanced it, has been borne out by events. “Three years ago, when I spoke about European sovereignty and strategic autonomy, I was taken for a lunatic,” he muses, “and these ideas were dismissed as French whims,” but no-one’s laughing now. The German defence establishment, represented by the craven Atlanticist submissiveness of the defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, may still complain, but “fortunately, the Chancellor [Angela Merkel] does not share this point of view.” 

Assuaging the outrage of think-tankers by stressing Europe’s close bonds of alliance and friendship with America, he nevertheless emphasises the continental bloc’s need to “prevent the Chinese-American duopoly”; indeed, he repeatedly links the two rival superpowers when he argues Europe’s need to assert technological and political independence from both.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

A geostrategic Europe, with a sphere of influence in Africa which he terms a partnership, is at the heart of his vision: chiding Africa once again for its excessive birth rates (and for the first time linking it to Europe’s demographic decline, a dynamic where “for one European country demographically disappearing, in the same period, one African country appears”) and for the abuse of Europe’s asylum system by African economic migrants, Macron posits a Euro-African relationship where France’s post-colonial interests and those of Europe as a whole are perhaps uncomfortably elided.

Yet it is surely in his vision of Europe as a commonwealth, a continent where we share a sense of belonging and ineffable political values despite our division into discrete nation-states, that we see Macron’s evolution most clearly: the defender of the French Revolution’s values has become an unexpected Burkean. It is not just that his horror at the tyranny and fanaticism of what became of the Arab Spring shapes his worldview, as the French Revolution did Burke’s, with his drift to the right deriving from a similar claimed desire to save liberalism from its own worst excesses.

Macron also echoes Burke’s conception of Europe as a political unit, an orderly and pacific civilisation of its own, and a commonwealth of shared values to be defended against internal and external challengers. Whatever divides us Europeans, he asserts, in a quote which could be lifted directly from Burke’s 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace, “something unites us. We know that we are European when we are outside of Europe. We feel our differences when we are among Europeans, but we feel nostalgia when we leave Europe.” 

But above all, Macron observes, citing our moderate economic ideals, our belief in the value of culture, and our neighbourly relations with the Middle East and with Russia, “we are not the United States of America”. He is surely fortunate then, in the reaction he has now solicited from the other side of the Atlantic: if the basis of Macron’s creation of a geopolitical Europe in his own image is that of our deep and essential difference from the United States, then he has no greater ally than the American press, which draws the dividing lines between Us and Them more clearly with every passing day.

Britain and Germany are not identical; we have slightly different cultures, different political systems, different demographics. But as countries go, we’re pretty similar. We’re both middle-sized-to-large countries — there are about 66 million of us, about 83 million of them. We are both western European democracies with temperate climates. They’re the 16th richest country in the world by GDP per capita; we’re the 21st. We both enjoy beer and football. It’s hardly comparing apples and oranges.

And yet, somehow, British people have been dying at six times the rate of German people, from a disease that both countries could see coming at the same time. I wanted to ask around a bit and find out why.

The short version is that there are several factors, of varying importance — but, probably, none of them is magic, or hidden, or mysterious. There’s no obvious need to posit “immunological dark matter” or illegible cultural factors. Germany was better prepared and reacted faster than Britain did, and in some ways got lucky, while making some mistakes of its own; it had a political system and, of course, politicians, which were better suited to the moment; and together, those factors added up to keeping several tens of thousand Germans alive.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

The key factors, in particular, appear to have been that they took measures earlier, and that they were better at protecting the most at-risk people. Those decisions came at significant cost, economically and to people’s lives – but, I think most of us would agree now, they were worth it.

Here’s the longer version.

First, the political system. Germany, unlike Britain, is very decentralised. It is a federal country of 16 states. Each state is itself broken down into smaller units, each with considerable autonomy over public health measures. The local health authorities all report into the centralised Robert Koch Institute, which is the main public health body, a bit like the US Centres for Disease Control, but often make decisions on their own.

According to Jens Spahn, the German health minister, speaking with Jeremy Hunt at a Policy Exchange event in July, this allowed more rapid responses at local level: “In this crisis, there are unforeseen things, and it means you have to handle things very pragmatically. It can help to have many different players who are self-organised.” If you have cases rising locally and the autonomy to do something about it, you don’t have to wait for central authority to order you to do so.

One direct example of this is the track, trace and isolate (TTI) system, which in Britain so far – I think I’m being fair in saying – has been an expensive failure. In Germany, the TTI system was always very obviously under the remit of the local public health authorities. “Doctors had to report a positive test to the public health authority; the authority had to report it to the Robert Koch Institute. Then there were manual forms that were given straight to the doctor, who had to get numbers and call everyone up, find out the symptoms, get them to isolate,” says one senior German public health expert I spoke to. There wasn’t a single central body trying to run a one-size-fits-all system across hundreds of disparate local authorities.

It also allowed different regions to try different things, which could then provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t. The public health expert told me that Jena, in eastern Germany, was the first “to implement a requirement to wear masks, which in Germany at the time was considered an infringement of personal freedom – silly when you think about it! – and they had much lower infections, so it led to it being implemented elsewhere”.

The health system had other advantages. Spahn pointed out to Hunt that Germany’s intensive care units (ICUs) had very high capacity by the standards of its peers, and – also important – most Covid-19 patients were not treated in hospital at all, but by community GPs. That prevented the hospitals getting overrun, and reduced hospital transmissions. 

Suggested reading

Is this the second wave?

By Tom Chivers

One huge advantage Germany had early on was testing. In January 2020, shortly after China made the SARS-Cov2 genome public, researchers at the Charité hospital in Berlin developed one of the very first Covid-19 tests; it was swiftly adopted by the WHO. By 1 February, all the passengers on a flight from Wuhan landing at Frankfurt international airport were tested, and two of them were found to be asymptomatic carriers of the disease. Being able to check at the border like this so early meant it was much easier to keep the disease out of the country.

Germany imposed widespread testing early on and continued – Britain, overwhelmed in the early months and following a pandemic flu plan which assumed that it would be impossible to continue testing all at-risk people, limited testing to hospitals and other high-risk areas in early March. By 1 April, Britain had performed around 150,000 tests in total; Germany, around a million. Germany was much better able to see where its outbreaks were.

It was also much more able to follow them, because its contact tracing system was largely in place via the localised public health authorities and the Robert Koch Institute, as we mentioned above.” I’m not sure if this authority had a lot to do for the last 20 years,” says my public health expert, “but in this moment it was crucial.” They also kept it well-staffed, recruiting medical students, firefighters and other groups to stop it from becoming overwhelmed. It also developed a functioning app much earlier. This means that it is now able to trace essentially every case of Covid-19; Britain, as yet, is not.

No doubt it was also helpful to have a scientifically engaged leader who led by example. Angela Merkel declared early in March that Covid-19 was the biggest threat since the Second World War – my public health expert said that “she never does that, she’s not a drama queen”. She was very involved in the Ebola crisis and is interested in public health and global health; this played to her strengths. She also led by example: “She goes to some European summit and the Italian PM tries to hug her and she veers away.” The public health expert drew a comparison with examples given British politicians – Boris Johnson proudly shaking hands; Dominic Cummings breaking lockdown rules. It’s only speculation, however, whether it had a major effect.

But there do appear to have been two really crucial steps that Germany took. The first was protecting the elderly and vulnerable – in quite a severe way. Britain’s great mistake, well documented now, was discharging patients from hospital straight into nursing homes, with no quarantine or testing. In Germany, this was not allowed – no patient could go into a nursing home from hospital unless they were able to be quarantined for 14 days first, or, later, until a test came back negative.

Spahn said that these measures were stringent: “We had some big incidents where too many care home inhabitants died in an outbreak, and we could see how brutal this virus was for very old people.” So they prevented all contact – “no visitors at all, even your partner – 50 years of marriage, but still not allowed to see each other for days or weeks”.

It came at huge cost to mental health and happiness. “It was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea,” said Spahn. “The social consequences and health consequences that came with the distancing were hard. You have to balance between the harm of the virus and the social distancing, and we were on the side of being very cautious.”

Suggested reading

Has Covid become less dangerous?

By Tom Chivers

Schools were closed suddenly; nurseries too. Hospital visiting was limited to the point where fathers couldn’t attend their children’s birth. This was hard and painful – special-needs schools were shut down at short notice, support for parents of disabled children stopped coming with no warning. “It had a huge impact on mental health,” my health expert said. “There was a genuine attempt to protect vulnerable communities from superspreading events, but at the same time there was a lot of collateral damage on the health and happiness of everyone involved.” It was immensely controversial.

It seems, however, to have had a huge impact. Our World in Data reports that by late May, only 19% of Covid cases in Germany were among the over-70s, compared to 36% in Spain and 39% in Italy. And that meant that fewer people died: just 4.6% of those tested positive by May in Germany, compared to 14.1% and 12% in Spain and Italy respectively. Younger people are at much lower risk from the disease.

The other really key difference is that Germany simply acted faster than Britain did. Both countries were able to watch the progress of the disease in China, and then in Italy, at the same time. But as the virus started to arrive inside their own borders – more slowly in Germany, perhaps because of the more rapidly available testing system, perhaps because they imposed more stringent border controls earlier – Germany was ahead of Britain in every decision it took.

For instance, on 22 March 2020, a total of 252 people had died in this country, compared to 67 in Germany. But Germany introduced its own version of “lockdown” right then, on the 22nd; Britain didn’t enter full lockdown until the following day. According to an Oxford University index of how stringent government responses were – looking at measures such as school closures, stay-at-home orders, restrictions on gathering, and transport bans – Germany had stricter measures in place than the UK from late February right up until the 23 March lockdown, despite having a much more well-controlled outbreak. Britain, like the US, tried to avoid the economic consequences for as long as possible – Germany simply decided it would risk them, after seeing events in Italy and Spain. In hindsight, this appears to have been the wise decision, both from a public health point of view and an economic one.

We should note that “lockdown” in Germany meant something very different from what it meant here: Spahn said that it was closer to a Swedish model, where people were encouraged to remain home where possible and to avoid standing close to each other, than to a Spanish one, with troops in the streets and enforced curfews. But Germany did take measures earlier than its peers, and never needed to be as strict as some because its outbreak was always better-controlled.

Germany was also lucky in a lot of ways: the early outbreaks, for example, tended to be among healthy middle-aged people returning from skiing holidays in northern Italy. That meant the first patients tended to survive, and also avoided immediate outbreaks in the care system.

There may have been demographic advantages, too, – the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine speculated to me that the smaller average household size in Germany may have been a factor, although likely only a small one.

Also, the fact that Germany was so well-set-up is partly the luck of the cultural draw. As the public health expert points out, the country has a proud tradition of public health, going all the way back to Robert Koch himself, the great 19th-century public health doctor and rival of Louis Pasteur. The strong pharma, epidemiology and virology landscape were all important, but the current German government can’t take a large fraction of the praise for them.

Finally, Spahn said, even the fact that Germany shut down when it did was, in part, luck. “We didn’t know back then if this is the right time,” he said. “If it’s too early, too late. But it seems to have been just the right moment to get it down before it could really spread.” He remembered a meeting with other health ministers shortly before lockdown, when Italy and France were the only ones having major problems. “Then Spain had to lock down, a week later. It was really a question of one, two, three weeks.” Small differences in time made a big difference in outcome, and, he says, Germany’s decision involved some good fortune.

Suggested reading

The misguided mission to mask us

By Paul Embery

It should also be pointed out that not everything went well for Germany. As well as the backlash over the strict and heartbreaking rules around nursing homes and hospitals, there was a shortage of PPE for a long time, just as in Britain; and also, there was long-lasting resistance to wearing masks. 

But we don’t know whether this is the whole story, and I’m not sure we ever will. It’s not as though we can run the experiment again, randomly assigning different policies to Germany each time, and without that almost all of this is little better than informed speculation. Certainly, though, the factors listed above are probably a large part of why so many Germans are now alive, when so many Britons are not.

Britain’s facing a resurgence now – as I write, another 143 deaths have been announced, roughly as many as died on 25 March, two days after lockdown (although note that I’m comparing deaths announced today with deaths that actually took place on that date, so not quite the same thing). In Germany, meanwhile, numbers are much lower – while the UK has seen numbers like 60, 70, 80 over the last few days, Germany has had numbers like 10, 12, 16. It’s about the one-to-six ratio that we’ve seen for the entire pandemic.

Can we learn from Germany’s success? Acting fast, protecting vulnerable people, giving autonomy to local and regional authorities – these seem to have worked there, and perhaps they’ll work here. But perhaps we don’t have the deeper structural and political arrangements (and the political personnel) that allowed Germany to move so fast and be so agile. I hope it’s the former. 

*Usual caveats about the ways deaths are recorded apply. These are confirmed deaths, not excess, so it’s an underestimate in both cases, but I think we’re dealing on roughly the correct scale.

“We assumed that multilateralism, openness, and reciprocity comprised the best model not only for our continent but also for the wider world,” the EU”s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell wrote recently, but those illusions are long gone. “To avoid being the losers in today’s US-China competition,” he asserted, “we must relearn the language of power and conceive of Europe as a top-tier geostrategic actor.”

Last week, Germany assumed the rotating presidency of the EU Council. Its politicians have already embraced the new language of sovereignty. European Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen last year pledged to lead a “geopolitical commission”, and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defence minister and Angela Merkel’s hapless, erstwhile successor, remarked to the Munich Security Conference that “Europe and especially my country have a duty to become more able and more willing to act. Because we Germans and Europeans are faced with a strategic situation that is increasingly dominated by great power competition.”

Confronted by a rapidly shifting global order, the EU will have to adapt to the new realities simply to survive, radically reshaping its institutions, in the words of Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, just to “keep Europe functioning in a world in which the global balance is shifting rapidly — away from Europe”.

The recent Franco-German proposal for a shared European debt mechanism to aid the bloc’s economic recovery from Covid has been hailed by some as the EU’s “Hamiltonian moment”, after the process by which the United States evolved from a loose collection of autonomous states into a truly federal power. But the comparison only highlights the fragility of European solidarity, with even this modest proposal meeting stiff resistance from the fiscally frugal alliance of Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark.

In reshaping foreign policy, the challenges are even greater, with perhaps the greatest stumbling block to a coherent European strategy being Germany itself. The economic giant’s lucrative trading relationships with external rivals act as a brake on any serious strategic action, with Germany essentially having no foreign policy to speak of, and the geopolitical needs of the continent as a whole subordinate to the demands of German industry. 

By the same author

The West's monumental crisis

By Aris Roussinos

In the realm of defence, crucial to any meaningful strategic autonomy, Germany has long shirked its spending responsibilities, allowing its armed forces to atrophy to the point of uselessness. Indeed, Germany’s prevailing ethos of post-historical utopianism has seen the country’s military viewed with such social disfavour, it has become a hub for political radicalism, with Kramp-Karrenbauer being forced to disband one-quarter of the KSK special forces, the equivalent of the SAS, last week for neo-Nazi sympathies. An economic giant, Germany is a strategic dwarf whose inability and unwillingness to project hard power gravely diminishes Europe’s ability to shape its own destiny.

For all that German politicians rebuke Europe’s illiberal challengers as a threat to the bloc’s security, trade-focused Germany has enmeshed itself inextricably with the EU’s greatest rivals. Macron’s outreach to Russia as a potential European security partner in a world defined by the coming struggle between the United States and China has been met with gasps of horror from Germany’s Atlanticist think tank class, but by doubling down on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia against bipartisan American disapproval, Germany has made itself and Europe as a whole heavily dependent on Putin’s goodwill.

With the US threatening sanctions if the pipeline goes ahead, Germany is pushing for Europe-wide counter-sanctions, in a familiar example of the continent’s “self-interested hegemon” attempting to utilise the EU as leverage for solely German interests. In a recent interview, Merkel struck a markedly ambivalent tone on Russia, chiding Putin for interfering in European politics, while making the case for cooperation. “There are good reasons to keep engaging in constructive dialogue with Russia,” Merkel argued, “In countries like Syria and Libya, countries in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood, Russia’s strategic influence is great. I will therefore continue to strive for cooperation.”

This is a small victory for Macron, who appears to view Russia as potentially useful additional muscle for Europe in a world of great power competition, but will perturb the Baltic states and Poland, who view the assertiveness of their former imperial master with alarm. Trump’s announcement that he will draw down the American troop deployment in Germany and increase the US military presence in Poland can be read as a rebuke to what he has called a “delinquent” Germany, and there is no reason to believe America’s displeasure will be lessened under a Biden administration.

Interestingly, a recent paper from a think tank aligned with Germany’s centre-left SPD party, coalition allies with Merkel’s CDU, endorses Macron’s policy of European strategic autonomy from the United States, urging German support for an independent European “nuclear umbrella” under French control, and enhanced security dialogue with Russia. Though not citing Poland and the Baltic states by name, it also waves away their fears of Russian encroachment, arguing that European policymakers “must ask themselves for how long and to what extent our future will continue to be dictated by the history of national suffering”, and dismissively remarking that “history plays an important part in politics and society, but it should not serve as a veto in solution-oriented policies”.

While a reset of relations with Russia is a rare example of shared Franco-German geopolitical interests, it will likely be a wedge issue with Germany’s increasingly self-confident eastern EU neighbours, allowing the US to play European countries against each other, and diminishing the possibility of concerted strategic action.

By the same author

Will Libya tear Nato apart?

By Aris Roussinos

A more immediate challenge to coherent European strategic action comes from Turkey, an illiberal challenger to Europe’s collective sovereignty, deeply intertwined with Germany both demographically and economically. France’s dispute with Erdogan over Turkey’s arms shipments to Libya, encroachment in Greek and Cypriot waters and malign role in Syria is rapidly escalating. Last week, France withdrew from joint NATO naval operations in the Mediterranean in protest, and French foreign minister Yves Le Drian is convening a special EU summit to address the Turkey question, threatening sanctions in retaliation.

Austria will likely support the French moves, especially after being forced to summon Turkey’s ambassador for a dressing down last week after the Turkish foreign ministry condemned Austrian police for dispersing a mob of Turkish ultranationalists attempting to burn down a Kurdish community centre in the centre of Vienna. “I know exactly what Turkey is trying to do here, namely to use the Turks in Europe to sow strife and to campaign above all for Turkey’s own interests,” Austria’s chancellor Kurz has stated, demanding that “there must be an end to Turkey’s attempts to influence the people here in Austria and instrumentalising them for their conflicts.” 

The largest party grouping in the European Parliament, the conservative EPP, has similarly run out of patience with Turkey, with its leader Manfred Weber, a member of the Bavarian CSU sister party to Merkel’s CDU, demanding a debate on Turkey and claiming that “Turkey is unilaterally escalating conflicts with Europe and the situation is getting worse. Turkish security forces attack the Greek border on a regular basis and the drilling attempts in the waters of Cyprus are intensifying continuously,” and insisting that “the EU cannot leave these aggressions unanswered”. 

Yet the greatest stumbling block to concerted European action against Turkey will be Germany itself. To French and Greek dissatisfaction, the German security establishment consistently shies away from confronting Erdogan, with Germany raking in huge profits from arming Turkey with the high-tech weapons of war used against both European interests in the region and the borders of the EU itself.

Railing against the German defence industry’s lucrative deals with Turkey, Cyprus’ president Nicos Anastasiades demanded action from Merkel last week, asking “has Germany ever pondered on what it is breeding? Are the financial interests enough to justify disregarding consequences that may damage an important number of European countries?” But it is difficult to see Merkel’s Germany, perennially shrinking from confrontation, supporting the French initiative. With Turkey as with Russia, Germany’s high-minded rhetoric on European sovereignty will be undercut by Merkel’s desire to keep the lucrative deals rolling in.

Perhaps the most pressing opportunity for Europe to demonstrate its sovereignty comes from the unbalanced relationship with China. This was meant to be the agenda-setting year for this crucial issue, until Covid upturned the world order. Hopes that a China-EU trade deal would be finally signed this year, replacing the unbalanced economic relationship with a level playing field for European exporters, have been dashed by intransigent Chinese delaying tactics, with Beijing cancelling the September Leipzig summit until further notice.

Merkel’s long-standing illusions of “change through trade” have evaporated, replaced by a clearer understanding that the Middle Kingdom’s rebirth as a great power represents a systemic challenge to Europe’s sovereignty. Similarly, the risks of over-dependence on supply chains trailing back to China have been revealed by Covid, with “health sovereignty” emerging as a major priority for EU action. 

By proceeding with Huawei’s central role in rolling out Germany’s 5G network against both American threats and the advice of the German security services, Merkel’s government displayed a startling naivety on China, only now being reassessed. Belatedly realising that the new Cold War playing out inside its citizens’ smartphones will challenge Europe far more than a contest for the distant islets of the South China Sea, the EU is placing new emphasis on cyber security, an area in which joint and concerted action will likely bear successful fruit. 

By the same author

2019: the year the West wised up to China

By John Gray

On human rights, Germany’s equivocal stance, gently rebuking the awakening giant for its  abuses while deepening Germany’s economic and strategic dependence on its systemic rival, is coming under greater domestic pressure. Merkel will be forced to defend her China policy before the Bundestag this autumn, with the increasingly important German Greens emerging as unexpected China hawks, lambasting Huawei as a “Trojan horse” for the Chinese Communist Party and pushing for sanctions against individuals linked to repression of the country’s Uighur minority.

Initially weak EU statements against China’s actions in Hong Kong are slowly evolving into more assertively condemnatory language, but Merkel herself remains committed to striking a note of caution, remarking blandly in a recent interview that “China has become a global player. That makes us partners in economic cooperation and combating climate change, but also competitors with very different political systems. Not to talk to each other would certainly be a bad idea.”

A hangover from a vanished age of multilateral cooperation through trade rather than multipolar competition through foreign policy, Merkel’s natural caution will likely dampen any meaningful action towards reshaping the EU into a major geopolitical player. In the dying days of her generation-long role as Europe’s most powerful politician, Merkel will likely leave dramatic action to her successor, whoever that will be, with the potential heirs to her throne already vying to establish themselves as serious strategic thinkers on the European plane. For the continental bloc to survive the coming era of great power competition, concerted action to reshape the union into a strategic actor will need to happen soon.

While Germany wishes to extend its holiday from history for as long as possible, Russia and Turkey are already spreading their beach towels across the Mediterranean’s most desirable real estate, and the romance with China is already turning sour. This may be the EU’s Hamilton moment, but with Germany at the reins, it is one without a Hamilton to rise to the occasion.

Lately Hungary, unlike Britain, has had toilet rolls in the shops — but also troops on the streets. If the presence of the latter served to guarantee supplies of the former, I’d be reluctantly accepting; I’m as keen on a comfortable loo visit as the next chap. However, to me the military presence seems to facilitate another, less laudable, purpose.

Officially the deployment of soldiers in major Hungarian cities, which began last Friday, was to “reassure the civilian population”. This seemed incongruous: people here are scared of corona not of each other, and there is no sign of civil disorder.

The defensive positioning of armoured vehicles in major squares around Budapest on Friday afternoon coincided with the government tabling a law “On Protecting Against the Coronavirus”.  The APCs provided the law with a kind of symbolic escort into the Országgyűlés  (National Assembly).

The bill was first debated on Monday (23 March) and seems set to pass into law next Tuesday (the 31). Some prominent legal scholars have criticised it as a latter-day “Enabling Act”.

The law’s emergency provisions are formidable. They include allowing the government to rule by decree without legislative oversight and endowing Orbán with power to amend or suspend any provision of the criminal or civil codes at will. No elections can take place. Crucially the State of Emergency has no time limit; a standard basic safeguard in democratic systems.

The act specifies two new offences (punishable with 3- or 5-years imprisonment) related to “spreading a falsehood or distorted truth” touching the corona outbreak. Last week, Fidesz-aligned media demanded the jailing of respected investigative journalists who had exposed serious flaws in the government’s corona response.

Suggested reading

The BBC is having a good coronavirus war

By Robin Aitken

“Orbán’s terrible track record on press freedom creates the suspicion that the law is aimed at the last remnants of an independent press in Hungary,” says Kim Lane-Schepple, Professor of Politics and Sociology at Princeton University (and a long time Hungary watcher).

Governments worldwide are seeking authorisation from parliaments to intervene in their societies in ways that outstrip accustomed norms. I expect that coincidence will soon be cited by Fidesz, and its slick Anglo-American apologists, in an epic exercise in ‘whataboutery’. On close examination the case is unconvincing.

In Britain the curtailment of particular freedoms announced by Boris Johnson on Monday night, including closure of non-essential businesses and limiting exercise to one outing per day, are dramatic. However, the restrictions occur within the framework of the established legal order. In Hungary the legal order itself is the victim of the emergency.

The size of the UK’s corona legal package, at more than 300+ pages, has occasioned excited comment in the British media. Paradoxically, though, when it comes to emergency legislation “more is less” closely specifying what a government may do also limits its room for manoeuvre. Conversely brevity of language goes together with blanket empowerment.

The prolix exactitude of the British legislation, combined with time limitation and judicial-scrutiny safeguards, has enabled even a staunch human rights lawyer like Phillipe Sands to support the British bill

“You can see that… they have done it in as limited a way as possible,” Sands told the BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight on Friday, stating the bill is “absolutely connected to the objective of addressing this threat and [it] cannot be used for anything else,” .

Suggested reading

China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

Hungary’s emergency law runs to only four pages. Instead of pin-pointing variations from particular statutes, within stated perimeters, it grants a catch-all permission. Within its brief text it states that the government may “suspend the enforcement of certain laws, depart from statutory regulations and implement additional extraordinary measures by decree”.

In other words this is a legislative blank cheque which, given the lack of a sunset clause, might never expire. Though the Constitutional Court is left as a nominal counterweight to Orban’s power, there is confusion as to how appeals can reach it if, as now, trial courts are shuttered. The court has in any case been safely under Fidesz control since 2013.

The hollowness of the Hungarian government assertion that the Corona Act was motivated by public health concerns was exposed by the presence in the chamber on Monday of the Fidesz MP for the city of Szeged, László B. Nagy.

Nagy was sitting apart from his colleagues and wearing a face-mask. Only the previous day he had informed the local Szeged media that he and his family were entering a two-week voluntary quarantine after finding he had been in close physical contact with a physician diagnosed with the virus. For the government however, the desire to ensure a qualified majority for the bills immediate passage outweighed infection control considerations.

As things turned out Fidesz could not press the bill through all its stages in one afternoon. Even with support from the openly neo-fascist Mi Hazánk (“Our Homeland”) party, an insufficient number of opposition delegates could be found to reach the four-fifths majority required to suspend the normal House rules of procedure and rush the law through.

This followed Orban’s refusal of all compromise suggestions from opposition party leaders. These included an offer to give him the entirely unrestricted powers he desired but only for a (renewable) specified time-period. While opposition deputies have delayed the bill’s passage for now they cannot ultimately prevent it: the outcome of next Tuesday’s final vote is inevitable.

A way back from full autocracy could be found if sufficient international pressure forced Fidesz to withdraw or modify the bill. The only effective source of pressure on Budapest from within the EU is Berlin: Germany is Hungary’s largest foreign direct investor.

With Angela Merkel struggling to co-ordinate government from her own quarantine and Bavaria’s (Orbán-allied) Christian Social Union setting the tone in the governing coalition that seems unlikely.

Suggested reading

Can your ideology cope with coronavirus?

By Peter Franklin

Corona is the perfect vehicle for fully realising Orban’s autocratic aspirations. The epidemic excuses removal of residual legal fetters on power; emergency legislation by other states affords propaganda camouflage and the distraction of partner governments by the anti-virus battle means restraining international pressure evaporates.

What happens in Hungary should matter to us all. It is a test case for what can go wrong when the inherited liberal paradigm with all of its (admittedly significant) problems is discarded.

The failure of contemporary liberalism has been its treating of the individual in isolation from the community: assuming that freedom equates to life enjoyed without the guidance of objective truth or concession to communal norms. The damage done to public discourse and personal well-being is expertly diagnosed in many articles on UnHerd.

Some prominent Anglophone post-liberal intellectuals like Phillip Blond, seduced by Fidesz’s strongly communitarian rhetoric, have lauded it in the face of criticism. In doing so they risk the failure of post-liberalism as a morally credible project.

What becomes evident from consideration of the latest power grab in Budapest is that Orbanism does not represent a viable rebalancing of rights between community and individual. Rather it is the triumph of arbitrary power over structures of collective accountability.

In Hungary Covid-19 endangers not only the human body but also the body politic.

This is true even for British liberals who, reeling since the night of 23 June, 2016, have made the continent a sort of spiritual home as they’ve become alienated from their countrymen.

Right-thinking Britons see their country as an embarrassment sliding towards populism, a sad contrast to the moral superpower that is Germany and France under centrist leader Emmanuel Macron. Yet the Continent of the Anglo liberal imagination is as unreal as the supposed nostalgic Britain of yesteryear loved by Leavers.

Italy

Britain, many people fear, is moving away from the European dream and towards fascism. It’s such an established meme that even the most recent BBC Agatha Christie adaptation was a thinly-veiled analogy about 1930s fascism and Brexit.

Yet people keep on coming to this Nazi hellhole, with the fabled “Brexodus” of migrants leaving the country actually seeing an extra 212,000 people arriving last year, and with record numbers of foreign students, too.

The fascist Brexit Britain theory is held among a minority of Remainers because they’re measuring the country by a theoretical ideal rather than comparing it to other — real — countries. So while the hate crime “surge” following the referendum mostly involved very minor incidents, Italy saw a number of openly racist murders during the late 2010s.

Whether they’re connected or not, Italy has also had a populist Right-wing government in power for most of the past four years, and the Lega may well return — at around 33% in the polls, it is by some distance the most popular party. Italian politics has been, as long as anyone can remember, chaotic and unstable, which makes me wonder if Mary Beard’s Italian colleagues who make her feel “embarrassed” about Brexit have been paying attention to their own country.

France

A central theme of fascism is a love of violence against ideological opponents, and so a visitor from outer space with a vague understanding of our human political philosophy would probably conclude that there was only one fascist state in the EU — France, where the brutality of the police is on a scale that would be unfathomable in England.

Among the recent victims of the gleefully violent French police is a teenager who lost an eye in Strasbourg and an elderly woman in Marseilles who died from her injuries after being hit by a rubber bullet. Just this month prosecutors launched a probe after a video appeared to show a policeman firing point-blank at protestors with a riot control gun.

France is quite far down from Britain in the Freedom International rating, and treats minorities like Roma in a way that would do more than embarrass liberal Brits.

Right-wingers often complain that the horrific behaviour of the French police towards the gilets jaunes has received scant coverage in the BBC; certainly if Hungary or Poland treated their citizens like that, I’m pretty sure it would be on our news more. But then France has always been a politically violent country.

The last mass murder of protesters in England occurred in 1819, when 18 people were killed by authorities in Manchester; in France police in Paris killed up to three hundred unarmed protesters in 1961.

Had anything even vaguely comparable happened during the US Civil Rights era it would have been the subject of about 500 films and even my children in an English primary school would now be learning about it now. But then Anglo liberals are fascinated with the Anglo world; not so much by the continent.

France is different to England, in some ways far more traditional; for example, the same-sex marriage campaign there was opposed by enormous protests, while, like many continental countries, it has a 12-week limit for abortion, when even talk of a 20 weeks-limit would have the Anglo commentariat dressing up in those Handmaid’s Tale outfits.

More from this author

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

Germany

Germany also has strict laws on abortion and its rate is around a third that of England, while it only passed same-sex marriage in 2017, against the wishes of liberal idol Angela Merkel.

But no one cares, because a certain type of Anglo sees Germany as flame-carrier of all that is good and forward-thinking, locked in a battle with the forces of darkness towards the east — Hungary, Poland and especially Russia.

Yet Germany is, if not Russia’s ally, then a close trading partner; it has far, far better relations with the country than Britain does, largely built on energy supply, and Germany’s support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline makes it far easier for Moscow to exert pressure on the west. Europe’s biggest economy also gives far less in international aid than Britain, which donates more than any other country in the continent and is, proportionally, the sixth-most generous.

Scandinavia

Even more so, Scandinavia is seen as an ultra-progressive paradise to British progressives, especially those who — like me — enjoy Borgen. Yet neither Denmark nor Sweden are as social democratic as Anglos believe, with large private sector involvement in areas run by the state over here; in Denmark even the ambulances are privatised, while Sweden is fiscally more free market than the US, and has three times as many private health operations as Britain (proportionally).

Denmark also has immigration restrictions that would have British academics in full “Toby Young has said something” outrage mode — and these were put in place by its centre-Left party.

Are the Danes racist bigots? By any measurement they are among the most tolerant, liberal people on earth — they just don’t share the Anglo elite’s belief that immigration controls are necessarily immoral, a worldview that makes us quite unusual globally.

The Nordic countries generally also have fewer females in top jobs compared with the United States, and a smaller proportion of women studying STEM subjects than Islamic countries like Malaysia and Oman.

British progressives see patriotism, and particularly its violent, heroic element, to be positively primitive. Because they’re not keen on the idea of dying for their country they assume other liberal nations are like them — and yet the Swedes and Finn do not feel the same way and are positively gagging for a chance, way ahead of any other non-ex-Soviet European state.

More from this author

Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Racism

Although Britain has fallen to fascism, it curiously remains by most measurements one of the least racist countries, the least worried about inter-racial marriage, or living next door to people of a different race.

Britain is also unique among European countries in having a tiny education gap between the children of natives and immigrants, whereas in every continental country it is large.

Europeans are far less pro-immigration than Americans are, while Britons are among the most pro-immigration of Europeans, and public attitudes towards immigrants have softened further since the referendum.

Americans and Britons also have stronger sensitives about race than continental Europeans. Recently Italian football authorities decided to take a stand against racism in the game, so they hired artists to paint… monkeys. Many Italians are of course embarrassed by this, but something like that would never have seen the light of day in England.

On a similar note, every December lots of Anglo-liberals are shocked to learn that the Dutch have a festival once a year where people black up as Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”.

Although it is true that the Netherlands is a more liberal — and generally better — version of England, it is different to ours. It also has a far stronger religious element, which might surprise people who rarely travel beyond Amsterdam. Britain’s progressive sibling even has its own Bible Belt, where women are discouraged from wearing short skirts and swearing is even prohibited in some communities.

Healthcare

Perhaps no subject brings out the parochial Brit more than healthcare, most of whom believe that there are two systems in the world: our NHS, and the American system where paramedics rifle through your wallet before giving you CPR. Most remain blissfully unaware that many of our neighbours do not have an NHS. Germany doesn’t. France doesn’t. Switzerland doesn’t.

Germany and France both have the “Bismarck system”, not the “Beveridge Model” used in Britain, and have much better healthcare outcomes.

Suggested reading

How Brexit broke up the 'special relationship'

By Mike Martin

Citizenship

When the Home Secretary suggested that London-born jihadi Shamima Begum should be stripped of her nationality it was widely denounced as racist by UK media, American media, and even by Al Jazeera, the network owned by the not-at-all-racist Qatari state.

Is taking away the citizenship of a jihadi born in the country that odd? The Germans do it, and so do the Danes, and I wouldn’t call either of those countries fascist dystopias. Even the proposal to allow a jihadi bride with two children to return to Norway has brought down the country’s government, which includes the populist-right Progress Party.

But then the whole idea of jus soli — that being born in a state confers some natural right to live there — is far from universal. The French have long had it, and so have the Americans, yet it’s never been the norm in Germany or other countries. And why would it? Different countries have different traditions.

Free movement

Despite all the despair about Brexit taking away our freedom to live, love and travel the world, not many Brits choose to live in continental Europe.

Of those who do are large minority are retirees, especially in Spain, people who aren’t taking the opportunity to explore the world but just want less winter in their autumn years. There are just 6,000 Brits in Poland, for example, about 0.6% of the number of Poles in Britain, while even the numbers in France are small compared to the French diasporas in London, and the age difference between the two groups is significant.

This isn’t a criticism – I live about 10 miles from where I grew up – but the rhetoric of Europeanism and of free movement isn’t matched by the reality.

Likewise with students and their opportunity to explore the continent; lots of young Britons would like to study in the EU, but then several non-EU states take part in the Erasmus scheme too, and the country they most want to live in is, of course, the United States.

International affairs 

People who worry that Britain’s relations with our European partners also need to bear in mind that Italy and France are now so at loggerheads that they’re engaged in a sort of proxy war in Libya, each backing different shady militias in that benighted country.

In contrast Britain, France and Germany have grown increasingly close on military matters since 2016, a by-product of the United States’ inevitable drift away from Europe towards Asia, with various joint statements reflecting the stronger three-nation alliance.

There are two continental Europes: the fictional one of the British liberal imagination, and the reality; both are indeed lovely places, but they are rather different to each other; and despite globalisation, the internet and all that business, the continent still remains very much isolated.

His bad week kicked off with Donald Trump threatening tariffs of up to 100% on a large number of those French goods that actually do sell well abroad — from yoghurt to luxury handbags, champagne, cheese, and cosmetics. This was a retort to France’s unilateral 3% “digital tax” on sales (not profits) on those internet giants, all American, as it happens, with global revenues above €750 million and above €25 million in France.

This “GAFA tax” in turn was a result of French annoyance at the OECD’s perceived inability to come up with effective guidelines for international digital giants to pay tax in the countries they operate in. Other European countries (Italy, Austria, Spain, Belgium) have similar plans, although few have taken the drastic (and very French) tack of a tax based on turnover, not profits. So Macron decided to go it alone, and to go it first.

Suggested reading

Could Macron prove more dangerous than Trump?

By John Lichfield

Trump, the man who once dreamed of having a military parade in Washington modelled on the Bastille Day one, evidently decided to make an example of France, pour encourager les autres.

Then the French President even managed to irk Merkel. It takes talent to annoy the German Chancellor. But she finally snapped  in response to that Economist interview, in which he declared Nato to be “brain-dead”. “I understand your desire for disruptive politics, but I’m tired of picking up the pieces,” she told him. “Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can then sit down and have a cup of tea together.”

Macron knows that Mrs Merkel is scheduled for departure next year; he’d probably already been briefed, ahead of speaking to the Economist that her GroKo (Great Coalition) was threatened by her SPD partner’s Left. Typically, for a top of the heap Frenchman of his particular stripe, he saw her as “a loser”, and dumped on her accordingly. It’s the sort of venomousness they all learn at ENA, the elite government school Macron attended.

Meanwhile, at home, his popularity is tanking. An Odoxa poll last week gave his negative opinions at two-thirds of the voters (with just 34% favourable); another Ifop poll gives his favourables at 33% against 65% negatives.

Suggested reading

How the gilets jaunes went up in flames

By John Lichfield

The French are unhappy with him and the “Jupiterian” (his own word) persona he constructed to counter the appearance of youth and inexperience. As they see it, the country is careening from one crisis to the next, with a chest-thumping president leading a weak government of clone-like technocrats. Added to which is an even weaker parliament full of inexperienced, first-term Macronistas rubber-stamping most of his legislation, and occasionally indulging in woke amendments (the one last week calling to outlaw any advertising for Black Friday in a good example). Absolutely none of this resonates with the country’s concerns, real or imagined.

The French worry about jobs, insecurity, immigration, the economy, crime; they’re angry about the degradation of public services they used to take for granted, from vanishing country train lines to overcrowded and understaffed hospitals. They complain, bitterly and incessantly, of deep “inequalities” — even though France is in fact more redistributive than Sweden.

Macron has argued back that the French economy is doing better. It’s largely true, but his problem is that it’s not perceived as doing well, partly because some stubborn problem areas remain, with an EU record number of long-term unemployed seniors, young people, minorities. Unemployment has slipped from 10% in 2016 to 8.4%, but uncertainty on too many economic variables (taxation, regulation, social climate) means the very last investment businesses make is manpower.

Suggested reading

How the gilets jaunes could save Macron's skin

By John Lichfield

Hence the surprising amount of support for any kind of social protest in the past year. It would be a mistake to believe that because their weekly demonstrations now only gather a few thousand people, the Gilets Jaunes themselves are no longer a headache for Emmanuel Macron. “The Gilets Jaunes aren’t a movement, they’re a symptom,” says a Préfet who received many delegations of his département’s protesters. “They are a clear manifestation of a deep state of discontent, they’re not a coherent party. Among Thursday’s strikers, officially answering a call by the unions, you’ll find many of the same people who were once stopping traffic on provincial roundabouts.”

He points out that, significantly, 60% of the French support the national strike; and that the strikers’ motives and sociology will, in fact, be quite close to the GJ’s. In his view, the current porous anger (superbly theorised by the American analyst Martin Gurri  in his prescient book,  The Revolt of the Public) is expressed in many ways, from the Left to the Right, to the violent and inchoate. The Gilets Jaunes shape of this has run its course; the motivations, which are a mix of reality-based complaints and deep misperceptions, remain.

Paradoxically, Emmanuel Macron’s chief problem may be that he has essentially destroyed any form of democratic opposition. Whenever someone on the Left or on the Right seemed promising, he co-opted them into his Cabinet, and he continues to do so. As a result, voters find themselves inexorable herded toward a single, unpalatable choice. It’s not clear whether Macron has realised that the wasteland he’s leaving in parliamentary politics will drive people away from the democratic process — making them ripe for a Bolsonaro or an Orbán. The scene will be set for a populist to sweep in.

Suggested reading

Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie le Conte

This doesn’t yet mean Macron won’t be re-elected in 2022. In all likelihood, he will be up against his favourite opponent, Marine Le Pen, but it will be a much closer shave than before. She’ll lose. But not because she is seen as a Fascist danger. She’ll lose because of her incompetence. Her 30-year-old niece Marion Maréchal, whose turn will come five years later, may become the Matteo Salvini of France — within the far more stable Fifth Republic constitutional system.

Like her father, she’s a good public speaker, but her policies have wobbled depending on which adviser had her ear (pro- and anti-“Frexit”; pro- and anti-euro) or where she was campaigning: in her Northern constituency, most of her electorate once worked in mines or textile factories, now closed; and like to hear of more state aid; in the South-East Rassemblement National bastions, the burning issues are immigration and crime. Few believe she has effective policies to change either.

But another eventuality is currently terrifying the Elysée tacticians. These thirtysomething white men who all look and sound like Macron are said to be working on pre-emptively neutralising what they call the “clown candidate“: a possible run by a non-politician, probably a popular performer (TV presenter, actor, singer…), à la Beppe Grillo or Volodimyr Zelensky. It could be what the French public is waiting for.

Suggested reading

What does it mean to be French?

By John Lichfield

Yet on Macron proudly strides — with Europe in his sights. Even though he is struggling at home, the President, a petit-bourgeois liberal, imbued with his own undeniable but narrow intelligence, considers himself to be Europe’s natural leader. Since Germany will be preoccupied with its difficult political transition, facing signs of an early recession, and with the UK gone (the UK will be gone, won’t it?), who else is there, after all?

Some of his arrogance comes naturally, but some is theorised: why would he go against the tactics defined by de Gaulle, and followed by Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac? The assumption that nuisance value gives you more clout in international politics has always been a mainstay of French power projection. Macron is simply continuing the tradition.

But alienating friends and not influencing people is all too often coupled with a lack of effort to understand how France’s partners think. And given that many decisions have to be taken unanimously by the EU27, it’s hard to see how he’d make a success of European leadership.

Macron does have a unique way of ruffling feathers — from his Nato remarks to his recent veto against EU membership application for both Albania and North Macedonia and his rudeness to Mrs Merkel. It will trip him again and again: the President will never be a team player. So as the country literally grinds to a halt, Macron stands alone with only his ambition and acolytes for company.