Germany’s foreign policy: What lessons can be learned from the Schröder years? By Charles Grant
The German general election on September 18th is of massive interest to people all over the world. Because Germany is a large and influential EU member, its foreign policy matters not only to other European countries, but also those further afield, such as the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese. If the opinion polls are correct, and the German people elect a new government, the country's foreign policy will change. The international record of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-Green coalition has been very mixed. There have been achievements, but most of them came during the first term (1998 to 2002). There have been mistakes, too, mostly during the truncated second term (since October 2002). During the last three years Schröder has revived Germany’s close relationship with France, in ways that damaged ties with the US, the UK and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The result has been a Germany with less diplomatic influence than it had seven years ago. One measure of Germany’s relative weakness is that its campaign for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC) never had much chance of succeeding. Schröder and Joschka Fischer, his Green foreign minister, deserve credit for giving Germany a more ‘normal’ foreign policy. During most of the post-Second World War period, the ghost of Nazi militarism ensured that German foreign policy had a strongly pacificist tone. Thus during the time of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship, Germany was very reluctant to commit troops to international peacekeeping missions. And Germany never committed its forces to combat, thus staying out of the Gulf War coalition assembled by the US in 1990-91. The Schröder government had the courage to argue that Germany should, like other middle-sized developed countries, be willing to reinforce foreign policy with the deployment of armed force. So Germany’s airforce took part in the NATO-led bombing of Kosovo in 1999 and its special forces fought as part of the anti-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan two years later. Schröder and Fischer risked their careers by making the case for those interventions in the Bundestag, in the end winning the votes and the arguments. Partly as a result of those interventions, Germany has become a major provider of peacekeepers. In recent years it has sent troops to countries such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and it has sometimes had as many as 10,000 soldiers serving abroad at any one time. Normalisation has also meant a more assertive German foreign policy. Schröder, unlike other German post-war chancellors, has talked unashamedly about the German national interest. For example he has declared that Germany will no longer be the paymaster of the EU (though his actions on the EU budget have hitherto been much softer than his rhetoric). And he has campaigned hard for a German seat on the UNSC, against the traditional German line, which has been to favour an EU seat. Overall, the attempt to forge a more normal foreign policy is commendable. However, any country which starts to promote its national interest in a more assertive manner is bound to ruffle feathers. The way in which
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