A Return to Weltpolitik?

The question of Germany's possession of, and attitude toward, world power status has been ceaselessly jawed about for a century and a half now. The issue, however, has not always been equally topical. It seems to have become more so this past decade, in the wake of an embrace of economic neoliberalism at home that had the conventionally-minded in the business press and economic analysis nodding approvingly; its championing of the same in Europe's fiscal crisis in which it has been seen as a leader (in part, because of the slighting of the international character of the bailout that the U.S. alone furnished); and in a context of intensifying conflict in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East (and neocon doubts about America's commitment to its old role), the increasing militarization of German policy. (Thousands of German troops are now deployed in about a dozen other countries from Mali to Afghanistan, while German defense ministers propose new missions to the Middle East, with more of the same on the way as the country ramps up its defense spending and openly discuss policy changes from a renewal of conscription to the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal.)

At its most extravagant some of the talk has a whiff of Kaiser Wilhelm about it ("taskmaster of Europe,", "newest superpower," "indispensable nation," "too rich, too big, too powerful, to shrink from its responsibilities"). And considering it all I find myself comparing Germany's position with respect to hard power then and now. Looking at Angus Maddison's historical data, and Paul Bairoch's oft-cited historical data on manufacturing shares, it seems that in 1913 Germany had a little under 4 percent of the world's population, and about 15 percent of its manufacturing output--making it number one in Europe and second only to the United States in the latter area.*

Moreover, there were significant potentials for further expansion, under the right conditions. A Pan-German movement that it was imagined could peacefully bring the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Low Countries and Scandinavia into some sort of union with Germany, had it accomplished its maximum goals, would have given the new entity about 7 percent of the world's population, and at least 22 percent of its industry, while assuring the continued dynamism of German manufacturing through its access to raw materials and markets, leaving it more populous than America, and even more narrowly competitive with it industrially. Expansion beyond those possibilities, militarily at the expense of France and Russia, for example, held out still greater potentials.

Even realizing such possibilities only partially would have considerably extended Germany's preponderance in Europe, which was still the center of the world in a good many respects--with the continent accounting for nearly three-fifths of the planet's industrial output, while the empires seated there exerted formal control over most of Africa and Asia as well. In short, there was some foundation for the great power aspirations, even if, as Bloch, Wells and others rightly observed at the time, pursuit of them was virtually certain to result in catastrophe (as indeed it did). To a lesser extent this was still the case in the 1930s when a German government made its second bid for global power (which ended even more catastrophically, not least for a Germany that was divided and occupied for a half century after).

By contrast today Germany accounts for little more than 1 percent of the world's population, and 7 percent of its manufacturing--punching above its weight by an even greater margin than it did a century ago, but all the same, in a rather lower weight class. An expanded Pan-German entity is a fantasy confined only to the most extreme nationalists. And however powerful Germany could become in Europe from its limited base within the structures of the European Union or informally, Europe is far from being the power base it once was, in a world full of other power centers, while the trend toward broader multipolarity seems nearly certain to continue.

Of course, if some of the talk echoes that of an era long past, even the most aggressive German commentators today do not proclaim anything like the agenda of formal imperialism inside and outside Europe that the country's Establishment did circa 1913. Still, all things considered, the rhetoric can seem disconnected from reality.

* Germany's lead over Britain can appear slight (14.8 to 13.6 percent according to Paul Bairoch's figures), but there was a significant qualitative disparity. Britain's manufacturing base was, if large, comparatively backward, being disproportionately invested in old lines like textiles and of deteriorating competitiveness in regard to productivity and quality of output in areas like steel; and heavily dependent on defense orders and colonial markets for its sales.

Has the American Right Changed its Mind About Europe?

Recently I had occasion to revisit the theme of the passing of the "European dream"--the hope, or rather, the illusion that in a world where the United States had come to be identified with neoliberalism and neoconservatism the countries of Europe, individually and also collectively through the European Union (EU), would provide an alternative model more appealing to progressives--no leftist paradise, it is true, but still, socially more egalitarian, ecologically more sustainable, in foreign policy less militaristic, certainly to a degree that would matter and, from this standpoint, leave the world better off.

Such views derived some support from the inability of successive European governments to do more than chip away at protections for workers that looked extravgant to Anglosphere eyes; from Germany's successfully pioneering methods for pioneering the expansion of renewable energy, and the EU's emissions trading schemes; from the French and German opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the expectation was shared by people in and outside Europe--the term "European dream" I use here the title of a book by Jeremy Rifkin making exactly this case, while the sociologist Emmanuel Todd made the same case, not least in his book on the anticipated decline of the "American empire," in which drama the last act would be Europe's own ascendance as Britain with its financial weight and Russia with its military might and natural resources joined in the building of an even greater community extending from "sea to shining sea."

Of course, all this quickly waned after 2008 as European elites, long fantasizing about remaking the continent in the image of post-Thatcher Britain or post-Reagan America, not only grappled with an economic crisis of colossal proportions, but saw an extraordinary opportunity to cram neoliberalism down the throats of a public that had more strongly resisted the policy than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They did not hesitate to be brutal with the working classes of the continent, especially in its smaller and poorer nations--with not only their claims to social and economic rights, but their more classically liberal civil and political ones trampled. I am no admirer of Silvio Berlusconi, but the EU's squeezing him out of office was hardly democratic, and even as one prone to think of talk of Fourth Reichs and the like as melodramatic, it was impossible not to get the feeling watching Berlin impose its diktat on a horrifically brutalized Greece--and a French President who had kind words for Vichy unleashed the state security apparatus in a brutal assault on protesters against his predictably centrist "fake left, go right" course.

At the same time Germany, while in respects paving the way for a world getting its energy from renewable sources, has seen its policy substantially remain in the grip of coal barons, whose filthy, polluting production has meant that even as the solar panels and the wind turbines spread, the country's greenhouse gas emissions remained high--in spite of that emissions trading scheme, which did not amount to very much. And the European states that balked at invading Iraq in 2003 did not hesitate to back regime change in Libya, Syria, Ukraine; or display great viciousness in a militarized response to the refugee crisis to which those "regime change" attempts contributed so much.

As one considers all this it is worth remembering that the more progressive, greener, pacifistic version of Europe was the object of enormous contempt on the part of right-wing American commentators. Remember Eurosclerosis? Remember Donald Rumsfeld's witless, illiterate rhetoric about "Old Europe and New Europe?" Remember the inanity that was the renaming of french fries and french toast Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast? One hears less of such things than before, and that does not seem accidental. It would be an exaggeration to say that the American right has come to love Europe. But, as Europe has changed in accordance with their ideals, they have at least come to be more accepting of it.

The German Economic Miracle (?)

I remember the hype back in the 1980s and 1990s regarding the reported ascent of the German and Japanese economies--how it seemed they were edging the U.S. out of the number one spot. I remember, too, how that talk faded during the '90s amid fuss over globalization and the New Economy, and how supposedly the Eurosclerotic Germans with their unaffordable welfare states, and the rigid Japanese, were missing that train as such dynamic firms as Enron were, in Thomas Friedman's words, "discovering the equivalent of cyber-oil."

Of course, that hype faded in its turn (even as it remained the conventional wisdom), but the appraisal of at least the German economy became less harsh as it turned out to be, after all, a global champion in manufacturing exports (doubling the share of these in its GDP in 1990-2009, and outdoing the four times' larger U.S. to become number one in the world), and weathered the Great Recession better than just about anyone else, and laid down the law in the European economic space it dominated. (It was also far from trivial to the essentially neoliberal commentariat that its government increasingly embraced their preferred theories, not least in the Hartz IV labor reforms, cheered by the economically orthodox, not so cheered by, you know, actual working people in Germany or anywhere else.)

Naturally one hears, from time to time, reference to not just the country's successes of the present, but those of its past, touching in particular on its recovery from the Second World War, which they are quick to chalk up in a vaguely racialist way to German propensity for hard and attentive work, and to the home-grown variant on neoliberal, supply-side economics, "ordoliberalism."

Of course, as is always the case, the reality is more complex than this morality tale so beloved of those observers who like to talk about "culture," and the virtues of hard work and right-wing economic prescriptions--as I was reminded when researching Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity (principally about Britain's economic history, of course, but its premise was that what the country's rivals did mattered, making Germany's ascent part of Britain's own story).

The reality is that before the war Germany had been the world's number two industrial power for decades, substantially due to the opportunities afforded by its unique geographic position in nineteenth century Europe (and the ways in which it improved on them through conquest, especially in the Franco-Prussian War, not least its scoring the continent's richest industrial territory as spoils).

Moreover, catastrophic as World War II was for the world, and for the tens of millions of Germans killed, maimed and rendered homeless or even stateless, and virtually all the rest whose lives were stunted or scarred by the experience, German industry did relatively well for itself. In the 1930s and 1940s German industry gorged itself on military spending and the spoils of war to such a degree that even after the losses of wartime destruction and post-war occupation and confiscations the German industrial base was still ahead of where it was pre-war. In itself that would seem to have been enough to lay the foundations for German industry's leap into the "Fordist" era, while it did well, too, out of the post-war, which is to say, the early Cold War in which it was all too clear that a strong Germany was far more useful to the Western alliance than a weak one. The result was astonishing debt relief; the Marshall Aid that compensated for confiscations by the Allies and enabled its trading partners to afford its products; and the very light defense burden it bore compared with America, Britain, or even France; along with the massive stimulus of America's military Keynesianism in the Korean War period and after. (Far from insignificant, too, was German capital's finding the country awash in cheap labor with all those millions of ethnic Germans expelled from the East refugees in the West, and millions more guest workers come north from the shores of the Mediterranean. Oh, and an undervalued currency, too.)

All that made the miracle possible, a miracle that it must be remembered was only one miracle among others in that period. (There was an even more spectacular Japanese miracle, after all, and great leaps on the part of the Italians and French and even Soviets in these decades, while the U.S. economy, the biggest and richest of all, went on exploding.) And like all the rest the German miracle was running its course by the 1970s, Germany like all the others slowing down as post-war boom turned to post-post-war bust. Still, starting out in a different place Germany's advance put it well ahead of the rest of the European pack (and save for the U.S. and Japan, the world pack) at a moment when the terms of the race changed profoundly. (The market got crowded, the rate of profit fell, the rate of growth slowed, and the neoliberal turn delivered an age of anemic growth indeed.) That left rather little room for anyone to make up the distance, perhaps especially within the framework of the European Union whose consumption of German goods has been so crucial to its success.