A "Greater Germany" in Military as Well as Economic Terms?

Some time ago I read Emmanuel Todd's discussion with Olivier Berruyer of the German economy's weight within the European Union and was struck by the pointed difference between his assessment and my previous impressions. I equated Germany with the nation-state that is the Federal Republic of Germany, with its population of some 80 million and GDP of $4 trillion. However, Todd described an increasingly coherent economic space encompassing Western Europe's other German-speaking territories (Switzerland, Austria); the territories associated with them for centuries through the Prussian and Austrian Empires, especially about the Baltic and Adriatic coasts (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Croatia, while the landlocked but also formerly Austrian territory of Czechia is also in there); and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and Sweden for good measure; within which, by virtue of trade, investment and the influence they bring, German interests are dominant.

The resulting entity, recalling the Pan-German dreams of another era, and which might be spoken of as an economic "Greater Germany," comes to 200 million people with a GDP of $8 trillion that can seem more than the sum of its parts (bringing together as it does unique strengths from the Dutch monopoly of cutting-edge photolithography to the financial weight of Switzerland and Luxembourg). A much more satisfactorily superpower-like entity in itself than the Federal Republic, with the help of partners like France, it is the dominant force in an undeniably superpower-like European Union of 450 million people with a $16 trillion economy.

Still, this Greater Germany had distinct limits, not least in the military sphere, which have only since been underlined by the discussions of Germany's elevation of its defense spending--the proposals of February 2022, however heavily they lay on Germany's citizenry, a far cry from what it would take to make Germany stand as tall in Europe and the world militarily as it does economically, never mind realize any superpower aspirations.

It did occur to me that Germany could endeavor to integrate the armed forces of the "Greater Germany" into its own in some fashion--a process that had already begun in a small way, with the Netherlands has been integrating their ground forces into the German army. As it happens, this process has already been long ongoing, specifically entailing the Netherlands integrating each of the three brigades of the Royal Netherlands Army into one of each of Germany's three army divisions. Taking place over many years, according to the English-language statement on the web site of the Netherlands' Ministry of Defense, this past March saw the completion of the process with the last Dutch unit, a Dutch light armored brigade, now integrated into a German armored division.

What is one to make all this? Certainly examining Germany's ground forces, like those of other major West European states, one is struck by their relatively understrength quality--the Bundeswehr’s "armored divisions" on paper being something a lot less numerous and heavily armed than the label implies. (On paper Germany has two "armored divisions." In reality it lacks enough main battle tanks for one division on the old standard.) One may add that Germany has long strained to make good the shortfalls in its case, in part because of difficulty recruiting enough volunteers to simply keep the gaps from being too disruptive. Germany's filling out "understrength" formations with whole units from its neighbor and longtime NATO ally, with which it has long had a special bilateral association in the German/Dutch Corps founded in the early 1990s, and which just so happens to use much of the same equipment German forces do (like Leopard 2 tanks, Boxer armored fighting vehicles, and Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers), seems one way of compensating for the inadequacies in short order.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense emphasizes in the aforementioned statement that "the Netherlands remains in control of the decision whether and where to deploy its military forces," but one may presume that there is an expectation of cooperation in any really important eventuality requiring the dispatch of an entire division. That said, the Netherlands is but one European state, and represents a relatively limited part of the potential "pool" of Greater Germany's military power--but that this happened at all can seem suggestive indeed of the direction in which Germany would like to move, and in which at least some of its neighbors and partners may be prepared to follow.