The Trump administration has thrown European security and the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into disarray. In Part III of Rules of engagement, Cathrin Schaer considers what this means for Germany where, in many ways, a whole country based its national and cultural identity on the post-war, international rules-based order. To read Part I, with Andrew Gunn reporting from Kyiv go here. To Read Part II, with Andrew Anthony reporting from London, go here.
There’s a war going on about a day’s drive from where I live in Berlin, historic alliances are being torn asunder, Germany’s far-right is rapidly rising and the “international rules-based order” isn’t really following the rules any more. But heck, you wouldn’t really know it.
It’s been one of the warmest springs on record so far and, as usual after a long, grey winter, local bars and restaurants have moved tables and chairs back onto Berlin’s streets. Cycling back from a canal-side beer garden as the sun goes down, you wonder (as you always do at the end of winter) where all these delightful, laughing, beer-quaffing people were hibernating up until now.
In other words, it’s pretty much life as normal here in the crowded, dirty, always-entertaining capital of Europe’s biggest economy.
But of course, as anyone who reads the news is well aware, it’s not. Although Berliners are doing all the usual things – working, booking summer holidays, buying groceries, walking the dog – there’s an uneasiness running through daily life.
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it feels a bit like a crack has opened up somewhere below us. We can’t quite see it, but the earth is shifting beneath those café tables. And we’re not sure if the crack is going to close again quietly or whether it will widen into a deep, dark chasm that we’ll all eventually be sucked into.
Is that overly dramatic, I ask at our table in a Turkish restaurant on the weekend, or do other people feel that way, too?
“There’s definitely a lot of uncertainty about the future at the moment,” one German diner agrees. When Spain and Portugal went through a nationwide power blackout in late April, she says, she immediately thought a war was starting. Previously, she might have thought someone had damaged a wire or driven into a power pole.
“You’re right, the existing world order is being broken down,” one of the older guests, an Englishman, said, somewhat resignedly.
“Back in the 60s, we were scared of one thing really: the atomic bomb. But in some ways that was easier to deal with. This is much more diffuse. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, or what China or Russia or Trump or the markets will do next.”
Over her hummus, another German at the table added: “I used to be quite proud of the way Germany worked through its war-time history and the Holocaust. But now, I just feel like it was all fake. We learnt nothing. And I really don’t know if I can trust the government ever again.”
It’s unclear whether she is referring to the government’s support for the far-right Israeli regime – support that has upset a lot of people because of the way it flounts the system of international justice that actually arose after World War II, and which Germany allegedly supports – or whether she’s upset about the government’s current drive to spend more on guns and bombs.
Defence spending surge
Militarisation has been anathema to many ordinary Germans for decades, precisely because of the country’s wartime history. Since then the Germans have been the good guys, the pacifists with the money for foreign and development aid, not tanks.
But now, thanks to the Trump administration’s comments about the Nato defence alliance and “European freeloading”, its wobbly support for Ukraine and ongoing threats to pull American soldiers out of the country, Germany has become the fourth largest spender on defence in the world.
According to a March report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany’s expenditure of $88.5 billion on its military in 2024 amount to an 89% increase in such spending over the past decade. The country hasn’t spent this much on its army since the Cold War ended 26 years ago, the institute said. The newly elected government is even said to be considering bringing conscription back.
None of that really fits with Germans’ post-war, pacifist self-image. “How times have changed,” Joerg Lau, international affairs correspondent for local newspaper Die Zeit, wrote in Berlin-based foreign affairs magazine Internationale Politik Quarterly late last year. “The idea that we are still living in a ‘post-war era’ is overshadowed by the premonition that it could also be a pre-war era.”
Europeans may have thought they had it all figured out, but for various reasons – including the Trump administration, the economic and social hangover from the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – they are being forced to ask themselves who their enemies are, who their friends are, and even who they are. That reassessment is particularly challenging in Germany where, in many ways, a whole country based its national and cultural identity on the post-war, international rules-based order.
The script, with the dull-but-happy “end of history” finale, seems to have been torn up.
Cathrin Schaer is the Listener’s Berlin correspondent.
