Kundnani Hans - The Paradox of German Power

During the past two decades, German historians have described the post-war Federal Republic above all as an Erfolgsgeschichte, or success story. They have told of how it emerged from the catastrophe of 1945 to become a successful democracy, how it atoned for the Nazi past and developed a liberal political culture, and how it became part of an integrated and interdependent Europe. The story culminated in, and was confirmed by, reunification in 1990which followed the first peaceful and successful revolution in German history. The reunified Germany was, as Heinrich August Winkler put it, a post-classical democratic nation among others, firmly integrated into NATO and the European Community. Thus Germany had finally abandoned its Sonderweg, or special path, and completed what Winkler called its long road west: Germanys equivalent of Francis Fukuyamas idea of the end of history.

Germany had had a complicated and ambivalent relationship with the West. Many of the ideas that were central to what Winkler has called the normative project of the West came from German Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant. And yet German intellectual history also included a darker current of nationalism that first emerged in the nineteenth century, became increasingly anti-Western, and culminated in Nazism and the Holocaustwhat Winkler calls the climax of the German rejection of the Western world.

What made reunification a completion of this long road west is that it was a Western solution to the German question. At the time of reunification, some had feared the so-called Berlin Republic would become less Western than the Bonn Republic. But, at least during the first decade after reunification, those fears did not become reality as Germany confirmed its commitment to the West. In particular, there seemed to be a symbiotic relationship between Germany and Europe: German reunification was only possible in the context of European integration and seemed to prove that German problems can only be solved under a European roof, as Konrad Adenauer had famously put it. Conversely, reunification was also a catalyst for further European integration and in particular the creation of the euro. In 2000, Winkler could write that fears about Germany had lessened in the decade since reunification.

However, since the euro crisis began in 2010, there has been a need for an epilogue to the triumphalist narrative of German post-war history. The crisis thrust Germany into an extraordinaryand, in the history of the EU, unprecedentedposition. The whole of the eurozone looked to Germanythe largest creditor in a crisis of a common currency consisting of sovereign statesfor leadership. But, fearing the emergence of a transfer unionthat is, one in which fiscally responsible member states subsidise fiscally irresponsible member statesit has resisted a mutualisation of debt in Europe, and has imposed austerity on others in the eurozone in an attempt to make Europe competitive. The approach has in some ways deepened rather than narrowed the divide between surplus and debtor countries: while unemployment in Germany has reached the lowest level since reunification, it has risen to extraordinary levels in the countries of the so-called periphery. The cost of adjustment in the single currency, Andrew Moravcsik writes, has been borne disproportionately by the poor and the powerless.

Against the background of this clash between creditor and debtor countries in the eurozone, collective memories from Europes pre-1945 past have both informed the discourse and been instrumentalised by it. The most dramaticbut by no means onlyexample is the mutual animosity between Germany and Greece. Some Greeks are once again demanding war reparationswhich, according to a government report published in 2012, amounted to up to 162 billion.