In an interview one week ago in the Hamburg-based newspaper Die Zeit, German satirist Henryk Broder, who had just completed a six-month journey across Deutschland that he called a "Germany Safari," offered a succinct description of his country's default psychological state. "Germans like to be afraid. They are afraid of overhead lines, and underground train stations; of dioxins in their eggs at breakfast, and of climate change," he said. "Fear is Germany's nectar of life."
The German word for fear, Angst, carries an additional resonance of anxiety -- of the type of dread, for example, that has been the mark of Chancellor Angela Merkel's foreign policy decisions on Europe, NATO, and the Middle East in recent weeks. The multiple global crises haven't triggered panic in Berlin -- Merkel, the PhD physicist, is too calculating for that -- but Germany's decision-making has been informed by a dismay of the unknown and an instinct to obsess over parochial concerns. Germany, the longtime geostrategic understudy, has finally earned a leading role on stage only to promptly forget its lines. Its fumbling improvisations haven't inspired much confidence either.
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Once the evangelist of European solidarity, Germany is now reluctant to jeopardize its stability for the sake of a fraying continent. Berlin has made a decision to mostly stay out of budding conflicts, rather than shape a resolution to them. As a grand strategy, this has unsurprisingly proven problematic. With the common European currency spiraling deeper into crisis, the continent's largest economy has managed to organize only piecemeal palliatives as first Greece, then Ireland, and now Portugal teetered on the brink of all-out bankruptcy. And after Germany finally earned in January a long-coveted seat on the United Nations Security Council -- a position it assumed with the promise to "prevent rather than promote antagonisms on the council" -- how did it decide to use it? By abstaining in the March 17 vote on intervention in Libya, thereby aligning with China and Russia against its closest allies, France and the United States. Politicians across the political spectrum in Germany, astounded by their country's newfound diplomatic isolation, have wondered why the government couldn't have voted for the resolution while clarifying that it would not be able to substantially contribute to a military mission. They have not received any clear answer from Merkel. The situation prompted a respected German army chief, Klaus Naumann, to say that he was "ashamed" of his country's stance.
Indeed, it's not that Germany does not have the capacity to serve in a position of global leadership, but that it simply would prefer not to. The psychological roadblocks to a more robust leadership role are deeply ingrained, so much so that Germans are blind to them. One anonymous government official in Berlin dismissed concerns about his country's abstention from the Libyan war, proudly stating that Merkel was too busy attending to the German public's concerns with Japanese nuclear power. When history is written, he told the New York Times, "people will remember 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Kennedy assassination, and Fukushima." It's true that Germans have been obsessed with the nuclear disaster in Japan (like they are still obsessed with Kennedy), but that is evidence of myopia, not of wisdom.
Indeed, Germany registered its abstention at the U.N. vote as if only dimly aware that the decision would have a series of real, and uncomfortable, repercussions. The first came courtesy of Muammar al-Qaddafi, who thanked Germany for its vote and promised he will now advocate for Berlin to have a permanent seat on the Security Council. (Germany's former foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, promptly declared that long-time aspiration now permanently dashed.) Germany has also found itself in the somewhat humiliating position of having to remove four military ships seconded to NATO from the Mediterranean to be certain that they stay out of any potential entanglements -- a move that amounts to a unilateral withdrawal from other NATO commitments that Berlin had made in the region. In a seemingly ad hoc decision to prove her goodwill, Merkel has quickly moved to increase German support of military surveillance missions in Afghanistan. Of course, goodwill only goes so far in high-stakes diplomacy.
Meanwhile, France is working to ensure that Germany is kept out of any aspect of consultations on the current status of the Libyan intervention and future political arrangements, while French diplomats lob vague threats at their neighbor. "Angela Merkel will have to pay for this for a very long time," one French diplomat told French newspaper Le Parisien. Meanwhile, it seems the rebels in Benghazi have turned decisively against Germany as well. Spiegel reports crowds of men in the Libyan city chanting, "Merkel should be ashamed of herself." The magazine quotes one rebel saying, "When we've earned our freedom and can decide for ourselves, we won't be doing any business with Germany."
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