Germany, the Indispensable Nation
Franz Pokorny
Normal politics bores me. My attention span is too short for the slow boring of hard boards — I like conspiracies, anthrax balloons, multi-thousand-year genealogies traceable back to Minoan Crete, men in smoky backrooms pushing little figurines of Putin, Xi, and klutzy Keir Starmer to and fro on the grand chessboard, the Catiline connivances of unelected liberal and labour peers against George Osborne’s tax credit cuts. This trusty epistemology has proven time and time again to put me in the advantage over my less credulous contemporaries when it comes to discerning the inner logic behind events and generating actionable advice.
A previous series of articles in J’accuse postulated the German-Chinese relationship as the fulcrum of world politics. Germany’s confounding behaviour during the Eurocrisis — its resistance to emphatic calls from no less a figure of moral authority than Barack Obama to „show leadership“ and voluntarily forego its current account surplus vis-a-vis the European periphery — was explained as Schäuble’s daring thrust to integrate the entire continent deeper into German value chains, fortify German export competitiveness, and secure new markets in Cathay. A whole intellectual Bayeux tapestry of elite sinophilia was even rather fancifully woven back to Leibniz — an illusion which, however unimpeachable its claim to describe the reality of the early Bundesrepublik may be, has been exploded forever in my mind by the dearth of cultivated discourse at this year’s ball season. O tempora, o mores!
It is a truism that the venture of world politics cannot get off the ground without a forest of shadowy personal ties, antediluvian networks, green gloves et al. But let us supplement these with a „structural“ account of the Beijing-Berlin Axis. An industrial Germany is, historically, an import-dependent Germany — the German strategic mind is moulded not by the trauma of 1920s inflation (the drum perennially thumped by the centre-right brain trust’s less highbrow figures, the Tichys of the world who seldom publish outside their native language), nor by 1930s unemployment (as their neokeynesian critics — Adam Tooze and his ilk — contend), but by the British „hunger blockade“ in WWI. Before all else, the young Bundesrepublik’s economic planners strove to orient industry to the productions of surpluses to aliment the Rhine’s overburdened population. Since Germany’s existing advantages lay in high-tech capital goods and chemicals — that is, precisely those products that had facilitated the rapid industrialisation which allowed the country’s population to blossom — postwar German policy has striven to promote „international development“ — a desideratum that naturally expresses itself in an anti-imperialist, „multilateralist“ ideology that made Bonn a willing partner in American-led globalisation (although the lack of a German-Indian relationship comparable to the Sino-German understanding must surely be considered a point in favour of a conspiratorial, LaRouchian account of German policy).
The persistence of the export model beyond early postwar exigencies owes largely to inertia. Technology-driven agricultural productivity gains in the postwar period have sufficed to eliminate the element of necessity in the importation of comestibles — while Germany today is not entirely self-sufficient in agricultural production, this is more a matter of a conscious decision to exploit comparative advantages than the hard constraints imposed by the scarcity of arable land and the level of agronomic know-how. The proliferation of civilian nuclear energy could theoretically have done the same in that sector: energy dependence on Russia was always — to use one of the German language’s more grating anglicisms — ein Nice-To-Have; a charitable donation made out of a mixture of social embarrassment and the goodhearted Rhenish spirit of comity when confronted with Green moral insistence. German surpluses in the current year are a product of small-c conservatism, a preference for the tried over the untried; for the good life near at hand — the form of existence necessitated by autarchy and the possibilities opened up thereby are incongruent with the materialist, pacifist ethos of the Federal Republic, and statesmen up to Scholz — whose Zeitenwende was the only sovereign decision against the export economy a bundesrepublican government has yet laid down — have found themselves unwilling, if not unable, to unravel the delicate political bargains sustaining Germany’s industrial compact.
The export model is the central, unquestioned fact of German political life, the hard constant to be solved around, batting away every challenge to its predominance and constantly demanding new sacrifices. When the model came under pressure in the 1990s and 2000s, it was the SPD that had to be thrown on the bonfire. The Agenda 2010 reforms, pushed through by Gerhard Schröder’s government in 2002, alienated the party from its working class base and laid the turf for Merkel’s fiscal consolidation and the CDU’s decade of preeminence until Merkel’s Woke rampage in the summer of 2015 did to that party what the Agenda had done to the Social Democrats. When, thanks to the vagaries of Germany’s culture wars, the „energy transition“ become a second constant in the equation, it was the transatlantic relationship onto which the burden of adjustment fell — Nord Stream 2. All this bore fruit in the Merkel regime’s twilight years, when a rapidly industrialising China opened its bulb to soak up German industrial surpluses, securing the country the modicum of prosperity to allow this Brandenburg parson’s daughter to pump the Orontes up the Rhine to only modest social dissent.
This floating world split open with the first spring buds of 2022, when the war in Donbass flared up and energy prices soared to the high heavens. The CDU, having failed to form government that winter in a moment of internal chaos, had left the country at the whims of a weak chancellor dominated by a junior coalition partner beholden to the Beltway war party. Although some creative effort by heroic, never-to-be-named „consultants“ kept German goods flowing across the Caucasus and through Central Asia to, the dream of free trade and „multilateralism“, which nowhere found more fervent and dogmatic enthusiasts than on the Rhine (these memes having long been met with gentle smirks by an Anglo-American establishment blithely content to slip into the age of the BRICS), was over.