Europe’s foreign and security policy is in bad shape. All eyes are focused on Germany’s new coalition to see how it will deal with the big strategic issues that will affect every EU member state, writes Judy Dempsey.
What happens in Germany matters. As the European Union’s biggest economy and country, Berlin was pivotal during the global financial crisis, the euro crisis, the Russian crisis, and the migration crisis. Some member states viewed Berlin’s role as hegemonic. Others viewed it as a leadership necessary to keep the EU together – especially since other EU leaders were so weak.
Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor who spearheaded these policies, was also a great supporter of the Good Friday Agreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol. Her outlook was based on her philosophy of strategic patience, especially for the big economic and security issues. She rarely let the big dossiers – Russia, China, transatlantic relations, and Ireland – leave her desk. They were the remit of the Chancellery, not the foreign ministry. She had an insatiable appetite for detail and juggled Germany’s interests, which were crucial to the country’s export-driven economy, with the values upon which the EU and democracies are built and what she herself believed in.
Olaf Scholz, her successor – who was her finance minister – will make a big effort to retain these dossiers, but it is not a given. Annalena Baerbock, the Green Party foreign minister, is determined to put values at the core of her foreign policy. Baerbock is not naïve enough to believe that any country can discard interests, but with German public opinion on her side – especially a younger generation acutely sensitive to human rights, climate change, values, and more European integration – Baerbock can exert influence.
Take China, for example. The Greens know that Germany’s economic interests and trade relationship – and indeed Europe’s – with Beijing are huge. China has overtaken the United States as the EU’s largest import source for goods. All the more reason to use that clout. Yes, China can retaliate by threatening embargoes if the Berlin government increases its criticism of China’s human rights record, its ineluctable shift towards authoritarian rule, and its untransparent procurement procedures and weak intellectual property rights. But would Beijing go down that path?
Germany is too big inside the EU, and its relationship with the United States is too important for Beijing to threaten Berlin. It picked on Lithuania, which for a small country has taken an admirably tough stance on China’s human rights records and has opened a Taiwan office. Beijing sent its wolf warrior diplomats into overdrive, but China’s crude tactics are backfiring in many EU member states. That is why the German coalition must defend its values. The more united the EU is, with support from the United States, the better.
As for Russia, Germany has a deep, ambiguous and historical relationship with Russia. Angela Merkel went out of her way to stop, or at least contain, the conflict in eastern Ukraine. However, the Minsk Accords and the Normandy Format talks she brokered with France, Ukraine, and Russia are unravelling. In retrospect, it was a mistake that Merkel did not include the United States or the EU.
Meanwhile, Russia is using its gas as a geo-security weapon and its military build-up against Eastern Ukraine in much the same way as Belarus’s discredited leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is using migrants to divide the EU. It’s all about testing Europe.
In short, with this new German government ensconced, the EU must finally act strategically in a way that can combine values with interests. Europe as a bloc has the economic power to do just that. Putting interests first is doing the EU – and its credibility – a disservice.
Judy Dempsey is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe and Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Europe.