Reluctant Meister - How Germany's past is shaping its European future
By Lord Stephen Green, Member of the House of Lords
It is a great honour for me to stand here today, amongst friends from former times when I was a
banker in a competing house, as well as other friends from my time as Trade and Investment
Minister of the British Government. Both roles brought me often to Germany - a country I have
loved and found fascinating ever since my schooldays.
To start with, it was the German language which captivated me. I was first sent to Bavaria as a
fourteen year old during the summer holidays to improve my German. I don't think I made much
progress over the three weeks - although I was introduced to what the mother described as
'richtige Bergwanderungen' - a love which has also remained with me ever since. But oh, the
German language! All those wonderful mouthfuls. You could construct things in German, as if it
were a Lego language. German compound words are often so expressive - or so hard to translate that English (that great borrower from all languages) has simply taken them on board as they are:
Angst, Apfelstrudel, Bildungsroman, Blitzkrieg, Dachshund, Delikatessen, Doppelgänger, Edelweiß,
Glühwein, Götterdämmerung, Kristallnacht, Lebensraum, Leitmotiv, Poltergeist, Realpolitik,
Schadenfreude, Übermensch. Untermensch, Volkswagen, Wanderlust, Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist.
And many others. I became enthralled by the mixture of the good, the profound, the innocuous and
the sinister. More and more, i wondered what that mixture revealed about the culture those words
came out of.
Then there is the literature that the language unveils if you grapple with it. Above all, Faust - which
I studied (not nearly thoroughly enough) at university. And all that philosophy (ditto). And the music.
My first serious brush with classical music was at school. A friend of mine introduced me to the
autumnal tones of Brahms: first, the Variations on a Theme by Haydn - especially that
extraordinary seventh variation, which soared into a heaven which was entirely new to me. Then
the First Symphony - on an old LP whose cover photo showed woodland trees with their colours
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turning. Over the years, my musical education has broadened out, as I came to know and love the
intricate geometry of Bach, the agility of Mozart, the passion of Beethoven, the exquisite melodies
of Schubert, the grand panorama of Wagner, the sumptuousness of Strauss. Other musical
traditions have transported me too. But the breadth, depth and intensity of German music has
never been quite matched.
But even in music, there is sometimes a worm in the apple. Just two weeks ago I was at one of
those wonderful London Proms concerts - a full Brahms programme: the Academic Festival
Overture, Nänie, the First Symphony - and the Triumphlied. Not often performed, beautiful - and
composed in 1870 in celebration of the glorious successes of the Prussian military in France. A
harbinger of the tragedy which was to come.
Two generations have passed since the disasters of the first half of the twentieth century. It can
take a leap of imagination to put ourselves in the minds of those who surveyed the Germany of
May 1945. The moral and spiritual collapse had been so complete, the trauma so shocking: it
would have been easy to despair. It seemed all too obvious that Stunde Null was the end of all that
had been. It was not obvious at all that it might be the beginning of something new. And when the
Federal Republic was born in 1949, it would have been understandable if there had been some
nervousness about what this new German democracy would be like. The past history of German
government had, after all, varied for almost a century between the unsatisfactory and the appalling
- from the half-democracy of the Kaiserreich through the unstable and ineffective Weimar republic
to the abyss of the Third Reich.
Against this background, the achievement has been all the more extraordinary. We are familiar
with the economic story: Germany became, and is to this day, one of the powerful industrial
machines on the planet. What is less often celebrated is the political phenomenon. By any
standards, the Federal Republic is one of the world's most deeply rooted democracies. Since the
watershed year of 1969, the colour of government has changed along a spectrum between right of
centre and left of centre in response to shifts in the electoral sands, in a way which is almost a
classic sign of mature democracy at work: change has taken place at a frequency which is high
enough to be evidence of real responsiveness, and yet low enough for stability and effectiveness.
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Since 1949, Germany (first West Germany and then the unified country) has had eight chancellors;
over the same time frame the US has had twelve presidents and the UK has had fourteen prime
ministers - and Italy has had over sixty governments.
Gone completely is the aggression, the expansionism and the militarism. Instead, this new society
has confronted the ghosts of its past and searched its soul with a painstaking - and painful thoroughness which should be an example to the world. (And it is not only the obvious suspects
who ought to be quietly challenged by this German struggle - Japan, for example, or Russia - but
also others who have sins in their pasts which they have not fully acknowledged: Britain and
France, just to mention two other leading European states.)
By any reasonable standards, all of this is an astonishing achievement, which was completely
unexpected in May 1945 and for which there are few if any parallels in human history. It would, in
fact, be tempting for the dispassionate observer to conclude that the question of the German
identity and of its place in Europe had been resolved. Tempting - but wrong.
For three centuries the German lands were the playing fields of European power politics. Then
came a further century in which a unified, defensive/aggressive Germany sought to assert itself on
the global stage with catastrophic consequences. There followed what can now be seen as a short
interlude, ending in 1989, of ideological competition which both suppressed the European identity
and denied Germany its natural place in that identity. And now, in a new millennium and a
generation after the fall of the wall, the Federal Republic finds itself playing the role of reluctant
leader in the most ambitious political project in all European history - the construction of the
European Union. Yet at the same time, there is a serious question - an existential question - about
its very identity and its whole future.
For Europe is now in long term relative decline. It is no longer the energetic, ambitious and
aggressive continent it was when the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the
British set out over the oceans to plunder, trade, and colonise. It is no longer the continent whose
technical brilliance the Chinese emperor so notoriously spurned when Lord McCartney sought to
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open commercial dealings with China in 1793. And it is no longer the frontline of a Cold War
between two global nuclear superpowers. It has retreated from being the self-defined centre of the
world to being what it had been before the fifteenth century - a corner of the Eurasian land mass. It
remains fertile, populous and wealthy, but it is profoundly uncertain about its identity and its future.
For since the epochal year of 1989, the rise of Asia has driven a new and historic shift of the centre
of geopolitical gravity. The reemergence of China as a great power, and the modernisation of so
many countries in Asia, has contrasted sharply with a sustained sluggishness in the old economies
of western Europe. Even if all had gone well for the Europeans there would have been a decline in
their share of the world's income; and they would have had to become used to dealing with new
actors on the world stage. But in fact the European performance has been weakened - particularly
by extreme stress within the euro zone but more generally by its disfunctionality. Europe is left
struggling to find a secure foothold in a global marketplace which is becoming more and more
competitive - and where its ever more sophisticated eastern competitors are conscious that their
time has come.
China and the United States may be wary of each other; but both recognise what is happening and
know that Europe has lost much of its significance. And China's mood is in some ways reminiscent
of Germany's in the late nineteenth century: conscious that its time has come; determined to be
taken seriously by the existing occupants of the world stage; and burning with not-so-ancient
grievances against some of those occupants (for Germany then it was France: for China now it is
Japan in particular - but also the Western powers generally).
Europe's response to the new reality has been underwhelming. It has been hobbled, first, by the
complexity of a Union which now has twenty eight member states and will have well over thirty
within the next twenty years or so. Its cumbersome structure cries out for reform; but the process of
building consensus for change is painfully slow.
Secondly, there is widespread though inchoate disaffection amongst its citizens, who feel very
distant from the corridors of power. All too often they want to be assured of a predictable continuity
which is not in fact available. This public mood has surely been exacerbated by the absence of any
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clear leadership at the Union level, ready to set out the right blend of vision and home truths about
Europe's place in this changing world.
This identity crisis has become acute. The aspiration to achieve 'ever closer union amongst the
peoples of Europe' is now openly challenged in many parts of Europe. Few believe that this Union
is one in which 'decisions are taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen' - to quote
the words in the Treaty which follow the statement of that aspiration. And few have much
confidence in the emergence of a European identity with any real hold on the loyalty of the people.
Yet the facts of geography, and therefore of geopolitics, bind us together - as the present migration
crisis has so graphically and tragically reminded us. So do the historical and cultural realities we
cannot deny.
In 1946, amidst the ruins of war, Churchill proposed a United States of Europe (not that he
expected Britain to join it!). And the notion of combining sovereignty was not new then either. In
1940, he had offered France in its hour of need a union with Britain. Intriguingly, there is a still
earlier version of a (regional) United States in Europe: the proposed United States of Greater
Austria. This idea was floated in a fascinating book by a lawyer in a group around Franz Ferdinand,
heir apparent to the Austrian throne, in 1906. It envisaged a reconstruction of the Austro-Hungarian
empire into a group of sixteen national states with a federal structure under a constitutional
monarchy. All the issues of population mix that bedevilled the interwar period are considered
methodically in the proposal. Could it have succeeded? We will never know: but it offers a poignant
glimpse of an alternative future, had catastrophe not been ushered in with the assassination of
Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914.
What we have instead is a European Union which is on a unique journey. It has progressed from
an economic starting point, from a coal and steel community through a common market and the
European Economic Community, to what is now the European Union, through a series of treaties
which have continually increased the degree of integration.
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So what is the ultimate end of the European project? This question exposes the divergences and
the fractured identity of Europe. At one end of a spectrum are the British, who would have the
Union be a single market but very little more than that. At the other end are those who see growing
political and economic integration on the basis of an increasingly harmonised socio-economic
model as both inevitable and desirable. To be clear, even the former position involves a strong
Union, because full blooded implementation of a single market requires a lot more integrative
leadership and management of the European Union as a whole than many British eurosceptics
would want. But the difference between the two ends of the spectrum is nevertheless a wide one:
is Europe little more than a trade bloc, or is it indeed a project of increasing political cohesion
which might even converge in the end towards something that is indeed more like a United States
of Europe?
For better or worse, it is striking how familiar the complexity of the European identity is to the
German psyche. It has deep historical resonances from the long standing and subtle balances
within the Holy Roman Empire. Germany is a land where over a long history people have seen
themselves as involved in layered identities: the all important Heimat, the region, and at the same
time the German culture which was defined by their language. The Third Reich sought to suppress
all separate identities in its levelling state; so, later, did the highly centralised GDR. But the new
Germany clearly shows that the ancient strong regionalism of the German lands is still a vibrant
source of identity which carries real political significance.
In the darkest days of the Second World War, one of the most interesting - and poignant - of the
small resistance groups in The Third Reich is what became known as the Kreisau circle (named by
the Gestapo after the country estate of one of its leaders, Graf Helmuth James von Moltke). Moltke
was amongst the very few Germans at the time who regarded the fall of France in 1940 as an
unambiguous evil, not as a cause for exhilaration. Their thinking about a new order after the
demise of the Third Reich would seem outmoded in some ways (particularly as it was conditioned
by the widespread sense that the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic had been part of
the cause of Germany's social and moral breakdown and of Nazism's success). But what was
striking was their commitment to and advocacy of a united European governance within which
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regional entities with cohesive cultural and historical identities could exist together in trust and at
peace. Most of the Kreisau circle were executed in 1944: but the issues they wrestled with have an
obvious and continuing relevance in the modern Europe. The Kreisau circle is much more than just
a historical curiosity, more than just a footnote in the story of the Third Reich.
Today's German regionalism is highly stable because of its deep historical roots. Because of that
history, Germany is well-prepared for today’s world in which the European identity needs to be able
to enfold and embrace various specific layers of identity - local, national, cultural, European without demoting or cancelling any of them. Other member states are finding this harder. The
centrifugal challenges to the British, Spanish and Belgian identities have varying origins and may
or may not prove fatal to the integrity of these member states. But they certainly mean that radical
regional decentralisation is inevitable. And the EU offers a context in which regional identities can
find their own level, either within an existing member state, as German regionalism has done so
successfully in the German Federal Republic - or independently in their own member state, as - for
instance - the Irish experience demonstrates.
So what will the structure of the new Europe end up like? Over the last six decades the project has
evolved, not according to a clear blueprint but in a general direction on which there has not always
been complete consensus, and with a considerable measure of improvisation. The future will see
more of the same. Somehow, the Union is like one of those great cathedrals of medieval Europe:
those who laid the foundation stones knew they would not live to see the completed building, and
also knew that the design would evolve as the generations went by. Some of those cathedrals
collapsed because they were just too ambitious. Some remained incomplete for hundreds of years
(famously, Cologne). Others were never completed at all. Many of them came close to bankrupting
the cities which undertook their construction. Yet many also became structures which were
perhaps beyond even the boldest imaginations of those who laid their first foundations.
This reminds us of something about the European project. The Europeans have already been at it
for sixty years or so: it has evolved over the years; and plainly there is a long way to go. We will not
see its completion or its final form in our lifetimes.
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So will this work? Will Europe be able to become a flexible, cohesive and strong economic and
cultural competitor and counterpart to those new Asian giants? The answer is not clear. Might the
cathedral fall down? Might it bankrupt its builders?
The broad German answer is clearly that building this cathedral is worth the risk and the struggle.
In the last analysis, Europe is more than just a governance structure. And it is certainly more than
its current preoccupation with the travails of the eurozone, its loss of geopolitical influence and the
ambivalence of the British. For Europe is also the history of how we got to being a prosperous
union of peoples - a history which is both sublime and tragic, and endlessly moving. It is also a
continent which is a treasure trove of beauty - for all the destruction it has seen. From its ice age
art to its neolithic pottery, through classical Greece and Rome, through the Renaissance to the
Romantics and down to the present day: the fruits of European spiritual, philosophical and
aesthetic exploration are, taken as a whole, the richest, most diverse, most vibrant, most searching
anywhere on the planet.
As a result, Europe does have core values which have been hard won through history. These
common values are the heritage of a tradition which has been shaped by such towering figures as
Galileo, Erasmus, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Darwin - and of course many others too.
Out of their different perspectives, and out of the many and painful sins we Europeans have
committed over the generations, has emerged something profoundly important for the whole world
of the twenty first century: a commitment to rationalism, democracy, individual rights and
responsibilities, the rule of law, economic effectiveness and fairness, social compassion, care for
our planet; and even the sense that any European loyalty cannot be the last step or the highest
stage of identity - that in some emergent sense we are also citizens of the world. This too is implied
by those European values: this too is therefore part of Europe's proposition to the world. All this is
worth our loyalty: all this is the basis for a European patriotism. And - for all its Angst about its
future - no member state resonates with this vision more strongly than Germany.
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Does Germany's leading role in Europe imply a special responsibility and some risk? Yes, it does.
Will the evolution of Europe change Germany? Yes, of course it will. But to the question
'Deutschland aus den Fugen?' I would reply: certainly not!
Keynote hold 18 September 2015, on occassion of the seventh „Denk ich an Deutschland“conference
in Berlin.
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