LookingGlass – Report
Download the full LookingGlass No 1/2008
The special relation between Russia and Germany
There is quite a lot of talk – and some whispering – about a special relationship between Germany and Russia. Opinion surveys show that the Russian elite views Germany as a true friend and advocate in the West. Germany is Russia’s principal trade partner. Moscow does not see Germany as a rival in the geopolitical arena that has arisen after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since succeeding Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union has given priority to relations to the West, but has hardened the tone towards Moscow, while the Social Democratic Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also the SPD candidate for Chancellor in the elections later this year, continues to pursue Schröder’s Russia-friendly policy. However, Merkel’s room to manoeuvre in relation to Russia is limited.
“There is rivalry between Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier,” says Stefan Meister, expert on Russian affairs working at the German Council on Foreign Relations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik) in Berlin, “above all over the approach to states like Russia and China. Steinmeier is influenced by Schröder and is deeply rooted in the Social Democratic tradition of Changing through Nearing (Wandeln durch Annäherung). The Christian Democrats on the other hand have always nurtured transatlantic ties, and even if this has been more difficult with Bush as president, they have made the effort. Nevertheless, German foreign policy has not basically changed. Merkel was not originally a supporter of the Baltic pipeline, although she has recently been to the Baltic States and Sweden in connection with it. In this, she has been forced to bow to the demands of German business and German economic interests.”
German business judges future prospects in Russia to be very good, and is not alone in this. Last year, the German magazine Capital asked 600 representatives for the political, business and administrative spheres how they viewed Russia (no. 25/2007). In general they were notably uninfluenced by the worsened political relations, according to many the worst since the end of the Cold War. Nine out of ten attribute Russia with enormous growth potential and consider that one must judge Russia with another yardstick than that used for Western nations – it takes time to build a democracy. No less than 99 per cent considered it important for the future that Germany and Russia should cooperate closely. German companies are naturally well aware of the constitutional shortcomings of Russia, but have far more faith in the possibility to reach special agreements with different decision-makers. Of course, it is uncertain how long they will apply. The agreements reached with Yeltsin, for example, were not valid after 2000, Stefan Meister points out.
“There is a strong business lobby pressing policy towards a Russia-friendly stance. It is just one of many influencing factors, but an important one,” says Stefan Meister. “The business sector has big investments in Russia and is dependent on Russian energy. To the German export economy, the EU Member States are still the most important partners, followed by the USA and then Russia. However, Russia does have enormous growth potential, while the USA and Europe do not. And Russia needs precisely what Germany can deliver.”
“So German business is lobbying strongly”, Meister goes on. “Gerhard Schröder has acted as a business lobbyist and has said many ill-advised things about Russia. Even if Angela Merkel has tried to pursue a more objective policy, her actions show how difficult it is to take a hard line against Russia thanks to pressure from German business. In the close collaboration between business and politics is in fact one aspect of Rhineland capitalism. But naturally things are not so one-dimensional. Business is one important factor, but the debate is public, and the press and politicians have their own preferences. The business sector can send Merkel to drum up support for the Baltic pipeline, but it cannot prevent her at the same time from roundly condemning Russia for its actions in Georgia.”
Relations between Russia and Germany bring up the general issues connected with the return of authoritarian capitalistic states. Should they be met with confrontation and containment, or integration? Choosing the former, can one be sure that confrontation will not itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Choosing the latter, can one be sure of who is integrating whom? An authoritarian regime can just as well be stabilised by strong economic development. Can the West afford to say no to the economic gains which these relations lead to, in particular a Western world that finds itself in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s? In the case of Germany and Russia, relations have an enormous historic resonance. In 1941-1945, the two main peoples of Europe clashed in probably what was the most calamitous war in history, instilling fear in their neighbours (and in fact themselves to) which runs deep. Close relations between them generate mixed feelings in Poland and the Baltic States. The Polish Minister of Defence, Radek Sikorski, has for example characterised the Baltic gas pipeline from Russia to Germany as an energy counterpart to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The fact that Germany has previously represented the most destructively dynamic variant of an authoritarian/totalitarian state on capitalistic foundations makes the relations even more charged and complex. Some fears today are probably more linked to fears that Germany will pursue a policy towards Russia based on economic interest and through a combination of energy dependence and growth opportunities in Russia, and will be amenable to Russian claims; that sufficiently problematic in itself, of course. But there is also a fear – to some certainly a hope – that they will both find a deeper common interest and together dictate terms to lesser peoples.
In a historical perspective, there is the basis for such a special relationship, a feeling of kinship between Russia and Germany, which has been concealed by the Nazi racial war against the Russian population and the Cold War. German writers such as Karl Schlögel and Gerd Koenen have in recent years uncovered this historical layer. For a long time, Berlin was Russia’s portal to the West. It was where Russians fled to after the Bolshevik coup and created a flourishing émigré culture, which Schlögel has depicted in several works, most recently Das russische Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas (2007). Gerd Koenen showed in Der Russland-Komplex: die Deutschen und der Osten 1900-1945 (2005) how important these positive relations have been also intellectually. Russia has always sought its identity in the demarcation with the West, and such attempts have fallen on good ground in Germany, where the search for a demarcation with the West was also widespread, and strengthened after the end of the First World War. Russian culture had enormous impact in Germany both before and after the First World War. It is no coincidence that Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the Conservative revolutionary who coined the term “Third Reich”, was also Dostoevsky’s publisher and an influential interpreter of his work for the German readership.
To many, the “primitive”, “childlike”, even barbaric Russia seemed an antidote to the urbanisation and industrialisation that had been sweeping over Germany with considerable force since the end of the 19th century. Negative and positive stereotypes were remarkably similar in the German debate; Russian “backwardness” could also be seen as “untaintedness”, the barbarism as a panacea for Western enfeeblement. With the help of the inscrutable Russia, it was hope that one could cure oneself of sterile Western faith in reason. Lenin for his part announced that the Bolsheviks’ task was to learn from German state capitalism and with overwhelming force and consistency introduce it in the Soviet Union.
When discussing the influence between the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists, one must not forget that both were inspired by the German wartime economy in the latter phase of the First World War, which had strong elements of a planned economy. That Prussian tradition, with its emphasis on subservience to the state could also form the basis of a sort of national socialism, and it was such syntheses that the Conservative revolutionaries strove for in order to overcome Western individualism and commercialism. To Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918-1922), Germany was essentially antiliberal and antidemocratic. The working class was to unite with the best representatives of the traditional Prussian state idea and win out against French democracy and English liberalism, he argued in Prussianism and Socialism (Preussentum und Sozialismus, 1919). In the opinion of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the “young” peoples – above all Germans and Russians – should unite nation and socialism and form the vanguard for the struggle against the old bourgeois West. One might suspect that such conceptual figures are also lurking in today’s discussions and at they can quickly surface because of underlying dissatisfaction with Anglo-Saxon capitalism.
“It is said that Germans and Russians have a special relationship, and there is some truth in it,” says Stefan Meister. “Russia’s modernisation is influenced by Germans. Peter the Great had Germany as his model for Russian bureaucracy. It was constructed by Germans and strongly typified by Germans. There is German fascination with Russia. No other country has translated so much Russian literature. And the Russians in turn are fascinated by Germans, since they have what the Russians themselves do not have – pragmatism, decisiveness, exactness. There is a mutual attraction between Germans and Russians. To the Germans, the Russians are what they themselves are not.”
The notion of the Russian German complementarity, that the one has what the other lacks, is alive today too, however it is difficult to see a significant ideological superstructure in the form of a developed geopolitical vision as yet, it is more about profit and programmes. Nevertheless there is reason to wonder to what degree the German ties to the West are a result of the shockwaves following the Second World War, which like tectonic movements have forced together above all France and Germany. How much of the Franco-German alliance after the Second World War has been built on complementary needs? Germany has wanted to abandon its Great Power claims and France has wanted to keep them. When Germany was reunited it was feared that the German centre of gravity would move east and that the country would shed the ties which he had forged during the post-war years. In addition: was there not a pent-up need for German national self-affirmation that needed to be released? Well, all this has not turned out to be any more correct than the Fukuyamaist predictions of the democratisation of dictatorships.
“Germany has changed a lot since 1945,” says Stefan Meister, “and allowed itself to be affiliated to the EU and NATO and has developed strong economic relations with the West. There was a debate in connection with the fall of the Soviet Union about whether Germany would become the new European Great Power, become a more independent player and pursue Realpolitik. Nothing came of that. The EU and multilateral relations have remained central to Germany, and this applies also to transatlantic ties. I see no tendency towards Germany distancing itself from this, although the energy agreement can be an exception. German ties with the West are very stable, and German foreign policy in recent years has shown how highly it is prioritised. With Western integration, the Economic Miracle and democratisation, there has arisen in Germany a broad middle class which has adopted all this as its own. The concern over closer ties between Germany and Russia expressed by Poland and the Baltic States is understandable but disproportionate. However, the German government has paid to little attention to this and has not discussed sufficiently with Poland and the Baltic States. One advantage with the EU is that it is now mandatory to do so because these states can veto projects within the EU. Germany must learn to deal with small states.”
The fact that Germany signalled its independence in relations with the USA in connection with the Iraqi war should not be seen as a return to German Alleingang, but on the contrary as opposition to the American counterpart, go it alone. In a sense, it is right for Germany to act as an independent power defining its own interests, and show that it will not follow the USA as before. But there is little understanding in Germany for the French conception that American power calls for a counterweight. What happened in the run-up to the Iraq war was not a German self-aware Great Power re-entering the scene, but on the contrary the most significant manifestation to date that Germany had renounced such ambitions. The conclusion drawn from German history is that it is better to try persuasion than violence, better to pursue integration than confrontation. That which at first glance can seem an unholy alliance between two newly revived Great Powers is in fact a paradoxical cross between two opposed lines of development: newly-awakened Russian power politics and Germany’s distancing itself from its previous power politics. Berlin's foreign policy today utilises independent analysis of the international situation, which in turn is based on lessons learned from the German tragedy.
”Ostpolitik in its new 21st century shape is all about Germany's self-styled civilizing role in international politics”, says the American political scientist Regina Karp, expert on Germany. ”There are strong preferences among German elites in all major parties to view foreign policy as a series of incentives to cooperate. Germany is committed to bring Russia into Europe. There is an across parties consensus that Russia's future is in strong relations with the European Union. This position makes Germany weak in its relations with Russia and open to pressures, especially in the energy field where dependence on Russia will increase significantly over the next two decades. What Germany (and others) consistently miss is that Russia wants to be a power in Europe but not a European power. Russia wants to play in the top league as a critical actor in world affairs, not be subsumed in relations with the EU. In short, Germany underestimates Russia's rather old-fashioned nationalism and misses the point that international politics is also about clashes of interests that cannot be easily reconciled.”
”It is hard to imagine that German power would be acceptable to its neighbours without Westbindung. That said, ties to the West are fraying due to the weakness of the institutions that served Germanies Westbindung in the past. The question is: Is there anywhere else to go for Germany? Probably not. Mitteleuropa in its historical dimension no longer exists, NATO enlargement put an end to it. Germany cannot move too closely to Russia, opening itself to pressures from Russia and engaging not in bridge-building, which is what Germany wants, but in the defamed Schaukelpolitik. German leaders must carefully navigate between dependence and entrapment. In short, there is significant danger with regard to Germany being pushed towards Russia due to weak institutions, ie. EU and NATO, and its energy dependence. Given Russia's current politics, Moscow will be tempted to exploit this, reverting to its own historical preferences of sowing divison among its neigbours in the hope of enhancing its own power positon.”
But just as the case with Fukuyamaism, it can be that there is simply a need for more time for the tendencies to become clear. It is difficult not to consider what can happen when extrapolating current tendencies, and to test different intellectual simulations. Suppose that the economic cooperation and interdependency between Russia and Germany is further developed; furthermore that the EU is weakened to the extent that Germany’s embedding becomes relatively ineffectual; that the prestige and attractiveness of the Anglo-Saxon model is reduced so much that a combination of strong states and market economy becomes the new predominant concept, and that Great Power politics return in a way evocative of the time before the First World War, as feared by Robert Kagan among others. That would mean a number of alliance options between different Great Powers, and a Superpower, the USA, weakened but militarily superior for the foreseeable future. One scenario is that Russia is drawn towards China in a geopolitically cohesive front against Western democracies. This is indeed one of the arguments for adopting a conciliatory attitude towards Russia, that one wants to avoid pushing the country in an easterly direction. There is however considerable distrust between China and Russia and the alternative is that Russia may be drawn closer to Europe. It is a basic tenet behind German foreign policy that Russia belongs to Europe. If the EU loses the initiative and transatlantic relations are weakened, it could bring about conditions for an alliance between Germany and Russia. So far there are no substantial signs of such shifts in the German perspective, but if the perceptions of the growing significance of economic relations are proven true, it will certainly have political consequences.
These scenarios presuppose another two factors, both uncertain: 1) that Russia remains economically successful and 2) authoritarian. Dependence on the price of oil is enormous; the Russian economic upswing is closely linked to the price of oil, and more general industrial development is still in the future. But more is going on than is often understood in the West:
“For the first time, Russia has tried to use its natural resources to modernise,” says Stefan Meister. “It is ineffective, due to the political system and bureaucracy, but the price of energy is so high that in spite of dissipation, some success had been achieved. Putin invests in innovations, even though Russia produces only a miniscule proportion of the world's technological development. Russia cannot compete through cheap labour. It is dependent on gas and oil prices, but it has also developed an enormous service market, which is the second pillar of Russian growth. From it, a middle layer is slowly emerging – a middle layer which has certain needs. The decline in welfare of the 1990s has now been recouped, and the standard of living has risen enormously for the majority. This can increase participation in politics. If one runs a small business and invests, one wants a functioning legal system.
“The population has accepted that it does not decide over the leadership, and as long as it creates a certain prosperity it is also legitimate. But it is quite crucial that the authoritarian state must be able to run the public sector – education, medical care – efficiently. I am sceptical as to that. There is no critical voice or opposition, and only competition and opposition can lead to an efficient public sector, which requires checks and balances. But whether this will lead to democracy, I do not know.”