Has
Angela Merkel No Shame?
Nov 28, 2024
Sławomir
Sierakowski
During the
former German chancellor’s long tenure, she made a series of landmark decisions
that ultimately rendered Europe less safe from threats both foreign and
domestic. But judging by her forthcoming memoir and accompanying promotional
tour, all the blame lies with others.
WARSAW –
When Angela Merkel left the German chancellorship in December 2021, after 16
years in power, she had a credible claim to being one of the greatest
politicians of the twenty-first century (so far). Now, after three years of
deafening silence, and with her legacy in shambles, she is promoting her
forthcoming political memoir. Her silence was more persuasive.
She gave her
first interview to the German weekly Der Spiegel, defending major policies that
helped to shape Germany and Europe as we know them today. Among these were her
appeasement of Russia, which adhered to the Cold War principle of “change
through trade” (Wandel durch Handel); her welcoming of more than one million
refugees (mostly from Syria and the Middle East) in 2015; and the phaseout of
Germany’s nuclear power plants.
A fourth
issue concerns not a policy but the lack of one. Owing to Merkel’s failure to
do anything noticeable to adapt the German economy to this century’s
technological challenges, the country remains under-digitalized, with
embarrassingly poor internet access, an absurdly overgrown bureaucracy,
governing institutions that still use fax machines, and once-dominant companies
that can no longer compete with their American and Asian counterparts. German
highways and bridges are crumbling, trains regularly run late, and major
infrastructure projects (like Berlin’s rail station and airport) take two or
three times longer than they would in Poland or even Romania.
Where once
Germans heaped scorn on Poles for supposedly being foolish and incompetent, now
the tables have turned. Visit Germany nowadays and you may find that you cannot
even pay for breakfast with your credit card. You will have to run to an ATM,
but you may find that it is broken or does not accept Visa or Mastercard (as is
the case two-thirds of the time). And don’t even think about connecting to
Wifi. You will find better access (and a more dynamic information-technology
sector) in Belarus – a Russian vassal state.
Moreover,
Merkel did nothing during her 16 years in power to prod the industries that
Germany prides itself on – chemicals, pharmaceuticals, internal-combustion
vehicles – to adapt to the twenty-first century, and now it shows. The German
army, meanwhile, is regularly an object of ridicule in the European press.
If Germans
prefer to use fax machines and avoid the internet, that is their business.
Unfortunately, though, their government’s decisions affect all of Europe.
Merkel’s moral argument for providing aid and shelter to refugees in 2015 is
uncontroversial. But surely she should have known that immigration on such a
massive scale would produce a populist backlash, not only in Germany but
throughout Europe. Merkel made a show of standing up for liberal democratic
values, but her policy yielded an assault on them. The result was weaker
liberal democracy and less immigration.
Similarly,
by stubbornly insisting on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream II pipeline
projects, Merkel and other German leaders empowered a dangerous dictator who
had revisionist designs on Eastern Europe. And by blocking NATO from offering a
“membership action plan” to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 Bucharest summit,
Germany effectively invited Russia to invade. Anyone with an elementary
knowledge of Russia’s foreign policy knew that the Kremlin would exploit the
resulting uncertainty.
In her
Spiegel interview, Merkel blames others for this litany of failures. She says
she was not the only one against a NATO accession process for Ukraine and
Georgia; but is that supposed to excuse her? Europeans took their cues from
Germany in those days, and Merkel’s voice mattered more than others – as she
well knows.
Similarly,
Merkel is still repeating the canard that Nord Stream was a purely economic
project, even though it obviously was not. In defending appeasement of Russia,
she argues that Poland and Ukraine did not mind having gas transit through
their territories as long as they profited from it. But the controversy around
Nord Stream was that by circumventing Poland and Ukraine, it diminished
whatever influence they had vis-à-vis Moscow. Merkel decided that cheaper gas
was more important than Polish or Ukrainian security. In the end, her approach
brought an energy crisis and was one of the causes of a new land war on the
European continent. The result was no cheap energy and no security.
Merkel’s
decision, following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, to phase out
Germany’s nuclear power plants also empowered Russia by making the German
economy even more dependent on Russian hydrocarbons. Again, such choices could
still be defensible if we lived in blissful ignorance of Vladimir Putin’s true
character. But after 2008, and especially after 2014, there was no longer any
question about who he was and what he intended to do.
Merkel
herself was repeatedly warned. As early as 2006, Radek Sikorski, then Poland’s
defense minister, was comparing the Nord Stream project to the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the secret 1939 agreement between Hitler and Stalin
not to attack each other). Five years later, he was still beating the same
drum, warning that Poland and Europe had more to fear from German passivity
than from German power.
Merkel
ignored these arguments. During her long tenure, Germany tried to trade Eastern
European security for cheap energy, abandoned an existing renewable-energy
source, and gave nativist populists a potent campaign issue. She made Europe
less safe from threats both foreign and domestic. Today, with Germany mired in
a leadership crisis and buffeted by new global headwinds, Merkel continues to
tell herself that she did everything right.
Sławomir
Sierakowski
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