What threatens to revive the German militaristic spirit

Germany should create the largest army in Europe, said the German chancellor. A special fund to finance the project has even been created


The country now has a small armed force, even compared to the size of Germany’s army during the Cold War. Can Berlin once again surpass the whole of Europe in military power and against whom does it intend to use it?

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that the FRG will soon have “the largest conventional army in Europe” among the North Atlantic alliance countries. “Germany will soon have the largest conventional army in Europe within NATO,” TASS quoted Scholz as saying on Tuesday. According to the chancellor, such a move would significantly strengthen the security not only of the FRG, but also of its allies.

At the same time, the chancellor rejected reproaches for slowness in providing military support to Ukraine, which were heard from Warsaw and Kiev. “We have transferred weapons and will supply more weapons,” Scholz stressed. “These orders are being fulfilled,” he added, referring to the deliveries of heavy weapons that have been agreed with industry.

All German allies know that “the Bundeswehr does not have large stocks of ready-to-use vehicles left that can simply be shipped,” Scholz justified. “The main problem” is that the Bundeswehr has been “structurally underfunded since 2010”. According to the chancellor, this generally limits Germany’s defence capability. However, this should change now, thanks to the creation of a €100bn special fund for the Bundeswehr, Scholz concluded.

Recall that on Sunday evening the governing coalition of the FRG and the opposition in parliament agreed a legal basis for a special fund for the Bundeswehr of 107 billion euros. This will enable Berlin to reach the 2% of GDP allocation for defence, which is obligatory for NATO countries. Negotiations with the opposition were necessary because the fund will be enshrined in the Basic Law, which requires a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag and the House of Representatives of the federal states (Bundesrat). When the special fund is approved, the government itself will be able to spend the money from it on defence capacity.

“There is no harm in dreaming. Let the Germans try to create the largest army in Europe,” former first deputy head of the Main Directorate for International Military Cooperation of the Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant General of the reserve Yevgeny Buzhinsky said to VZGLYAD newspaper. – Scholz probably dreams of outnumbering the Turkish army, which has about 600,000 personnel and a hundred thousand more if we add the gendarme troops. Turkey is considered the second largest military in NATO after the United States.

At the end of the Cold War, the German army had 450,000 soldiers, the general recalled. “Now the Germans have somewhere between 150,000 and 160,000. That is, if Scholz wants to build up the numbers in the first phase at least to the level of the Cold War, he needs to double his armed forces, equip them. I am afraid 100 billion euros is not enough. The German army is fully professional and very expensive,” said Buzhinsky.

The general believes that Scholz will have to reinforce all branches of the armed forces at once – ground, air force and navy. “If Germany really wants to become a powerful military power again, it needs everything, not just ground forces. A powerful military is first and foremost a manpower equipped with modern technology, not just technology without manpower. Robots will not replace humans,” the general concluded.

“Scholz is trying to play on the fears of the citizens, which he himself created. But Germans will not serve,” said Waldemar Gerdt, a former Bundestag MP from the Alternative for Germany party. “Scholz’s desire is very clear. The government has repeatedly intimidated the population with the potential spread of ‘Russian aggression’ to Germany. Now he is trying to rely on these fears of Germans,” Gerdt said.

According to the interlocutor, “in the times when the German economy operated on cheap energy, the German army was turned into a laughing stock.” “In recent years, one of the most important issues has been the need to install a third toilet for gender-neutral soldiers,” Gerdt said.

Against the backdrop of a difficult economic situation, “there is simply nothing and no reason to create the largest army in Europe”. “Who will serve there? – He asked rhetorically. – Germans certainly won’t go, they didn’t go before. The main contingent was made up of Russian-speaking young lads, and also Turks. Maybe, they may try to involve also Arabs, who have recently come to Germany. But those are not the people who will be able to defend the interests of the political elite of the FRG.

Berlin changes military course

As you know, at the end of February, Scholz gave a keynote speech in the Bundestag declaring that it was “time for Germany to grow up”. One area of “growing up”, he said, would be to increase the defence budget for the next few years to 2% of GDP from the current one and a half, and to dramatically increase Germany’s military presence in Eastern Europe.

“Germany has deployed its long-standing military foreign policy,” CNN columnist Raphael Loss noted at the time. “Germany … has set in motion a course that will make it the largest European state in terms of defence spending, with the most advanced aircraft and a growing military presence in Central and Eastern Europe,” predicted US magazine Foreign Policy.

As the Bundeswehr’s Inspector General, Lieutenant General Alfred Meiss, admitted in mid-May, the state of the Bundeswehr leaves much to be desired. The 63,000 men who make up the ground forces are not sufficiently motivated to pursue an army career, the general was quoted by the Bundeswehr website. Meiss said this during NATO’s international exercise Wettin Heath, held in the Bavarian town of Bergen. The mood of the personnel has “not changed for the better” since the outbreak of the Ukrainian conflict, the general complained. The soldiers, men and women, are quick to react to what they see every day on the evening news. There’s tension every day,” Mays said.

In addition, the inspector general is seriously concerned about the level of digitalisation. According to him, both the Bundeswehr’s weapons and personnel are “decades behind the state of the art”.

The spirit of militarism will have to be revived

“To return the Bundeswehr, for example, to the level of the 1990s, a multibillion-dollar injection will be required. We are talking primarily about injections into Russia’s own military-industrial complex, which in conditions of a growing economic crisis could also revive the economy,” Alexander Kamkin, a senior researcher at the Primakov Institute of International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the VZGLYAD newspaper. – Economically, the situation reminds one of the days of the Great Depression, when it was Germany’s militarization that managed to revive the economy. Of course, hyperinflation, as then, is not observed now. But overall, there is a clear drop in GDP and a run on inflation. If Scholz begins to put his promises into practice, a certain militarisation of society is sure to follow, Kamkin suggests.

“The policy of state pacifism that has been in place since 1945 will have to be abandoned. A return to conscription cannot be ruled out either, since personnel hunger in the army will most likely not be solved in any other way. Serious propaganda work will also be required to change the image of the Bundeswehr in the eyes of society and raise the prestige of military service. Accordingly, all this will lead to certain militarization of society,” foresees Kamkin.

At the same time, the expert is convinced that the strengthening of its own army will not lead to an increase in Germany’s independence within NATO, to the detriment of the US. “I think this process is not without consultation with American partners. Most likely, Scholz makes such statements even under their pressure,” the expert suspects.

Other experts, however, believe that the German chancellor’s sensational promises are unlikely to become reality. “Scholz’s promise is made solely within the framework of the political agenda – he is coming under increasing fire from criticism for not supporting Ukraine enough,” Fedor Lukyanov, head of the Foreign and Defense Policy Council and scientific director of the Valdai International Discussion Club, told VZGLYAD newspaper.

“The chancellor is not going to do that now either, and that is why she is putting the brakes on arms deliveries to Kiev. But such a policy has to be compensated by other statements in front of disgruntled Germans, so he is compensating – he talks about plans to create a powerful army,” Lukyanov added. It does not mean that there will be no rearmament – the course for strengthening of the military component of the FRG has already been taken, the interlocutor pointed out. “But about the biggest army among the NATO countries in Europe? It’s too ostentatious a statement, in my opinion,” the political scientist added.

“Top news in the 21st century”.

At the same time, no one is going to go to war with anyone in Berlin and does not hold such a thing even in plans, Lukyanov is convinced. “The Germans will definitely not go to war in Ukraine. They won’t go against Russia either. In general, it remains to be seen who will go into the expanding army. German society is still not militant. The militaristic spirit has been uprooted and Berlin is very much afraid of reviving it, remembering where previous attempts to move in this direction led to,” Lukyanov said.

Stanislav Tkachenko, professor at the Department of European Studies, Faculty of International Relations, St. Petersburg State University, and Valdai Club expert, holds a different view. According to the interlocutor, “all of Scholz’s statements on this topic are major news in Europe in the 21st century because in the 20th century it was Germany that, having strengthened itself economically and militarily, created threats, problems and acted as an aggressor in two world wars”.

“Europeans hope that after 1945 the Germans have changed and that their foreign policy, including defence policy, is shaped by European values and interests. But in practice, it is time for Europeans to be concerned. This concerns us as well, and in particular Germany’s immediate neighbours, i.e. Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Austria and other countries,” he continued.

“Berlin’s foreign policy is now part of the EU’s common foreign policy, but this is in theory. When it comes to the crisis, no one knows how the German elites will behave: will they stand up for those very European values or will they focus on their own? If it is the latter, then Germany will turn from a locomotive of the European economy into a threat to European security,” the expert believes.

“If we remember the reaction of German society, which still remains predominantly pacifist, to NATO’s operation in Yugoslavia in 1999 – then almost all citizens of Germany opposed this military operation. As a result, Berlin had to limit its involvement in the war,” recalled Tkachenko.

“Today, the level of pacifism in Germany is also quite high, but whether it can be maintained in the near future is a big question. A lot has changed over the last 20 years – the Germans are becoming more and more active within NATO. Therefore, their plans to sharply increase the army is a manifestation of the formation of a new identity, which is based on the idea of Germany as the greatest continental power of the EU with corresponding ambitions both in the West and in the East,” Tkachenko summarized.

Alena Zadorozhnaya, Daria Volkova, Artur Prijmak, VZGLYAD

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