“The week where decades happened: how the west finally woke up to Putin”, The Guardian
Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic editor, 4 Mar 2022
From Germany’s shock military spending rise to sanctions unity, leaders have come together over the war in Ukraine
Lenin, a Russian leader as obsessed with history as Vladimir Putin, famously said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” This has been the latter. The little more than a week since Russian troops invaded Ukraine has indeed shaken the world. Change has been telescoped, national taboos broken, moribund institutions given purpose and the spectre of a nuclear war in Europe has been raised for the first time since the 1980s. Germany has called it Zeitenwende, the Turning Point. It will not just be Ukraine that is changed for ever by this war.
But there is something specific about how war accelerates change. In The Deluge, his classic work on how society is changed by war, the British historian Arthur Marwick wrote: “War acts as a supreme challenge to, and test of, a country’s social and political institutions. War results not only in the destruction of inefficient institutions (such as the Tsarist regime in Russia), but also in the transformation of less efficient mechanisms into more efficient ones”.
The west has surprised itself with its ability to respond to the misery inflicted on the people of Ukraine. All kinds of unimaginable images emerge. The German Bundestag cheered an extra €100bn (£82.4bn) on defence spending, followed by 100,000 people on the streets in protest at Putin. Matteo Salvini, the great Italian defender of Putin, bringing white tulips to the Ukrainian embassy. Liz Truss, the UK foreign secretary, attending a meeting of the EU foreign affairs ministers meeting. The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, sharply criticised by human-rights groups and others over the years for his hardline border policies, sitting on a school bench opening his arms to refugees.
It was just a fortnight ago that the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock had appeared at the Munich security conference to caution the crisis was not the moment to try to execute an 180 degree turn on the decades old German policy banning the sale of arms into conflict zones. Josep Borrell, the EU external affairs chief, batted away calls for Ukraine to join the EU, saying they already had an exceptional trade deal. He spoke about the “power of the EU’s language”, distancing himself from his own one time claim that the EU must learn “the language of power”.
The next day – Sunday – all the talk was of Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic initiative, and the concessions the French president had extracted from Vladimir Putin. Even on Wednesday, on the eve of the invasion, Baerbock gave an interview saying it was impossible for Germany to impose the strongest sanctions because of “the massive collateral damage” to Germany’s own economy. Putin could end up laughing at us, she warned.
Yet by the following weekend, two days after the invasion began on Thursday, Germany’s coalition government had started that 180 degree course correction. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his cabinet agreed to send Ukraine with 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, lifting restrictions on German weapons being sent to conflict zones by third parties in the process. The next day Scholz told the Bundestag in his trademark matter-of-fact manner that he was injecting €100bn into German defence, but protecting other budgets, and defence spending would rise above 2% of German GDP. The MPs from government and the CDU gasped and cheered in equal measure. David McAllister, a leading figure in the German CDU and chair of the European parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, admits he nearly fell off his chair when he heard the plans.
The promised growth catapults Germany into becoming the third largest spender on defence globally, behind only the US and China. GlobalData forecasts an annual German defence budget of $83.5 billion in 2024, equating to a 45% increase on 2021’s budget of $57.5bn. That is bigger than France and the UK. Overnight Germany became not just an economic but also a geopolitical powerhouse. Polls said 78% of Germans backed the decision.
Matthias Matthijs, Europe senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “It is quite astonishing how fast this government broke pretty well every taboo in postwar German foreign policy.”
He attributes the scale of the change to a visit to Berlin on Sunday by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. “I came to Berlin to shake the conscience of Germany,” Morawiecki said.
Sophia Besch, from the Centre for European Reform, points out Scholz himself insisted he had not acted due to pressure from allies, but due to Germany changing its view of the threat posed by Putin. “The truth is the world did not change last Thursday,” she said. “Berlin for years has ignored the warnings that came from many of our allies and from Putin. We need to learn the lessons of how this could have happened and how we could have been so blind. We are leaving behind some of our old beliefs – that economic interdependence prevents conflict, but I am not sure we know yet with what we are replacing this belief.”
Sergey Lagodinsky, a German Green MEP, argued Germany now needs not just to spend more money, but to shift its mindset without becoming militaristic or interventionist. It needs to discuss how to adopt escalation, including military escalation, as leverage as part of its foreign policy toolbox. Foreign policy is not just a peace policy, Friedenspolitik in German, but also the ability to deal, manage and face conflict.
But the new German coalition, faced by the need to extricate itself from Russian energy, may have to challenge other orthodoxies. The Green economics minister, Robert Habeck, does not rule out extending the use of coal-fired power plants. “This blind, naive, one-sided relationship of dependency on Russia for energy for decades is one of the biggest strategic mistakes of the past 20 years,” Lagodinsky said. “Now we are stuck. It represents a medium- and long-term problem”.
But Putin’s recklessness is not just causing a revolution in Germany, but across Europe.
Sweden abandoned its policy of not sending weapons to conflict zones, agreeing to send Bofors AT-4, a single-use anti-tank launcher, to Ukraine, plus medical supplies. In Finland a bombshell poll showed 53% want Finland to join Nato. “This poll flipped everything on its head,” said Charly Salonius-Pasternak of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Moreover the poll showed that if voters were told that politicians said they backed the plan the support went up to 2/3rds. “You could sense the president, Sauli Niinisto, realised the whole defence dynamic was changed.” Niinisto, seen as one of the best readers of what Putin is thinking is now rushing to hold urgent talks with Joe Biden in the White House.
Even in Switzerland leaders had to catch up with the public mood in the space of a weekend, and by the Monday an emergency cabinet promised to implement the entire EU sanctions package. The decision does not formally end a policy of neutrality that has survived two world wars, but there is now pressure to track down the many oligarchs that live in the country. There are also calls for an increase in the defence budget