This is ironic, given that the right wing of German politics is a postwar offshoot of the Catholic Deutsche Zentrumspartei from the Imperial and Weimar periods.
These days, the only thing to which Germans seem to devote their passion for religion from former times is financial probity.
Nothing moves Germany’s political class like the project of tamping down inflation. It’s often suggested that this has its roots in the period of hyperinflation that struck the country from the end of 1921 until late 1923. This crisis was a profound shock to Germans.
In the period between August 1922 and November 1923, the aggregate inflation rate was on the order of 1.02 x 1010 . It is perhaps a measure of the intensity of this trauma that the period has spawned a corona of myths.
The most enduring of these is that hyperinflation was responsible for bringing Hitler to power. Although this is a compelling narrative, it has some problems regarding its factual underpinnings.
Hitler didn’t rise to power for a decade after the end of the crisis, and during much of the intervening period the NSDAP (Nazi Party) was very much in the political wilderness.
One might think here of the after-effects of the post-2008 financial crisis. They still resonate but are not what’s driving voter willingness to embrace the far right.
The more immediate precursor to the rise of Hitler was the catastrophic deflation brought about by Heinrich Brüning’s government in 1930. It was partly intended to improve German competitiveness (which it failed to do) and damage the labour movement’s power (in which it was more successful).
It was this deflationary period amid the worldwide depression, coupled by the systematic dysfunction of the German party system, that constituted the backdrop for Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and subsequent Machtergreifung (seizure of power).
Still, irrespective of its historical background, the German obsession with controlling inflation and related matters far outweighs faith in the redeeming power of Jesus.
Thus, it was jarring to learn that today (14 March), the Christian Democrats had altered the terms of the debt brake and had done so before they officially took power.
Both in terms of the act itself and the means undertaken to accomplish it, this is a deviation from the expected norm along the lines of the Catholic Church suddenly deciding to admit women to the priesthood.
The underlying dynamic is the turmoil being wrought on transatlantic relationships by the far-right psychosis of the second Trump Administration.
It has long been common knowledge that Donald Trump feels strong to the point of infatuation with Vladimir Putin. What is happening now is a direct outgrowth of this case of dictatorial puppy love.
In his first go round, the American president was restrained from giving in to this feeling by the need to maintain alliances with European powers painstakingly built up by half a century of American diplomacy.
Now, tucking into a second helping of presidential power, Trump has elected to throw caution to the wind, and throw the European Union (EU) out with the Ukrainian bathwater in a vain attempt to get Putin to respect, if not like him.
One knock-on effect of this has been that EU member states have had cause to look at their defence spending. That these were too low has long been an idée fixe for Donald Trump.
Once more at the summit of power and in a “so let it be done” sort of mood, his stance toward the EU has made it clear that Washington’s willingness to forestall military aggression from the east (once Soviet but now Russian) is over.
In the case of Germany, the question of increasing defence spending is a fraught one. Article 109 of the Grundgesetz (constitution) specifies that the federal government must balance its books. The maximum structural deficit allowed is 0.35% of GDP.
This synergises with the long-standing commitment to financial probity that led the German government to reject the issuing of Eurobonds even in the most chaotic depths of the eurozone crisis in 2011.
The plan being promoted by the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU), along with the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), would see those restrictions loosened, exempting defence spending above the threshold of 1% of GDP from the requirements of the brake.
Along with this, a fund of €500 billion would be set up to pay for repairs and upgrades to Germany’s deteriorating national infrastructure.
The last bit seems reasonable, particularly given the dire state into which German roads, bridges, and rail facilities have been allowed to decline. However, it only became an issue when it became clear that the available means could not support the deployment of 30,000 troops in the first 30 days of a conflict, currently called for by Germany’s NATO commitments.
As to the changes in the brake, those would require changing the constitution.
A further peculiarity called for by the plan would is that it would be undertaken before the seating of the new parliament, so that the requisite 2/3rds of the votes in the Bundestag could be cobbled together by combining the CDU, the SPD, and Die Grünen.
The larger issue is that Germany’s struggles with the issues illustrate the shifting priorities of EU member states, of the kind recently suggested by Janan Ganesh, in an aggressively titled op-ed in the Financial Times.
According to Ganesh, member states must transition from welfare to warfare states.
On the one hand, there is a certain logic here. European Union members, to one degree or another, have never spent the same amount on defence as the Americans.
Their defence outlay has been restrained by their ability to count on the US to intervene in the Middle East and the Western Balkans since 1990. European contributions to these initiatives were never of the same scale as that of Washington.
Having said that, the European Union’s capacity to fund and develop military capacities is considerable. If member states attempt to develop their military capacities as individual units, then the cost will be far higher.
The EU has been subject to considerable far-right pressures lately, not least due to Trump’s propensity and associates to court the affections of Europe’s populist parties. This will only worsen over time. This is an opportunity to go on the offence.
European collective action could not only reduce the political cost of military preparedness but also facilitate significant improvements in infrastructure without requiring wholesale shifts in spending priorities that favour weapons over welfare.
There are, of course, significant ideological obstacles. Europe needs to overcome the nationalist residues that act to push the member states further apart, of which EU-mandated austerity policies have played an outsized role since the 2008 financial crisis.
The War on Terror and its promotion of Islamophobia did much to underwrite Europe’s far right. Donald Trump’s return to power, with his Muslim bans and support for ethnically cleansing Gaza, will only embolden European extremists.
The EU also needs to dare more democracy. The bloc can only improve as a transnational project the more that Europeans feel connected to it and represented by its institutions.
The greater unity that a defence buildup might bring has to be coupled with more openness and transparency in the European Union’s newer, Eastern member states, and The Economist-branded “flawed democracies” in the Western half, such as France and Italy.
These conclusions are not new. But Germany’s decision to dispense with its debt brake is a sobering reminder of the costs that militarisation brings and why its political effects must be reigned in at both the national and European level.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
