Extended Commentary: Stunde None.

From time to time, grand moments can generate grand excitement which is in fact warranted. For example, I remember watching Barak Obama's inauguration in January 2009; an absolute experience, at least as I saw it. A nation that had struggled so badly with race, yet, where, ironically, diversity on that front might be its crowning feature, finally had a Black American as its chief executive and its primary representative on the international stage. It was the meaning of historic, any number of commentaries noted; regardless of what might happen after, an important barrier will have always been broken. (1) It was also an era in which a new tone might have been necessary after what was then a seven-year slog into the War on Terror--which, though we might not remember, Obama tried to address quickly post-inauguration by speaking to the Muslim world. "So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace," he intoned at Cairo University. (2) And, compared with the bombast which would come eight years later, it sounded every bit the picture of reason.

When I initially wrote this in the spring of this year, my sense was that the Ukraine invasion, as prolonged border conflicts sometimes can, was on the edge of fading a touch from view. For a period, even in Europe, it was no longer always the first item in the news (its effects on inflation and gas prices [and things like contested referenda in the breakaway regions] have largely changed that). (3) However, for a couple of months (February, March, and April, largely), the event of the war seemed to come off as a massive surprise. Maybe that wasn't so much if one was part of the intelligence community, but vis-a-vis a popular surprise that war returned to Europe after a twenty-year absence. Now, that's not exactly the case: fighting had been going on in the Donbas region since 2014, Russia made war with Georgia in 2008, and Russian "peacekeepers" (there are a lot of quotes when it concerns Russian Realpolitik) had been in Transnistria since the mid-1990s. (4) However, the sense was that, since the Yugoslav Wars (1991-99), the continent hadn't seen a full-blown conflict and that those conflicts, though tragic, were supposed to be blips on the radar screen in the post-Cold War growth of the continent's liberal-internationalism. A full-on invasion of one state by another, even if there are debates about to what degree Russia belongs to Europe, was something that belonged to the past--a time when black and white film captured people in one and a half time and war technologies looked like prototypes of the machinery we use today. Europe's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, argued Russia's invasion gave us the continent's "darkest hours" since the Second World War. (5) Since the '90s, in any case, and surely inside the space of the twenty-first century.

On February 27th, the conflict's third day, Germany's newly-minted Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, held what at the time I thought was one of the best political speeches of my close to fifty-year lifetime. Germany might be Europe's leading state: its largest economy, political engine, its greatest population, and emerging with relatively few scratches from the waves of Euroscepticism that have plagued neighbors from Denmark to France (we won't even talk Brexit"). Largely, though, Germany had a policy of circumspection regarding the use of military force in the face of what I'd call Stunde Null memory--Stunde Null, "Zero Hour," being a euphemism for the moment when World War II stopped, and the world, but also the nation specifically, looked up, needing to take stock of the disaster it wrought. The story is known: Germany touched off the world's deadliest conflict, it prosecuted the Holocaust and Shoah, its aggression led to the physical ruin of large parts of Europe, and, via its axis with Japan, it may have occasioned our entry into the age of nuclear weapons and bombs. Since its reunification in 1990, the country's mantra had been no weapons to conflict zones and heavy circumspection vis-a-vis forward positions regarding its security posture. However, "the heavens scream injustice," Scholz said, and nothing could justify the "cold-bloodedness" of what Putin had done. The pain caused by Russia's invasion cut "sehr nah," which in German is akin to "close to the bone." (6) Sounding like the title of the historian Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988; an assessment of the Holocaust's history), it was a tipping point. The nation need let go of the past and embrace a new role as a bulwark for democracy. I wouldn't say it hasn't. However, I'm not sure it has. In practical terms, Germany has delivered on a number of promises: guaranteeing a serious boost in defense spending, sending weapons to Ukraine, taking the case for a tighter defense policy to its Eurosphere neighbors, and somehow trying to wean itself off of Russian oil and gas. However (and I will admit that this article speaks to conditions at the time of its submission, at the start of the summer), that's been with more hemming and hawing than many had banked on, wherein one wonders if, rather than leaving Stunde Null, Germany has slipped into "Stunde None." (7) By "Stunde None," I mean a kind of mealy-mouthed zone in which perhaps the Stunde Null concept hasn't faded as much as we thought and it's combined with forces like a rough blase towards American "rah-rah for democracyism" and a stripe more sympatico towards Russia among some of its people than perhaps even skeptics had thought. The last point is subtle. However, it ping-pongs off elements of populism, the anti-hegemonic left, and, in the country's East, echoes of a time when Russia, as the heart of the USSR, had the status of "big brother" and "friend." Even if it's a tone problem, that's a shame because precisely the thoughtfulness demonstrated in German politics over the last three or four decades is what's needed in a leadership role--and few times has that been better articulated than in the Scholz speech. Of course, no one "wishes" Nazism, the dark sides of communism (or even some of the bizarre conservatisms of the country's post-War West), had been part of the picture. Still, we might need leadership from a nation that has simultaneously been forced to and willingly has so thoroughly discussed and thought through its past. Germany has earned the right to be a primary voice in defense of democracy. The question is if it sees that and what it would take for more of its people to embrace a role that would be of benefit to an international order based on rules, justice, and general senses of at large human rights.

Now, in many ways, the issues surrounding Germany's security policy extend back not just to the Second but the First World War. Historians see the origins of that conflict in a number of forces: competition between empires, the imperatives of capitalism, the nationalisms which dominated Europe through the "long" nineteenth century (1789-1914), the mechanistic character of military planning at the start of the twentieth century and dying empires attempting to reassert significance in a world changing rapidly around them (e.g., Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). However, Germany was a new state (its unification happened in 1871), that unification happened in no small part under the auspices of Prussian militarism, and it's often viewed as the most aggressive in pursuing its "war aims," as the historian Fritz Fischer once put it. (8) Germany may have no Sonderweg--the idea that there's something in German culture giving it a proclivity towards totalitarian ideals. (9) Still, the nation had great power aspirations through which, while it wasn't the only culprit behind the Great War, its responsibility is largely thought to have been greater than that of the other powers involved. (10) Certainly, the Allies thought that--one of the facts of the peace being that not only was Germany not included in making it but that Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty (the so-called "War Guilt" clause) laid responsibility for the conflict at Germany's door. No issue may have been more key to Hitler coming to power; broadly unpopular, the size of reparations and the denuding of German territory may have been, above any racial theory, the theme on which the Nazis most harped in the years before Hitler was installed as Chancellor in 1933. (11)

Within this, Germany's armed forces were a decided theme. It's a generally known story: the German army was reduced to 100,000 (some 14 million served during the First World War), and it was disallowed the use or production of heavy weapons. Fighter planes were out (World War I had made them a part of any great army), and it had to give up significant territory while its colonies had become League of Nations mandates. The Rhineland--the territory bordering France and the Benelux states--was turned into a demilitarized zone, and only three schools in the country were allowed to train the German officer corps. In part, because no fighting happened on German soil, many Germans had only a vague sense of military defeat. Part of Versailles' point, in the words of Ian Kershaw, was to ensure that Germans "recognized" that. (12) The symbols of great power should be taken from them, and a powerful...