The Germany We Never Wanted

The rearmament Europe doesn't know how to contain.

By 2035, Germany will be spending more on defence than France and Britain combined. The Europe we built to prevent this from happening again is looking the other way.

There is a sentence circulating in the corridors of Brussels that no one dares say aloud: by 2035, Germany's military expenditure will equal that of France and Britain combined. This is not an alarmist projection. It is a budget figure. And every time I think about it, I find myself wondering why we discuss it so rarely.

Franziska Brantner, leader of the German Greens, had the courage to say what European diplomats merely think: "Germany is about to become the leading conventional military power in Europe." Then she added something I cannot get out of my head: "Never in modern history has our continent had at its centre a Germany that was simultaneously peaceful and militarily dominant."

We would do well to sit with that.

Why Germany threw itself into rearmament

The official explanations are three, and all of them are true. First: filling the vacuum left by American disengagement. Second: responding to the Russian threat on the eastern flank. Third: meeting NATO's 2% of GDP commitment.

But there is a fourth explanation that no one states officially, and which I find perhaps the most unsettling: Germany has seen rearmament as a tool to revive an industrial and technological base in deep crisis.

The country has barely grown in seven years. Infrastructure has deteriorated. The digital lag is embarrassing for a manufacturing power of its standing. The railways, once a byword for German efficiency, have become a national embarrassment. In this context, a massive rearmament programme is not merely a geopolitical response: it is an industrial stimulus, a reindustrialisation plan dressed up as strategic necessity. Contracts for heavy industry, investment in military technology, skilled employment, arms exports. Germany has a well-established template for this kind of revival. It has done it before, with remarkable results, in the postwar decades. That is precisely what concerns me.

There is a fifth reason, less remarked upon still: the desire to reclaim the European leadership role that was one of the original impulses behind the construction of the Community. Not hegemony in the old sense. Responsibility, in the sense that a power of Germany's size cannot afford to stand in the second row when the continent is under pressure. Berlin knows this. And it is equipping itself accordingly.

How the rest of Europe is responding

The reactions of European governments to German rearmament reveal a great deal about the state of the continent. None of it is particularly reassuring.

Poland is the country that appears most welcoming, at least on the surface. Warsaw already spends more than 4% of GDP on defence, more than any other NATO member, and has every interest in Germany deploying militarily on the eastern flank. But behind the public approval lies a historical wariness that does not simply disappear: Poland wants a Germany strong enough to deter Russia from trying its luck, but not so strong as to become a problem in its own right. There are still people alive who lived through September 1939.

France has the opposite difficulty. Paris has spent decades constructing its strategic identity around being the principal military power on the European continent. A German rearmament that overtakes it in spending terms redrafts that identity in uncomfortable ways. Macron has responded with his proposal for European strategic autonomy, which in theory is multilateral but in practice assigns France a natural leadership role. A rearming Germany does not feature in that design, at least not in this form.

Britain watches from outside, with the particular complexity of a country that has left the Union but remains inside NATO. London has an interest in a militarily robust Germany because it strengthens the Atlantic alliance on the eastern flank. But it also has an interest in ensuring that robustness does not translate into a European defence structure that excludes the British contribution. It is the familiar post-Brexit balancing act: close enough to matter, distant enough to avoid being bound.

Italy, through Defence Minister Crosetto, has offered the most pragmatic synthesis. Crosetto rules out a centralised European army, which the Treaties do not permit and which no national government is prepared to accept. His model is different: integration without union, national armed forces operating together through NATO interoperability frameworks, pooled without being merged. It is a realist proposal that acknowledges genuine political constraints and tries to work within them. But I find myself wondering whether "integration" without a common structure does not risk becoming informal co-ordination: functional when everyone agrees, and liable to seize up precisely when it is needed most.

The frugal countries — the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland — regard German rearmament with a mixture of relief and anxiety. Relief because it means someone is finally taking collective security seriously. Anxiety because that same rearmament might be used as an argument for increasing the common European defence budget, drawing funds away from other headings. The frugals are the primary opponents of any form of shared European expenditure. They are also geographically the closest to Germany. I find that contradiction difficult to set aside.

Draghi and the willing

Mario Draghi has proposed a way out of this impasse that has the virtue of clarity and the disadvantage of being politically unpopular: coalitions of the willing.

The idea is straightforward. Since unanimity among 27 is impossible on almost everything that matters, the countries that wish to move forward do so, creating structures of enhanced co-operation that do not require universal consent. On the common budget, on integrated defence, on industrial policy. Those who wish to join do; those who do not remain outside without blocking the others.

It is a proposal that carries the flavour of the post-ideological pragmatism that has defined Draghi's entire career. It acknowledges real political constraints without resigning itself to them. And it points to a path that, by an irony of history, is the same one that has always worked: a few going ahead, leaving the door open for the rest.

The risk — which Draghi knows well, and which comes back to me every time I hear the word "willing" — is that this time the few may not be enough, and that the door remains open while the world outside changes too fast to wait for those who stayed behind.

The problem we refuse to see

The founding fathers — Monnet, Schuman, De Gasperi — did not want Europe because they were idealists. They wanted it because they had seen what happens when Germany acts alone. Not because they were Germanophobes: because they had understood that a great power without an institutional framework is inherently destabilising, for itself and for everyone else. They were right then. I fear they are right still.

The frugals are today dismantling that framework to save a few billion on the common budget, while Germany spends a hundred billion a year on arms.

The frugal countries that are applying the brakes on the common budget and on European defence are not preventing rearmament. They are preventing rearmament from being European. And the result is that the largest, wealthiest and most industrially capable country on the continent is rearming alone, faster than anyone else, without a common structure strong enough to contain it.

This is precisely the scenario that European construction had as its historical mission to prevent. Not out of mistrust of today's Germans, who are profoundly different from those of eighty years ago. But because history teaches that great military powers without institutional frameworks tend to produce instability, even when their intentions are good.

The frugals are saving a few billion on the common budget. They are setting the clock of history back to where we swore we would never set it again. And that, frankly, frightens me.

What Di Lorenzo does not say, but thinks

Giovanni di Lorenzo, editor of Die Zeit, when asked whether he is optimistic or pessimistic about Germany, pauses for a moment and replies: "At this moment, we have a responsibility to be confident. In spite of everything."

It is the answer of an intelligent man who knows that confidence, at certain historical moments, is not a feeling. It is a political choice. It is the only alternative to succumbing to the pessimism that paralyses.

I would like to share that confidence. Europe has the same responsibility Di Lorenzo describes. It cannot afford the luxury of pessimism. But it cannot afford the distraction of the frugals either — those who scrutinise budget decimals while the continent redraws its military balance of power.

A Germany rearming alone is not a threat. It is a symptom. The symptom of a Europe that has not yet decided whether it wishes to exist as a unified political actor or revert to being a collection of nation states that compete and fear one another.

That choice, deferred for thirty years, cannot be deferred any longer. I am not sure we have grasped that yet.