BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel has been thrust into leading Europe back from the financial brink, but Germany remains reluctant to take on global clout to match its economic prowess.
Beyond crisis efforts to save the euro, Europe’s top economy and export powerhouse remains unable or unwilling to pull its weight on major international crises, analysts say.
Its foreign policy is still defined by “caution, pragmatism, a reluctance to strike out new paths”, said Constanze Stelzenmueller of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Josef Joffe, writing in influential weekly Die Zeit, summed up German engagement abroad in a commentary headlined “Nothing but words”, charging that “Germany follows the crises in the world according to the motto ‘hurt no-one, least of all oneself’”.
Germany, shamed by its Second World War aggression, stepped lightly on the world stage for decades after, refusing to send troops abroad and avoiding muscular diplomacy.
It has since joined interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where it has the third-biggest foreign contingent. But it disappointed Nato allies again in 2011 by refusing to back the Libya campaign, abstaining alongside Russia and China.
Merkel’s erstwhile political mentor, ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl who oversaw German reunification, at the time complained that Germany lacked “a compass” in foreign policy and was “no longer a reliable force, internally or externally”.
Merkel’s former defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg recently criticised Germany’s “culture of reluctance” in foreign and security matters in a joint New York Times editorial.
Leaders across Germany’s political spectrum still believed the nation’s economic might helped compensate for its failure to pull its weight in Nato and elsewhere, wrote zu Guttenberg, who resigned in 2011 over a plagiarism scandal.
He also argued that “’chequebook diplomacy’ by the biggest European Union member is not a viable substitute for contributing military assets to the joint defence of our common values and interests”.
The new flare-up in the Syrian crisis again put Merkel on the spot, as she seeks to reassure allies that Germany is a reliable partner without spooking a history-scarred and mostly anti-war electorate.
AFP
