In an interview with “Welt”, Green Party politician Anton Hofreiter describes Germany’s Russia policy in recent years as “know-it-all”. It is characterized by a “paternalistic attitude” and a “colonial” attitude. For the political scientist Herfried Münkler, the allegations are untenable. A guest comment.
After a historical turning point, such as the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, what would otherwise be seen as a continuous development has been broken into a “before” and “after”. The otherwise self-evident connection between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations has been dissolved: if our expectations for the future were as wrong as is the case with regard to Russia’s politics, then the interpretation of past experiences must also have been fundamentally wrong.
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Accordingly, the German Russia policy of the past decade is now being judged: that it was characterized by naivety towards Putin and his goals is still one of the milder judgments. One should have listened more to the Baltic and Polish politicians, who have long warned of a threat from Russia. However, according to Anton Hofreiter in an interview with Die Welt, the German view of these politicians was “know-it-all”, characterized by a “paternalistic attitude” and a “colonial” attitude.
According to Hofreiter, the fact that “Russia has become an imperial, revisionist power” has been overlooked. This is a weak, and therefore inadequate, justification for the accusation of German paternalism towards East Europeans. That the political elite of Russia looked back wistfully to the times when the country was still a superpower, and many wished for the imperial greatness of the past, was clear to anyone who dealt with Russia – or even pursued the question of what an empire is and why it is dangerous when a country suffers from “post-imperial phantom pains”.
Herfried Münkler, born in 1951, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Many of his books are considered standard works, such as “The Great War” (2013), “The New Germans” (2016) or “The Thirty Years’ War” (2017). Herfried Münkler has received numerous awards, including the Science Prize of the Aby Warburg Foundation and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Fellowship.
It is true that most politicians – and political scientists too – had little use for the concept of empire, interestingly especially those who now appear as the main critics of German policy towards Russia. That Russia was a latent revisionist actor who wanted to reverse the political collapse of the Soviet Union – at least in part – was well known to anyone who had taken note of Putin’s statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
Revisionist powers want to change the status quo of a political space. It is initially unclear with what means they try to do this and how they can be prevented from doing so.
There is almost no peace order in which there is no revisionist actor. After the war of 1870-71, France was a latent revisionist power; after the Versailles peace treaty it was Germany, and today it is by no means only Russia, but also includes Turkey, which has been pursuing a neo-Ottoman policy for several years, shaped by memories of the Ottoman Empire that fell in 1918, which Greece and the Kurds in northern Syria and northern Iraq felt. And certainly Serbia, the loser of the Yugoslav wars of disintegration, is also a revisionist power, both with regard to Kosovo and with regard to the Republic of Srbska in Bosnia.
To describe Russia as a revisionist power is a political platitude. However, the problem cannot be solved by calling it by its name. What is politically decisive is how one deals with this challenge, how one integrates the revisionist actor into the peace order.
Basically, there are three possibilities: Either one relies on neutralizing the revisionist ideas of a state, which demands deprivation from its population, through wealth transfers. Prosperity lets the painful memory of former greatness and lost territories fade into the background, as the German history of the last five decades shows. Let’s call this buying revisionism.
Or you can appease the revisionist by accommodating his demands and making limited concessions. This policy bears the not particularly laudable name of appeasement.
Or one curbs the revisionist efforts by a system of military deterrence, so that every attempt at revision becomes priceless for those who undertake it. This was the Cold War policy known as Deterrence. But this policy is also expensive for those who act as a deterrent, because it is paid for with a loss of prosperity.
There can then be no question of enjoying a peace dividend. That’s why the time before 1989 was called the Cold War – and not the Cold Peace.
If you review Germany’s Russia policy over the past three decades, the strategy of buying has dominated for the longest time. This was achieved through economic integration: raw materials and energy sources were bought in Russia and paid for with good money. This offered advantages for both sides.
And it created a certain trust and an idea of reliability through the interdependence. Putin destroyed all that with his attack order, forcing the Europeans to build a system of military deterrence now. That should have been done earlier, says Hofreiter.
Of course, we are already feeling that this system change is also leading to a significant loss of prosperity for us, and that we will be significantly greater in the near future. After all, democratic systems need a dramatic threat from outside to make such loss of prosperity plausible to the citizens. They are unable to do this on their own.
No federal government could have set this change in motion with the argument that the Poles and Balts would have advised it. This required an actually – and not just presumed – aggressive Putin. According to Hofreiter, Germany’s Russia policy had nothing to do with paternalism and a colonial view of Eastern Europeans, but rather with its own interests, looking at ecological challenges and dealing with human issues such as hunger and migration in the Global South. All of that has to be put on hold now.
The orientation towards the questions of mankind would actually have led to expect a policy of appeasement towards aggressive revisionism – and Putin probably counted on it. The reaction of military training for deterrence may have surprised him too. All of this has nothing to do with the end of paternalism and colonial gestures towards Eastern Europeans, but with the forms of reaction in a democracy.
Otherwise, MP Hofreiter will have to be careful that Victor Orbán does not soon complain to him that German policy towards Hungary is characterized by colonial thinking and a paternalistic attitude. Or that Poland Kaczyńskis reproaches him for his formulations when it comes to Poland’s rule of law.
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