QUO VADIS, GERMANY?

Foreword
Tens of thousands of people have taken part in traditional Easter peace marches in Germany, but the heyday of the peace movement seems to be over as Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government prepares to spend billions on rearmament in Germany. The government is also seeking to increase the size of the Bundeswehr's active military force from the current 83,000 to 203,000 by 2031.

Bundeswehr Inspector General Carsten Breuer sees the rearmament as urgent because Russia's aggression will not stop in Ukraine, saying: "We are threatened by Russia. We are threatened by Putin. We must do everything necessary to deter him."

A recent YouGov poll found that 79 percent of Germans considered Vladimir Putin "very" or "fairly" dangerous to European peace and security. 74 percent felt the same way about Donald Trump.

In the first three months of 2025, Rheinmetall’s arms industry achieved total revenues of €2.3 billion, up 46 percent compared to the same period last year.

Background
For decades, Germans have been raised to reject military power, being acutely aware of Germany’s past role as an aggressor against European states.

“Germany started two world wars. Even though it's been 80 years since the Second World War, the idea that Germans should stay out of conflicts is still very much ingrained in many people's DNA,” explains Markus Ziener of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. This is why the German armed forces have been chronically underfunded.

The first Secretary General of NATO, Britain’s Lord Ismay, declared in 1949: “NATO's purpose is to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, not everyone was happy with the reunification of Germany. Among the unhappy ones was Margaret Thatcher who said: "We have beaten the Germans twice, and now they are back."

An ominous sign of this return is the Greens, a party founded on the manifesto of pacifism. A major turning point in the transformation of the Greens into the War Party was the Kosovo conflict. In the spring of 1999, the SPD-Greens coalition, led by Gerhard Schröder (SPD) with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Greens), decided that Germany would take part in the NATO bombing of Serbia without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. This was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter and the German Constitution.

Current situation

"Germany is back" declared Friedrich Merz, the German leader while the Greens have now become the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for rearmament.

On March 18, 2025, the German Parliament passed a constitutional reform that allows for significant spending on rearmament. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's ruling coalition has agreed a €1 trillion military and infrastructure investment package.

There is a failure of Germany's culture of debate and increased polarisation with people increasingly worried about being branded if they join a peace demonstration.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which according to the latest polls is supported by a quarter of all voters, has now adopted a more pacifist stance towards Russia. Few in the traditionally left-wing peace movement want to be associated with the far-right party.

General Breuer's ambitions are very high. He claims that Germany needs an increase of 120,000 troops to defend itself and NATO's eastern flank to a total of 460,000 troops, including reserves. He therefore insists that a return to compulsory military service is absolutely necessary.

The United States

Washington now shamelessly admits: this is a proxy war fuelled and directed by the United States. Trump, however, claims that the war in Ukraine, “Biden's war”, was a mistake: Russia is not the United States’ adversary and all efforts should instead focus on the confrontation the United States is preparing with China. Washington sees its economic and technological dominance challenged by China.

The United States' strategy (to prolong the war in Ukraine through huge investments, hoping to weaken Russia economically and militarily) has proven to be wrong. Washington has long considered a choice between two options: to intervene more openly and decisively with the risk of a third world war or to seek a diplomatic solution.

In the meantime, the European strategy has failed. The inability of European states, over the past three years, to take serious diplomatic initiatives for a ceasefire is now taking its toll. One European leader after another has even claimed to be seeking “military victory” over Russia: an absolutely unrealistic assumption!
Instead of learning from this debacle, some elements of the European establishment want to persist with the failed strategy, prolonging the war at all costs. Trump is therefore unilaterally moving forward to negotiate directly with Russia.

Germany
“With the possibility of the United States abandoning Europe, it is now Germany’s duty as the most populous and economically powerful country on the continent … to unite Europeans, lead them and push them to ensure their own security,” said Der Spiegel magazine.

But not all German media are so in favor of rearmament, with the Bild newspaper saying Merz has taken a dangerous turn by taking on gigantic debts and asking: “Who will build the necessary weapons? Does Europe have access to the necessary raw materials? What will happen to inflation when such sums are pumped into the economy?”

It all feels like a bad déjà vu. The tank makers are back and Germany is quickly reorganizing. The German parliament has voted on constitutional amendments allowing for the largest rearmament program since World War II. Germany already ranks fourth globally in defense spending, but is now turbocharging to become Kriegstüchtig (“ready for war”).

Further fuelling the Russian threat psychosis is NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, who has warned Europeans to buy weapons or risk “speaking Russian soon.” Fear is being spread.
Russia’s GDP is no larger than that of the Benelux countries, the customs union of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. After three years of war, Russian troops hold only 20 percent of Ukraine. They have been fighting for months to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk against an exhausted Ukrainian army. Are we to believe that this same force could defeat the combined forces of Poland, Germany, France and the United Kingdom? Absurd!

Even with North Korean aid, it took Russia months to retake two-thirds of the Kursk Oblast from Ukraine. Europe now has four times as many warships, three times as many tanks and artillery, and twice as many fighter jets as Russia.

It is said that Europe's "defense capacity" is priceless. But the price is cuts to schools, health care, social security, culture, and development aid. While, figuratively speaking, society itself is being militarized.

The European Union

To position the EU for a new supposed global rise, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks of an "era of rearmament." For the European people, this means an era of social dismantling.

As Sophie Binet, leader of the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union, says: "For workers, nothing is worse than a war economy. Every euro for weapons is a euro denied to schools and hospitals."

Meanwhile, the arms industry claims that rearmament will improve the economy: a kind of "military Keynesianism" through which states support arms manufacturers who, with the European automotive sector in crisis (and in Germany in recession), push for a transformation of cars into tanks.

Europe's arms industries are, however, relatively small as they serve small domestic markets. Small production quantities prevent the benefits of economies of scale and industrialization of production from being realized. Market integration would instead increase competition, which should be beneficial both in terms of prices and the quality of production.

But only a few European countries besides Germany have a significant arms industry, including France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Sweden. Bureaucratic cooperation models with complex joint ventures and large involvement of several governments and their bureaucracies must therefore be avoided in corporate decision-making.

Conclusion
The Greens have become the driving force behind German militarism. German politics is changing dramatically as the EU's economic power falters.

"Germany is back. Germany is making its great contribution to defending freedom and peace in Europe." This is the leitmotif of the Germans who, questioning the reliability of US commitments under President Donald Trump, are rushing to strengthen their defenses. This is all part of a push to rearm the entire continent, where leaders are bracing for alleged Russian threats and American unpredictability.

Meanwhile, German defense company Rheinmetall is seeing sales steadily rise. In the first three months of 2025, Rheinmetall posted total revenues of €2.3 billion ($2.6 billion), up 46 percent from the same period last year. Rheinmetall said it received three times as many orders (through new and existing contracts) in the first quarter of 2025 as in the first quarter of 2024, reaching 11 billion euros.

Even if Russia will “win” this war for a variety of reasons, it has blatantly exposed the weaknesses of the Russian military before the eyes of the world. This military is supposed to attack a NATO that is many times superior? That would be - to put it mildly - more than unlikely and, from Russia’s point of view, suicidal madness.

However, this war has once again made one thing clear: if the security interests of a country are permanently violated and never taken seriously, despite the fact that the policy of common security and the Charter of Paris provide for this, and then Russia is pushed with its back to the “political wall” by NATO’s eastward expansion, irresponsible and unjustifiable reactions may occur. Responsible peace and security policy must therefore always follow the idea of détente policy, according to which one's own security is only guaranteed if the security of the other is also guaranteed (Olof Palme Reports 1-1982 and 2-2022). The first shot in a war is always the failure of diplomacy and this is never a one-sided responsibility.