As eager as postwar Germany has been to atone for its Nazi past, there’s no chance that Berlin will pay any of this sum, as the Poles are well aware. But that’s not what this is about. Instead, the gesture by Poland’s hard-right Law and Justice party (PiS) speaks volumes about other afflictions ailing the European Union.
To wit: There’s the rise of populism and nationalism in several member states, which will be on particularly vivid display in PiS’s campaign for next year’s election. Then there’s the contentious and ambiguous role of Germany within the EU, a bloc it probably should, but either can’t or won’t lead. And there’s the way all the resulting tensions keep frustrating the EU’s raison d’etre — the internal reconciliation that would allow its nations to jointly confront external threats such as an autocratic Russia.
There’s no point in arguing about the number, 1.3 trillion. A “true” amount — tallied in human suffering as well as material damage — would be uncountable multiples higher.
And that’s where the problems start, as viewed from Berlin — or indeed from any other world capital that once ordered or oversaw atrocities committed in its name somewhere. Once you start compensating the descendants of some victims, where and when do you stop?
Berlin’s official reply to all reparations demands — Greece is another country that keeps asking — is frustratingly legalistic. After World War II, West Germany paid nominal indemnities to Israel, Yugoslavia and other nations. East Germany indemnified its communist big brother, the Soviet Union, which was in turn supposed to allot part of the sums to its communist little brother, Poland.
During the Cold War, the Germans therefore deemed other people’s war claims either settled or still pending a final arrangement with the Allied Powers. That closure came in 1990, with the Two Plus Four Treaty among the two Germanies and the Soviet Union, US, UK and France.
Since then, the Germans have maintained — as Chancellor Olaf Scholz again told the Poles last week — that the books are closed. As the Greeks joke: Before reunification, the Germans said it was too early to negotiate; afterwards, they said it was too late.
But to get bogged down in such hairsplitting, the Germans like to point out, is to miss the whole spirit of European integration. It’s supposed to be a “peace project,” an idealistic leap of reconciliation, as embodied in the mutual embrace of Germany and France — enemies-turned-friends, with aspirations to become family.
Poland, like the other member states formerly behind the Iron Curtain, entered the EU late and had different motivations for joining. It was in a hurry to escape Russia’s orbit and enter the West’s. But rather than submerge its identity into a new European one, it also wanted to catch up on its own nation-building, after centuries during which it was partitioned, moved, invaded and tormented by people speaking either German or Russian — and sometimes, as in 1939, by both.
Simultaneously, the whole EU has for years been debating the latest iteration of the old “German question.” This is the recurring problem that Germany, smack in the middle of Europe, is either too weak (as in the 17th or early 19th centuries) or too strong (in the late 19th and early 20th) to allow balance in the continental states system. Today’s version might be that Germany is too small to lead but too big to follow.
The EU, whose founding institutions were designed in the ashes of a German war of aggression, was built to prevent any member nation, and specifically Germany, from ever again dominating the others. At the same time, the club — with 27 members and more in the queue — is fragmented and dysfunctional enough to need leadership, a role for which its largest country is the obvious candidate.
In Germany, this conundrum led to a long “hegemony debate.” Most Germans, still traumatized by the Nazi past, reject the role of leader — it doesn’t help that the word translates to Fuehrer. They often quote the writer Thomas Mann, who feared a “German Europe” while yearning for a “European Germany.” During the euro, refugee and other crises, however, Germans also realized that the EU only functions when Germany takes the initiative.
Other Europeans have been just as torn. They loathe being lectured by Germans — on how to save money, in Athens or Madrid; on how to uphold the rule of law, in Warsaw or Budapest; on anything, in Paris or Rome. In Brussels, Germans often come across as humorless and hypocritical, the worst combination. One of the first countries, along with France, to break the EU’s vaunted fiscal rules — originally drafted by the Germans — was Germany itself, in 2005.
But most Europeans also understand the need to reconcile with Germany and to implicitly accede to its leadership. “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so,” quipped Radoslaw Sikorski in 2011, when he was Warsaw’s chief diplomat, “but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.” Yet he added: “Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.”
Since Sikorski’s remark, things have mostly deteriorated. In 2015, Poland followed the example of Hungary and elected populist nationalists who’ve been in power since. Step by step, PiS has compromised judicial independence, press freedoms and the rights of LGBTQ citizens, while ranting against Brussels and Poland’s historical enemies, the Germans over here and the Russians over there.
Previous PiS campaigns have featured bogeys such as Muslim migrants, queer and trans folk, Brussels technocrats and others allegedly bent on corrupting authentic Polish-Catholic mores. To win next year’s election, PiS has decided to roll out the ugly German again.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader, talks of “German-Russian plans to rule over Europe” and of the EU becoming a “Fourth German Reich.” He slanders his opposition as wanting to make Poland an “appendage of Germany.” As though directly rebutting Sikorski in 2011, the current Polish foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, recently said that “the EU needs not German leadership, but German self-restraint.”
The Germans, for their part, have — largely out of parochial absent-mindedness — lived down to stereotype. Ignoring Sikorski’s plea, they have not included the Poles — or Balts or others — in their decision-making.
The worst instance of their neglect was Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline built — after Russia’s first attacks on Ukraine in 2014, no less — under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Running right next to Nord Stream 1, this link was supposed to supply cheap Russian hydrocarbons to help Germany’s energy transition. The Germans were also convinced that doing more business with Russian President Vladimir Putin would keep him meek.
By contrast, the Poles and other eastern Europeans (including the Ukrainians), recognized both Nord Stream pipelines as geopolitical schemes by Putin to make the connectors running through their own countries irrelevant, so he could blackmail or starve them at will. Worse, the whole project looked like yet another separate Russo-German deal over their heads, the sort history has taught them to fear.
This year, as Putin weaponized Russia’s energy exports, the world found out who was right (the Poles) and wrong (the Germans) in that argument. I’m not aware of any German politician who’s explicitly apologized to Warsaw, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius or Kyiv for the pipelines — or for all the Kremlin coddling that went with them.
These eastern capitals — whose countries once made up what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the “bloodlands” between Hitler and Stalin — are now on the front line against Putin’s assault on Ukraine and decency. The four within the EU and NATO are leading the Western alliance in calling out Putin’s lies and modeling the courage to resist.
Berlin, for its part, has merely fallen in line behind its eastern EU partners. Its resolve came late and often appears wobbly. Leadership — by Germany as a country or Scholz as a chancellor — looks different.
There are two tragedies in this story. The first is that Kaczynski, PiS, and their populist ilk in other countries are playing with fire. They’re besmirching European ideals of reconciliation and wrecking dreams of strength in unity. Instead of asking for reparations for what Hitler did in World War II — that is, instead of stoking resentment — they should be linking arms with all their European friends to defeat Putin.
The second tragedy is that the Germans are no wiser. Thomas Mann is probably turning in his grave. Europe is not German, and nobody wants that. Nor, however, is Germany any closer to being genuinely European.
Germany will never again be the threat to Europe it once was — these days, Russia plays that part. But that’s hardly a high standard. Not only the Poles, but all Europeans would be forgiven for feeling that they can’t live with the Germans, but can’t live without them either.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. A former editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is author of “Hannibal and Me.”
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