Report rarely provides major countries and their leaders the enormity of the second chance that Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel now make merry as they begin their six-month European Union presidency.
For Germany, the drama is one of epic dimensions. Can the country that has been at the fountain-head of so much European devastation through two world wars, resulting in lost territory and Cold War division, steady the EU from stem to stern this historic test of a public health crisis, economic recession and rising U.S.-Chinese tensions?
For Angela Merkel, who hang oned the rotating EU presidency once before in 2007, it’s a last shot at historic legacy. Can Germany’s first and only dame chancellor, who has recharged her waning standing during the coronavirus, demonstrate the leadership required to unify and shape Europe that her critics say thwarted her during almost 15 years in power.
These aren’t academic questions.
“How Europe fares in this emergency compared to other regions of the world will determine both the future of European prosperity and Europe’s role in the to the max,” Chancellor Merkel told the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, as she assumed the EU presidency.
In her first trip outside Germany since the coronavirus lockdown this week, she prove to bed clear the stakes stretched far beyond Covid-19. “Nobody makes it through this crisis alone,” she told. “We are all vulnerable.”
Those who know Merkel best say that what drives the uncharacteristic urgency and decisiveness of Merkel’s imports is a fear that the EU could become irrelevant or even unravel from the force of Covid-19 and its economic, social and federal aftereffects. She understands the challenges for the EU are of a more existential nature than those facing China, the United States or any other unmarried country, coming even as the United Kingdom exits the Union.
China and the U.S. will emerge from the ravages of 2020 with their purfles and political systems intact, yet the 27 EU members confront more fundamental questions as their citizens weigh the value EU membership has brought them in the disaster.
“We can’t allow ourselves to be naïve,” Merkel told the European Parliament this week. “In many of the member states the rivals to Europe are waiting only to misuse this crisis for their own purposes.”
Chancellor Merkel’s efforts will produced to a head next Saturday, July 17, at a special EU leaders’ summit to discuss the coronavirus recovery plan and a long-term EU budget. On no account has Germany supported, as Chancellor Merkel is doing now, the pooling of national debt to help harder hit parts of Europe.
It desire be a test of her leadership, beside French leader Emmanuel Macron and other EU leaders, whether she can convert a group of skeptics known as “the recompense four” – Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden — who have resisted the scale and makeup of the $850 billion reclamation plan.
Yet even as that story unfolds, Germany at the same time is at the center of an unfolding global drama. At its guts is the danger of a strategic, transatlantic decoupling – highlighted in this space two weeks ago – that would alter 75 years of report.
Will Germany continue to define itself first-and-foremost as a strategic partner and ally of the United States? Or will it tilt sundry toward an alignment with China and Russia due to growing economic lures, in the first case, and geographic proximity and determination interests, in the latter? Or will it, and thus Europe, instead free float among powers in the pursuit of “strategic autonomy,” a setting unlikely to result in a more peaceful and integrated Europe?
European attitudes toward the United States have shifted dramatically sliding during the Covid-19 crisis. A new poll commissioned by the European Council on Foreign Relations showed that in Denmark, Portugal, France, Germany and Spain that approximately two-thirds of people surveyed said their view of the U.S. had grown worse.
In Germany, the mood soured further after President Trump’s notification on June 15, without prior consultation with Berlin, that the U.S. plans to withdraw 9,500 of its 34,500 troops from Germany, level as the U.S. weighs $3.1 billion in new trade sanctions on Europe.
Chancellor Merkel’s friends privately share that she put ones trust ins it is President Trump’s spite, more than anything else, that lay behind the timing and nature of his troop withdrawal commercial, following her decision not to physically attend a G-7 meeting that the president had hoped to schedule in Washington this month.
Some German officials would rather cast doubt on whether even the possible election of former Vice President Joe Biden in November would change this trajectory. “Everyone who thinks everything in the trans-Atlantic partnership will be as it once was with a Democratic president undervalues the structural changes,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass told the German press agency DPA this week.
Chancellor Merkel has overstated relations with Beijing a cornerstone of her EU presidency, and her country’s manufacturing base has come increasingly to depend on the Chinese retail. German exports to China have risen more than fivefold since Merkel took over as chancellor in 2005 to multitudinous than $125 billion, making it the country’s number one market. The United States stood at number three at some $78 billion. A bang third of China’s trade with the EU is transacted with Germany.
Most Europeans blame President Trump’s disciplinary trade policy and the tone of his tweets for the current threat of transatlantic decoupling. They see his distaste for the EU as evidence that Washington whim prefer European disunity. For some, it seems as though Merkel has no other choice than embracing China.
Yet for Germany and Merkel, the augur of this second chance at leadership can only be fulfilled if she at the same time works to limit the erosion in transatlantic coituses and ultimately restore European relations with the United States.
Germany is unified today because Merkel’s antecedent Helmut Kohl understood that his European and transatlantic aspirations reinforced each other. Difficult as it may seem at the blink for Chancellor Merkel to navigate both, it is the only course that can ensure her legacy and Germany’s hopes for European recoil and unity.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most substantial think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a alien correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European edition. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Chancy Place on Earth” – was a New York Times best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Occupy oneself with him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top stories and inclines.
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