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Letter to the editor

Germany asserts itself, unsettling some allies

BERLIN - For decades, the burden of World War II meant Germany lacked the heavyweight attitude to match its mighty factories and broad autobahns.

It was rich enough to spend billions on compensating the victims of its aggression and genocide, but where foreign policy was concerned, it was a meek and humble giant.

But with the 60th anniversary of the German surrender, things are starting to change.

Lately Germany has unsettled some allies with a new pushiness about putting its own interests first. It split with the United States, its longtime ally, over the war in Iraq. It is pressing for an end to the weapons embargo on China without waiting for its European Union partner-countries to reach consensus.

Equally significant is its attitude toward the European Union. The EU was supposed to be the stage on which Germany would demonstrate harmony and good-neighborliness toward the European countries ravaged by Hitler's army. But for three years, it has broken the EU's limits on budget deficits - necessary for its economy, it says, but annoying to its more fiscally correct EU partners.

This new assertiveness has come with the passage of time and the rise to power of a new generation - people such as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who was born April 7, 1944 - just 13 months before Germany surrendered to the Allies.

That's not to say Germany has shut the book on the past. The sense of guilt and responsibility for war and genocide remains strong, as witnessed by the new Holocaust memorial, to be dedicated Tuesday.

Yet that awareness is now accompanied by a new, hardheaded self-image. Through the Cold War, when Germany was split in two, the Western half was dependent on America to defend it. Today, 60 years after Hitler's death and 15 years after the Germanys were reunited, Germans yearn to see themselves as citizens of one normal country among others.

A Stern magazine poll shows that 66 percent of Germans think it's "good" that they lost the war, and only 13 percent regret it. But 68 percent also agreed that now "Germany can behave like any other country."

Germany, with its 82-million people, is the largest country on the continent, and its diplomatic imperative usually has been to assure its neighbors that it will never again seek to dominate them. For 16 years until Schroeder was elected in 1998, Germany was governed by Helmut Kohl, who was 15 when the war ended. Kohl believed in strong relations with the United States and close integration into the EU. The two pillars of his approach were "to try to appear less important than you are, and to give the small countries the impression that they count," said Karl-Heinz Kamp, national security coordinator at the Konrad Adenauer Institute.

"Schroeder has changed both of those pillars," he said.

Germany's new assertiveness isn't based on military power, and the country has a strong antimilitarist outlook. Far more important to Germans is the economy, stagnating with a 12.5 percent unemployment rate, and a welfare system whose lavish benefits may be heading to a crisis as the birthrate falls.

Kamp thinks these are also factors driving the new assertiveness - that Schroeder's forays into foreign policy reflect frustration over his inability to return the economy to the boom times of the past.

"Foreign policy is more fun, if you are in a difficult domestic situation," Kamp said.

[Last modified May 8, 2005, 00:46:16]