Norbert Röttgen is a senior leader of the Christian Democratic Union. A former cabinet minister, he was chair of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee from 2014 to 2021. Röttgen is the author of Democracy and War: Politics and Identity in a Time of Global Threats.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Norbert Röttgen discuss the insufficiency of Germany’s support of Ukraine (and the Zeitenwende that wasn’t); the nascent pro-Russian movement gaining strength on the margins of German politics; and whether the path to an independent and secure Europe runs through Germany.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: After Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that this was a Zeitenwende, a fundamental break in Germany’s epoch.
What did he mean by that, and did he deliver? What would it mean for Germany to actually take this idea of the Zeitenwende seriously?
Norbert Röttgen: It was a great speech, delivered only three days after the full invasion by Russia of Ukraine. So it was very early. And he really got it right in that speech. He outlined that everything had changed, and would have to change. Germany had to play a historic role to support Ukraine, and we had to fundamentally shift in our posture and in our policies. So this was the starting point for Germany; I could not have envisaged a better one. And we, as opposition members of parliament, stood up, gave applause to the chancellor and we enjoyed this moment of national unity and of a new orientation of German policies and even politics.
Unfortunately, he did not implement what he had said. If he had done so I would say I’m quite sure we would have a different situation on the ground in Ukraine. He quickly became reluctant, expressing doubts, and this has become the new common thread of his policy: always being late, or even unwilling, and in the end doing too little, too late, and in some respects doing nothing.
We have a responsibility, as he rightly outlined in the speech. And by his own yardstick he has not delivered the policy he described as necessary for Germany.
Mounk: So let’s take a step back. How do you view the current state of the conflict in Ukraine? And in terms of international support for Ukraine, what contribution do you think Germany and Europe more broadly has made?
I think, in the discourse, there are people who say that actually, if it wasn’t for the United States, nothing would have happened at all. And America has been the main supporter of Ukraine. There are others who point out that actually Europe did pull its weight to a considerable degree, that it has sent quite a lot of financial aid and weapons in considerable quantities. What has the relative contribution of Europe and the US been, and why do you think that it hasn’t been enough?
Röttgen: Perhaps three points. The first point is when the war started there was not one expert in the world I think who did not share the view that this war was going to be a matter of days or weeks, and it would not take months until Ukraine would be forced to surrender. This was the common expert view, including any intelligence service, and also the American intelligence services. So this can only be described as a huge success that Ukraine is alive, that Ukraine has gathered all it can muster and that the West has substantially supported Ukraine. Russia now is only in a very limited and incremental way making some progress. This is a huge, huge success. The second point is, yes, in the beginning, it was not the European Union or European states but the United States of America that turned out to be the major security power for Europe. The major European security power was not European, it was the United States of America, which provided a huge amount of support very quickly, very professionally. In the meantime, the Europeans have caught up; particularly, the second largest economy of NATO, which is Germany, has caught up. And important economies like Poland, but also very small economies like the Baltic countries or Denmark and others have, in relation to their GDP, have done much more—however, in absolute numbers, it’s very limited because they have quite small economies.
The third point is that, over time, I would say the two biggest economies of NATO, the United States and Germany, have not shown the necessary political will to support Ukraine in a way that would have enabled Ukraine to gain the upper hand in this war. It’s simply a lack of political will. It is a calculation that to do more perhaps could cause Putin to escalate even more than he has done so far. And there are, certainly in both countries, aspects stemming from a domestic calculation with regard to elections and electoral campaigns. So there is a restraint not only motivated from foreign policy but also coming from the domestic scene, and this has led to the insufficiency of military support. And restrictions on military support has led to an impasse, which is a bloodshed. And for Ukraine, it’s extremely dangerous to see such an impasse because Russia is three or four times bigger than Ukraine. So the time factor becomes now very crucial and time is playing in favor of Putin, unfortunately.
So it’s a lack of support which creates a substantial security problem, not only for Ukraine of course, but for Europe as a whole.
Mounk: I agree with you that Germany and other countries should have supported Ukraine in a much more muscular way from the beginning. And if they had done so, then Ukraine may actually at this point have won the war. As you’re saying, that didn’t happen. And it now looks as though we are in a very bloody stalemate in Ukraine. What is the way forward? Do you think that at this point much more decisive support for Ukraine could still allow the country to win the war outright? Or are we now in a position where a formalization of a stalemate is the best we can hope for?
Röttgen: I think the most important thing is that we have to be absolutely clear what is at stake in this war. What is it really about? And in my view, it’s about war or peace for Europe. So there is one question which decides whether Europe will have a fate as a war-ridden continent or if peace and security are to return to Europe, and it is whether the Ukrainians and the West make sure that Russia’s war at the end will turn out a failure. We have to make war a failure. This is the attempt by Putin to reintroduce war as a tool of foreign policy in Europe in the 21st century. And if we were to allow this attempt to reintroduce war as an instrument of policy to be a success, then everybody would learn from this lesson that war pays off for the perpetrator. And if we were to allow that, we would see that war remains in Europe. Putin wouldn’t stop. And there is no hint that he would stop. Perhaps the next country would be Moldova. He would stir tensions within the Baltic countries or wherever. So war would then remain and insecurity would also remain, and it would have dire consequences politically and economically.
It’s more than Ukraine. Ukraine is very important, of course. And the humanitarian catastrophe, we have to see that and feel for the Ukrainians. But we have to know it’s not only solidarity with Ukraine, it’s our own existential political interest to defeat war. And the longer it takes for us to learn this lesson, the more expensive it will get.
Mounk: So I agree with those principles and that sentiment, but I suppose my question is about what that means concretely in this situation. Can Ukraine still win the war? What would it look like to show Putin that his war was not worthwhile? How do we ensure that he doesn’t take possession of territories in Ukraine on which Russian troops are now quite firmly entrenched?
Röttgen: In a way, it’s quite simple, because it only depends on us. It does not depend on the Ukrainians; the Ukrainians have the bravery and the determination to survive and to give everything they have and this is first and foremost their lives. We only have to give money, and we have a lot of money in reserve. Both Germany, and other industrialized, rich countries of Europe like Italy, France, Britain, and Poland. And we simply have to understand what is at stake for us, for the West.
And we have, of course, to take back the restrictions. There is no legal and no political and moral argument for not allowing the Ukrainians to hit military targets with Western weapons on Russian soil. Why not? It’s completely legal to do so and it’s politically a strong argument that the Ukrainians are allowed to destroy weapons and ammunition and logistical hubs before these weapons are fired off and kill Ukrainian civilians. This is what is happening.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about public opinion within Germany. I think international observers sometimes struggle to understand why there is such pro-Russian (or, if you’re feeling generous, anti-anti-Russian) sentiment within the country. When you look at current polls, the parties that are very clearly anti-anti-Russian, which I would count the Alternative for Germany on the far right, the Linke on the far left, and of course, the newly formed Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the BSW, have about a quarter of the vote in opinion polls. If you add to that the significant portions of the Social Democratic Party that follow a similar line, as well as the parts of the Christian Democrats, which perhaps are less pronounced, but which also exist particularly in the east of Germany, that take a similar line, it comes to be close to half of the German political spectrum.
We’ve seen in the last days and weeks, so-called pro-peace demonstrations with a very broad cross-section of German politicians linking arms and advocating for less support for Ukraine. What animates that in the German public and how do you think this is going to evolve in German public opinion over time? And can you win a majority in Germany for having a more muscular foreign policy that actually stands up for democratic values in Ukraine and more broadly?
Röttgen: Absolutely possible. But I do not fully agree with your observations of the German domestic political situation. So what we had to start with before the war broke out was quite a pacifist public mood in general. Everything had to do with military instruments and the defense budget and all these things. They did not have a strong support neither in the parties nor in the political public and, particularly, the SPD was a highly critical party when it came to any kind of defense spending and also implementing some military and defense instruments as a part of our foreign policy. So this has fundamentally changed in Germany. I’m now 59 years old. I’ve been a member of parliament for 30 years. I have in my political lifetime and in my entire lifetime not seen as profound and as quick a political paradigm shift taking place as we have seen the last two and a half years. So this is a fundamental change in how Germans in the large majority see security and military aspects and so on. So this is a paradigm shift. So that Zeitenwende has taken place in our society. So I’m really very content and I say the Germans are doing well in this situation. It’s not about the Germans and our society.
The second point is, yes, of course, we are a democracy, and it’s not a problem if there is one quarter, a fifth or even a third of voters who are not supportive of a certain policy they see in government and the majority of parties. So this is absolutely normal and it’s not a problem at all. What is a problem? What we have is that Germany is divided between the East and the West. This is really a problem which we are not adequately dealing with and which we have to really face and address. On the whole we have two, as you mentioned and outlined, pro-Putin parties (as they ever have been). The far-right AfD has always taken the position and the views of Putin. And then we have the BSW, a new party and a one-person party, and that is Sahra Wagenknecht, the party leader. It is a highly elitist party, which does not allow everybody to join the party, and Frau Wagenknecht has always been pro-Putin. So you’re right, we have about a quarter fundamentally opposing the policy to support Ukraine and being the advocates of a pro-Putin policy of Germany. This is a quarter. Let’s say it might add up to a third, if you also take into account some members of the SPD or the CDU. The SPD—in general, I’m highly critical of their appeasement of the past and of doing too little today. But of course, fundamentally, they are anti-Putin, they are the leading coalition party who supports military political support for Ukraine. So we have to really draw a line between the populist parties and the SPD.
And then, if we had a clear leadership, if we had a chancellor who would deliver from time to time (only two, three times a year) a speech like the Zeitenwende speech he delivered, if he were to sustain and implement and stay the course, we would have a totally different situation. And not having that situation, not having a chancellor making the case, but permanently now voicing concerns, restraint, and so on, we still have 50 to 60% support. So this is a good situation despite the problematic role the German chancellor is playing here. The Germans are the right people to change the situation in Europe.
Mounk: I think there’s a lot that’s right in that. But let me push back on two points. The first is that it does seem to me as though Germany, or at least West Germany, has enjoyed since the end of World War II a kind of “holiday from history,” in which the country has outsourced a lot of its defense needs to the United States and been able to leave the game of geopolitics to other forces; and then sometimes, and this is being a little bit polemical, blamed those forces for it. So the typical view of America in a certain circle of educated Germans, the kind of circle I grew up in, was to say, “These militaristic cowboys are so obsessed with weapons.” And the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, would say it’s an error of the conditions of possibility; It’s easy to blame others for carrying weapons when your ability to not invest in the military is guaranteed by the fact that those very people carry weapons. So it is not clear to me that either the average German citizen—or, for that matter, the German intellectual and political elite more broadly—has truly recognized the extent to which the resurgence of Russia, the rise of China, and of course the changes within the United States have meant that this holiday from history is no longer sustainable, that it is effectively over.
The second pushback I would have is that Germany’s economy continues to be very dependent both in indirect ways on Russia and the provision of cheap energy, which was certainly the economic model that sustained Germany in the last decades, and of course on its export market in China. And that if it came to a situation where Germany has to decide, as it did after World War II, whether to be a firm member of a Western alliance at the cost of some of its economic relationships, not only with Russia but also with China and reverting to a kind of middle-power status where it continues to have reasonably friendly relationships with the United States, but refuses to do anything that would upset its ability to have a long-term partnership with perhaps Russia under a different leader and certainly China, it is not at all obvious to me that a majority of the population would choose that anchoring in the Western alliance. Am I being overly pessimistic?
Röttgen: I’m very grateful for these two aspects you are raising because I’m dealing with both of them in my book and so I’m really keen to address them. The first, the holiday from history—again, I do not fully agree when you start describing Germany from 1949. I would say then, back then, we really had a strategic foreign policy starting from 1949 in the decades to come: then, the German foreign policy was to do everything to get reintegrated again in the international system. We started World War II, we lost it, and of course there was the heavy historic and moral burden that never is going to go away. Nevertheless, we wanted to come back, and what we call West integration, what we called the process of European integration—these are really remarkable historic achievements pursued by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and ensuing chancellors. I would also like to mention the double-track motion of NATO in the end of the ‘70s, which was initiated by the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat, who started this NATO policy. I would say that in the first 30 years or so, Germany pursued a strategic foreign policy.
You mentioned Immanuel Kant. We thought we had achieved the philosophical concept of perpetual peace in our European house. This had dramatic consequences. We took the peace dividend and there was no urgent and obvious reason at all to pursue any kind of strategically-thought-through foreign policy. So yes, you’re right on that. For 30 years or so, we took this peace dividend and we got so accustomed to this comfortable situation that the political class and the majority decided to ignore anything that got in the way of this perception that military and defense instruments were not the tools we should apply, and that everything could be done by dialogue with Russia and so on. So even when it came to the annexation of Crimea, German foreign policy did not really live up to a new situation. This changed. It changed only when German politics and the political system was forced to adapt by the full invasion of Ukraine. Only when Putin resorted to war as his policy against Europe, we woke up and were forced to adapt. So I would say this is the case now and we have to recognize that Germany, absolutely contrary to the point where we started in 1949, now is the most important country to preserve or to restore security and peace for Europe. For Germans, this is a very new situation. So our learning curve is very steep. It’s very short and we have to learn very quickly.
We have a lack of leadership in Germany, across Europe, and I have to say in the West, which makes it harder for ordinary people and citizens to see that not only they have learned, but that also there is a leadership which is at their side and showing the way to what strategic goals you want to achieve. This is also true for China, which you mentioned absolutely rightly. Absolutely. I think there is a broad understanding that the dependency we have agreed upon for the German economy is not sustainable any longer. And we have to reverse course. We have outsourced our energy to Russia, our economic growth to China, and our security to America, as Constanze Stelzenmüller famously said one or two years ago.
So we have to change course. Russian gas supply is not viable any longer. And now we have to see that China has a strategic goal to change the world order. There is a power claim that is not compatible with our ideas and notions of individual freedom, the rule of law, and so on. They want to change to a global order that is not based on Western values. We have to see this. And the German government is doing China policy as if the Russian war and the consequences of dependency from an authoritarian dictatorship had not happened. And the third is true for security. I think the situation is clear that the Americans will not come back; we are not going to see a situation we had in the decades of the Cold War in which America is basically funding and equipping German and European security.
Mounk: It’s hard to talk about Germany at the moment without also touching on the political situation in the country and the sense more broadly that is very strong outside of Germany’s border, that the country is now in a serious crisis. Part of this is a political crisis we have seen particularly in the east of Germany, it is now hard to build stable coalitions. The size of both the far right AfD, but also this new party led by Sarah Wagenknecht, is considerable. And so some of these states now seem to be in danger of becoming ungovernable, at least in any kind of coherent way. At the national level, the polls certainly are more moderate. It does look as though moderate and democratic parties are going to have a clear majority at the next federal elections. But they’re going to struggle, as they have for the last 10 years or so, to form coherent ideological coalitions. It is unlikely that either the moderate parties of the right, or even less so the moderate parties of the left, are going to win an outright majority. So we’re going to have to have cooperation across the political spectrum in a way that, at least in the current government, has seemed to make it impossible to have a coherent government.
And then, of course, you have economic problems—not just the fact that Germany currently is in or close to recession, but also the fact that, for example, the German car industry is in a very significant crisis. It feels as though the German economic model is running aground. So how serious is Germany’s economic and political crisis. Is Germany, as some people abroad are now suggesting, the new “sick man” of Europe?
Röttgen: My analysis would be more that it’s not only Germany but that it is the West and Western democracy that is in a state of crisis, and, irrespective of national specifics, have similar phenomena of crisis: the erosion of the center, the radicalization of parties, or the emergence of new populist parties. We have more and more public debate characterized not only by different views and opinions and controversies, but by identity and truth. You can’t find compromise about your identity, so we have an increasingly hateful debate. You see it in the United States, you see it everywhere, in France, in Britain, and also in Germany.
What is fundamental for the emergence of this crisis is that we are living in a time of extreme simultaneous changes we are facing. It’s the erosion of geopolitical order, it’s technological disruption, it’s climate change, it’s migration—many changes that are immediately and directly affecting the personal lives of many, many people. And what we see is the traditional parties and our political systems, the way they work, they are still working as if this new era had not occurred. They have been trained and socialized in the old time, in the Cold War period and they are behaving as if revolutionary changes had not occurred. So what people feel is that they are fundamentally affected, have fundamental fears and concerns, and do not see the competence of these traditional parties to heal the problems and to pursue new policies. So there is a competence gap and a trust gap as a consequence of that. And the economic problems we are facing are only one element of the revolutionary changes we are facing in our countries.
Mounk: So in a certain sense, this is the normalization of German politics. Germany now faces a challenge from the far-right as well as from other populist forces, which other countries in Europe have faced for about 10 years, or a number of decades in some countries. So this doesn’t make Germany unique. It may be abnormal, but in a kind of empirical sense, Germany now resembles those other countries. But perhaps with one important difference, right, which is that Germany is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, and it’s certainly the wealthiest large country in Europe and yet, somehow, the AfD is actually more extreme than some of those other right-wing populist parties. The German version of this party is much more extreme, for example, at this point in the Rassemblement national of Marine Le Pen or, for that matter, Fratelli d’Italia, with its more radical history, of Giorgia Meloni in Italy.
Why is there such a profound sense that the German model is broken, not just among some commentators from the outside, but clearly among significant segments of the German population itself?
Röttgen: Germany is still and has remained a successful economy. We are the largest European economy. We are the third largest economy in the world, despite having only 85 million inhabitants. So we have remained very successful. We have a very sophisticated, very generous welfare system. The economic problems affecting people in the West are moderated through the German welfare model. So this means that there is a cushion in a way in our system that protects people and the Germans, I would say, in a more effective way than is the case in other countries—not to mention the United States, where these systems only exist to a very, very limited level compared to the German system. So I think this is one reason for the fact that a high degree of stability has remained and we have retained a high degree of stability.
However, it has now been the situation in the last two years or so that populism has risen and the populist parties have become stronger, and one party has emerged as a modestly successful populist party: in our last federal elections in 2021, the AfD came out at around 10 percentage points—too much, I would say—however only 10 percentage points. Now they are at 17 to 18 percentage points on the federal level and in the eastern regional elections they were about 30 percent. They have become much more successful. So what you see is not a partisan view that the government we have is not delivering in any way on the concerns many people have, from migration to economic developments. They see not a government that is in any way, in a convincing way, acting on these problems.
Mounk: So you are a key member of the Christian Democratic Party, a center-right party that is currently leading in the polls for next year’s parliamentary elections. There’s been a big debate about the political cause of the CDU itself, as well as of other center-right parties across Europe and the West. And the fundamental question people seem to be asking is whether those parties should stick closely towards the middle of the political spectrum, fighting for swing voters who have moderate political opinions on the economy and on social issues, or whether they should in certain ways emulate the far-right populists that are gaining on them in many countries to try and compete for those voters. You are associated in Germany, I think you’ll agree, I hope I’m not mistaken, with the position that the party should really fight for the political center. I personally have always found this debate to be slightly overly simplistic, and I’m sure you wouldn’t quite have put it in those simplistic terms either. It seems to me that when the leader of the Christian Democratic Party is somebody I could imagine voting for, as I could have imagined voting for Angela Merkel (and as I could certainly imagine voting for a CDU that is led by you), we would have a structural problem because I come from the left. I’m not part of a conservative milieu in Germany by ideology, or by sociology, by milieu. And so I wonder if we don’t need a third alternative, a center-right party that is quite robustly conservative; that for example, takes a more conservative opinion and stance than I myself might take on questions like migration, on which a majority of the public has sent the political class the message that they want many more restrictions, but without thereby emulating the far right, without giving up on basic democratic values or without giving up on being a productive and cooperative member of the European Union.
What do you think about the future direction that the CDU, in Germany, and that conservative or center-right parties more broadly should take? How can they stand up for democratic values but without leaving too much political space for the far right to recruit new voters and members among the conservative segments of a country’s populations?
Röttgen: There can be no doubt that we are facing a very serious challenge to our democracies, that our democracies are facing this challenge and that also the traditional political party system, our system which we have had for decades in a very successful way, is challenged. It’s not only that the one or the other party is challenged, but it’s more and more a challenge to the system. And I’m totally convinced that there is only one recipe for us and this is to defend the center, to defend our institutions, to defend our democracy and the values this democracy is based on. There is no way to try to emulate populist extremist parties; it would only legitimize the challenges to our democratic system if we were to show fear and surrender in style and on substance, because it obviously shows that we have neither the arguments nor the courage to defend the center of our societies and of the democratic liberal values that our post-war democracies have been based on. So I think there is no way to change this fundamental position.
However, this of course must not mean that we have only to continue the way we have done politics in the last decades. We have to rejuvenate. We have to reinvent ourselves. What do our values mean in today’s world? What does it mean when it comes to migration? Not to stir fears against migrants, of course, but that we have to develop policies that give our liberal democracies something people rightly complain that they want to see, and this is control of our borders. This is much more easily said than done in a globalized world where poor countries, countries ridden by conflict and disaster and catastrophes, immediately neighbor the rich European countries and are only separated by the very small Mediterranean Sea. But we have to make progress on solving these essential questions. Everybody knows that we have to develop a more sustainable economy. We have also to develop a growth model which does not come along with economic dependency and geopolitical dependency from China. So we have to fundamentally adapt. We have to work hard intellectually and politically. We have to invent new elements and forms of public communication. So we can’t just do it the way we have done it for decades. And this is what we have to do. We have to enter and embrace the new world.
Mounk: When it comes to the economy, what would it take? Angela Merkel was reportedly obsessed with the fact that Germany doesn’t produce any billion dollar patents—it has lots of patents on smaller kinds of inventions, but the truly important technologies of the future are not being produced in Germany or in Europe. I’m struck by the debate about artificial intelligence in Europe over the last months and years in which there’s calls for very strong regulation—but of course, it’s easy to regulate a technology that you don’t have. Germany and Europe are not players in the development of artificial intelligence. So what should the next new German government and what, more broadly, should the European Union do to actually make Europe a global innovator, a global economic player that is at the level of the United States and of China when it comes to those questions?
Röttgen: That’s hard given the situation we are in. But if you ask what should be at the heart of a new German and European policy, I would say that the first thing is, and we discussed it already, is that Europeans have to learn that our European security is at stake and that there is no country outside Europe that is ready to do the job for us. So if we fail to restore security and peace in Europe, I think anything else will not be achievable for Europeans because then we would be so absorbed and so damaged with this failure that any other political attempt would be doomed. So this is the first thing.
The second thing you mentioned, we have fallen back in areas of technology, productivity and so on. So this is the second biggest and equally big change we have to make. We have to focus on innovation and technologies where we have to massively catch up and we have massively fallen back. And to catch up is a difficult thing to do. However, we have excellent universities, we have excellent industries, we still have some technological leadership, particularly when it comes to industrial application of technologies. We have a big market of 450 million citizens, so there are assets, and of course we can make better use of these assets. It’s a matter of political will, of financing and funding, and there is still space to do something, particularly for Germany. We have fiscal space to reorient our policies. So I would put these two things, security and innovation and economic growth without geopolitical dependence at the heart of a new policy which has to be developed and pursued across Europe.
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