Berlin′s economic power creates ′new fear of Germany′ across EU

I’m not so much afraid of German power; its German inactivity I’m starting to fear,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, then Poland’s foreign minister, while speaking in Berlin in 2011. You would never have heard a sentence like that before 1990, says German historian Andreas Rödder — certainly not coming from Poland.

The national-conservative PiS party is now in power in Poland, and the words coming out of Warsaw are very different these days. But the ambivalent relationship between Germany and its eastern European neighbor, expressed by Sikorski back then, still exists. “There’s a new expectation that Germany will take the lead in Europe,” says Rödder. “At the same time, Germany is confronted by the dilemma that this will revive old fears that Germany wants to assert its supremacy in Europe.”

There is no simple solution. Rödder believes Germany must take on the task, in the EU institutions and also, above all, at nation-state level. And in this he thinks it is more productive if it openly assumes a leading role rather than engaging in back-room politics.

“Germany made a serious mistake over the refugee crisis,” says the historian, referring to the majority decisions made by the European Council of Ministers in September 2015. At the time, some countries, led by Germany, obliged other EU members to take in quotas of refugees against their will. “That was perceived as Germany dictating to them,” says Rödder.

This, he says, reveals a characteristic of German history that also found expression in a recent study. Europeans were asked whether they thought of their respective national cultures as more valuable than those of their European neighbors. 46 percent of the Germans asked answered yes. Among French people, for example, it was only 23 percent.