Helmut Kohl and Europe's National Interests
By Prof. Dr. Gunther Hellmann
 

On April 3 former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl turns 80. Germany already started celebrating him as a "great European" before the Greek crisis culminated in a summit meeting last week. The Euro-Group ratified a compromise which visibly carries the stamp of Kohl's successor, Angela Merkel. It also left a mark on her as a modern reincarnation of Bismarck and Thatcher. To Europhiles there could hardly be a more damaging criticism.

The focus on the contrast between the "European" vocations of Kohl and Merkel is partly justified. In Germany, Merkel's victory is celebrated as marking the symbolic end to the country's role as "Europe's paymaster," a policy often associated with Kohl's name. Yet it was already in 1999 that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder promised that he would stop the "squandering" of German money "in Brussels." The Greek crisis has only brought into the open what has been in the making for more than a decade.

Europeans have even less to be happy about. They should not be surprised, however; France, Britain and others have long provided role models for the "normal" practice of pushing through what they conceived to be in their national interest. Therefore, the issue at the heart of the current crisis is not whether Germany is renationalizing but how much national interest politics the EU can readily digest without suffering institutional constipation. The inclusion of a new "solidarity clause" in the Lisbon Treaty indicates that a properly functioning EU polity cannot be built by merely summing up twenty-seven national interests. Yet some politicians still seem to believe that the maximization of their individual national interest would in the worst case lead to institutional flatulence. The implosion scenarios which the Greek crisis yielded for the Euro and the European banking system sounded more as if the equivalent of intestinal perforation might be in the realm of the possible. Indeed, given the institutional density which EU polity has reached by now it is difficult to overstate the point of how much it has become a community of common fate not unlike the nation-state.

Such a community needs to adjust its discourse of interests in similar ways as the nation-states of prior centuries have taught themselves the language of national interests. Kohl's example is instructive because his experience as child of World War II had taught him to speak German and European at the same time. Rather than conceiving of Germany's national interests and European interests as mutually exclusive, he used to frame them as being mutually dependent.

To be sure, his European interests were as much a reflection of a particular German perspective as the French European rhetoric reflected French designs for reshaping Europe in its own image. Yet European talk was never cheap. Just as the invocation of national interests marks a claim which is taken as an invitation to articulate competing interpretations of what presumably is in a nation's interest, so does the invocation of European interests force interlocutors to engage in an exchange of what is best for the EU.

This is a crucial switch because the justificatory point of reference is changing. Merkel could never have sold her solution to the Greek crisis by referring to the maximization of Germany's interest. As a matter of fact, she spoke Kohl's language throughout in claiming to act as "Europe's trustee." Others should do so as well. If ever more politicians start to justify their competing claims in the name of Europe this will help to lift the discourse of interests from the level of the nation state to the level of the Union.

The task force which was established last week under the chairmanship of the President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, may play an important role here. It has to strike a balance between Germany's insistence on reinforcing the legal framework of the EU in the field of budgetary surveillance and the interest of other member states to enhance solidarity. In German government circles the latter is interpreted as a code word for pushing the EU towards a "transfer union" analogous to the system of revenue redistribution between Germany's states. The fear is that rich Germans may increasingly be expected to support poorer Greeks just like wealthy Bavarians are currently bailing out spendthrift Berliners. Mechanisms such as these will indeed have to be considered in the long run for the European polity if it is to function as a proper polity. The success of Helmut Kohl's determination in securing German unity while at the same time binding Europe's central power ever closer to its partners by giving up the Deutsche Mark has shown the way ahead.

Prof. Dr. Gunther Hellmann is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at AICGS and a professor of political science at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

This essay appeared in the April 1, 2010, AICGS Advisor.