The coalition agreement of the new federal government gives cause for optimism. He moves on the line of decades of German European policy, especially that of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, but also that of Prime Minister Angela Merkel. Some opposing statements from the CDU and CSU are based on a misjudgment – even if there will be friction again and again in the coalition and especially between the government and the bourgeois opposition when it comes to European decisions and EU legislation.
The key phrase in the foreign policy part of the coalition agreement between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP is: “We are going to be a government that defines German interests in the light of European interests.” Europe to serve the peace of the world ”.
The combination of German and European interests in the coalition agreement is also clever because today no European nation-state has the strength to assert its interests alone in the globalized world. National concerns must be bundled in European positions in order to have any weight at all on the geopolitical or geoeconomic scale.
Otherwise you will not be able to achieve anything on the world political stage, especially with the superpowers USA and China, but also with Russia – an obvious insight that the Berlin Republic and its think tanks sometimes seemed to have lost. I hope that changes now! The European Union and its Brussels headquarters will no longer be degraded to a kind of side event.
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Nevertheless, caution is advised: German business representatives continue to declare that companies would turn away from the Brussels “regulatory mania”, which is expressed, for example, in the debate about EU minimum wage regulations. The critics tend to ignore the fact that the internal market and the euro have removed almost all national trade barriers. Nor do they want to see that EU trade policy in particular has made a decisive contribution to German export success.
Expand majority decisions
In diametrical contrast, the coalition agreement makes it unmistakably clear: Germany cannot master the great challenges of our time – from the climate crisis to questions of internal and external security to economic, trade and currency policy – on its own.
The SPD, the Greens and the FDP rightly emphasize that they want to strengthen the EU institutions and replace the principle of unanimity in the Council, which has a paralyzing effect in many political areas, in favor of qualified majority decisions.
To achieve this, there should also be intergovernmental negotiations, but only on a transitional basis and in exceptional cases. According to the will of the traffic light, the political breakthrough should rather be achieved with a European convention in which not only European parliamentarians but also national representatives sit. In addition, the red-green-yellow government wants to use many of the previously unused possibilities of the Lisbon Treaty.
The EU is strong when it is decided by a majority in the Council, as is the case with the internal market. For this reason, EU policy must be speeded up through the expansion of majority decisions and a coalition of the willing within the framework of the Lisbon Treaty.
It remains to be seen how far it actually comes with the intended further development of the EU “to a federal European federal state that is also decentrally organized according to the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality”.
In any case, the assumption of the EU presidency by France in the first half of 2022 should meet the European political vigor of the traffic light coalition, perhaps it will even provide a new momentum. Head of State Emmanuel Macron is anything but a brake on European policy. He in particular can give a mandate to the EU future conference that has just started.
External relations are a top priority for Scholz
The European party CDU can actually support the goals of the traffic light. It is and was their policy to enable the “strategic sovereignty of Europe” through “increased capacity to act” in a global context. This is also indispensable if you want to become less dependent and vulnerable to non-European influences in important strategic areas such as energy, health, raw materials and digital technology.
From my point of view, it is also right to strengthen the common European foreign, security and defense policy within NATO. How far one gets with the military necessity of “hard power” remains to be seen in view of the relevant debates among the Greens and the “pacifist” SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich.
In Union circles there is widespread concern that the Greens, with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Foreign Office, have the decisive levers in their hands and that they would now completely dominate German European policy. But the Greens will not succeed in that. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has already made external relations a top priority, and the FDP will also have a say in this. Your finance minister Christian Lindner is unlikely to allow himself to be carried away by the Greens in matters of European budget, financial and monetary policy, given his constituencies. This is especially true with regard to the EU Stability Pact. According to the coalition agreement, the “Next Generation EU” development plan is “an instrument that is limited in terms of time and amount”.
For all these reasons, the CDU / CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag should offer the traffic light government their cooperation on European policy – which, by the way, would be in line with a decade-long, good German tradition. Of course, this does not rule out criticism in individual cases. In any case, alarmism is not the order of the day – because Germany only has one luxury problem. Anyone who worries about future German foreign and European policy after Angela Merkel’s political departure can be reassured: In the new German Bundestag, 85 percent of the members are not only pro-European, but also NATO-friendly. So you should leave the church in the village.
The CDU has to earn the title of European party again
Helmut Kohl once said: “With a good European and foreign policy, you can sometimes win elections. But it is irresponsible to direct this policy towards electoral victories. ”According to this maxim, the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Konrad Adenauer, Kohl and Merkel, must also act in the opposition now.
Above all, however, the CDU should come to an agreement on how it intends to constructively shape the future of the European Union after the British have left and in view of the unmistakable centrifugal forces within the alliance of states. In the end, the impression has sometimes been made that the CDU is primarily focusing on saying what it does not want. The title of “European party” has to be earned again in the opposition.
The author: Elmar Brok is an advisor to the Munich Security Conference. The CDU politician was a member of the European Parliament from 1980 to 2019.
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