‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy
The long read: Germany has been forced to admit it was a terrible mistake to become so dependent on Russian oil and gas. So why did it happen?
www.theguardian.com
An oil refinery in Leuna, Germany in 2007. Photograph: Getty Images
by Patrick Wintour
Thu 2 Jun 2022 01.00 EDT
Germany has been forced to admit it was a terrible mistake to become so dependent on Russian oil and gas. So why did it happen?
On Sunday 1 February 1970, senior politicians and gas executives from Germany and the Soviet Union gathered at the upmarket Hotel Kaiserhof in Essen. They were there to celebrate the signing of a contract for the first major Russia-Germany gas pipeline, which was to run from Siberia to the West German border at Marktredwitz in Bavaria. The contract was the result of nine months of intense bargaining over the price of the gas, the cost of 1.2m tonnes of German pipes to be sold to Russia, and the credit terms offered to Moscow by a consortium of 17 German banks. Aware of the risk of Russia defaulting, the German banks’ chief financial negotiator, Friedrich Wilhelm Christians, took the precaution of asking for a loan from the federal government, explaining: “I don’t do any somersaults without a net, especially not on a trapeze.”
The relationship would benefit both sides: Germany would supply the machines and high-quality industrial goods; Russia would provide the raw material to fuel German industry. High-pressure pipelines and their supporting infrastructure hold the potential to bind countries together, since they require trust, cooperation and mutual dependence. But this was not just a commercial deal, as the presence at the hotel of the German economic minister Karl Schiller showed. For the advocates of Ostpolitik – the new “eastern policy” of rapprochement towards the Soviet Union and its allies including East Germany, launched the previous year under chancellor Willy Brandt – this was a moment of supreme political consequence. Schiller, an economist by training, was to describe it as part of an effort at “political and human normalisation with our Eastern neighbours”.
The sentiment was laudable, but for some observers it was a potentially dangerous move. Before the signing, Nato had discreetly written to the German economics ministry to inquire about the security implications. Norbert Plesser, head of the gas department at the ministry, had assured Nato that there was no cause for alarm: Germany would never rely on Russia for even 10% of its gas supplies.
Half a century later, in 2020, Russia would supply more than half of Germany’s natural gas and about a third of all the oil that Germans burned to heat homes, power factories and fuel vehicles. Roughly half of Germany’s coal imports, which are essential to its steel manufacturing, came from Russia.
An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
“I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
In recent weeks even Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, a totemic figure of the Social Democrats and greatest German advocate of the trade “bridge” between east and west, has recanted. He admits he misread Russia’s intentions as he pursued the construction of a new undersea gas pipeline. “My adherence to Nord Stream 2 was clearly a mistake,” he told German media in April. “We held on to bridges that Russia no longer believed in, and that our partners warned us about.” This is an extraordinary admission for a man who acted as chief of staff to Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and thereafter a lavishly rewarded, and much reviled, lobbyist for Vladimir Putin. Steinmeier was also foreign minister under Chancellor Merkel, and a great evangelist for Wandel durch Handel, the concept that trade and dialogue can bring about social and political change.
How did Germany end up making such a blunder? Some argue that Merkel should have seen that Putin was taking Russia in an authoritarian direction when he announced his return to the presidency in 2011. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Germany made no move to stop importing Russian gas, and although Merkel threatened to introduce crippling trade sanctions, German industry convinced her to hold back. But some blame a more persistent misjudgment stretching back 50 years, based on a fallacy that authoritarian countries can be transformed through trade.
Destroyed buildings in Borodianka, Ukraine, in April. Photograph: Alexey Furman/Getty Images
The Social Democrats have now set up a review into whether the policy of Ostpolitik – first laid out in a landmark speech in July 1963 by Egon Bahr, then the closest adviser to West Berlin’s mayor and chancellor-to-be, Willy Brandt – became deformed over time, especially after securing its great achievement, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What is extraordinary, retracing the history through memoirs and contemporary records, is how frequently and determinedly Germany was warned, by everyone from Henry Kissinger onwards, that it was making a pact it might live to regret. Kissinger wrote to Richard Nixon on 9 April 1970: “Few people, either inside Germany or abroad, see Brandt as selling out to the East; what worries people is whether he can control what he has started.” Over 50 years, Germany fought numerous battles with a series of US presidents over its growing dependence on Russian energy. In the process, Germany’s foreign office developed a view of American anti-communism as naive, and a belief that only Germany truly understood the Soviet Union.
From the late 1960s, the Federal Republic of Germany tried to open its own direct line of communication with the Soviet leadership, even though its interest in reunification created tensions with the US. When it faced criticism from the US, Germany was wont to cite its unique status. “I cannot imagine there is anyone more interested in being allowed to continue working for detente and balance in Europe than the German people who are forced to live in two states,” Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then the foreign minister, told the German Bundestag in January 1980, to great applause.
But after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, why was Germany still so reluctant to listen to others? A sense of guilt for the atrocities committed against the Soviet Union during the second world war may have played a role. Pride, too, that – through Ostpolitik – it had mended its relations with Moscow. Germany, in a sense, became a double prisoner of its past – bound both to the horrors it had committed, and to its belief that its response to those horrors was correct.
The conflicts between Germany and the US in the 70s and 80s, involving two very different presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, were some of the most rancorous transatlantic battles since the second world war. “The disputes were all part of West Germany showing independence in foreign policy during the cold war, and that became uncomfortable for some American leaders,” the historian Mary Elise Sarotte said to me.
Carter and the German chancellor Helmut Schmidt had little respect for each other. Carter found Schmidt moody, while the chancellor, in his autobiography, dismissed Carter as an idealistic preacher, who knew nothing of Europe and was “just not big enough for the game”. The two leaders did not just grate personally, they disagreed on issues of substance – including how to protect human rights in Russia. In 1979 Schmidt and Carter came together to jointly adopt the so-called dual track decision, by which Nato would upgrade its nuclear weapons based in Europe, while actively seeking an arms control agreement with Russia. But in other ways their approach was very different.
