Germany: No Country to Fight For
Politics in Germany lived for decades in two truths.
One: a moral exile born of twentieth-century crimes.
Two: a practical Europe born of the postwar settlement.
Together they created a civic caution that looked like humility and felt like self-doubt. For a long time that doubt seemed like virtue. Germany defined itself through restraint, treating moral weakness as moral strength.
Then the world changed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revived old fears and offered a new stage for virtue. The language of guilt became the language of defense. The instinct that once forbade power now justifies it.
One sentence warns that nationalism is dangerous. The next asks citizens to defend the country.
Former Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck once said that expressions of patriotic love made him feel sick and that he never knew what to make of Germany, then or now. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refusal to celebrate her election victory beside a German flag became a national moment of discomfort. Former Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Germany’s sovereignty had become an absurd concept after the wars of the twentieth century.
This is not hypocrisy. It is the country's history, ritualized and moralized. But a creed begins to crack when the same class that built a post-national order now calls for sacrifice.
The head of the German Reserve warned that modern war kills thousands a day and urged a return to conscription. Even Former Vice Chancellor Habeck, who once struggled with patriotism, recently said that Germany must become combat ready again and that he would no longer refuse military service as he had in the past.
So the message flips. We need the people. We need them in uniform.
Let's recapitulate:
First they said there is no country. Now they ask you to fight and die for it.
For decades, flags were suspect.
Sovereignty shrank into an abstraction handled in Brussels or Washington instead of Berlin.
Now the same political elite summons loyalty.
People notice. They smell opportunism or simply feel lost.
A society built on treaties and guilt forgot the language of sacrifice.
You can ask someone to die for a country.
You can ask them to die for freedom. But to die for a bureaucracy is a hard sell.
One day talk of nation is crude. The next, dissent is betrayal.
History taught Germany to distrust its people.
Now here is the double bind:
How do you ask loyalty from people who have no country left to love?