BERLIN IS not interested in leading the EU but is anxious to renew its “pacemaker” role with France, according to German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble.
He said Berlin had been trapped between conflicting demands in recent months. Think tanks had called for greater German leadership in Europe, a role Mr Schäuble described as a “benevolent hegemon”. But economists, he said, had argued that such a role was neither practical nor possible in today’s complex geopolitical landscape.
“I have a sceptical view of a kind of general German leadership because the term ‘hegemony’ has bad associations in the light of our history,” he wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily yesterday.
“In addition, one cannot overlook that a push for international economic and political dominance was and is always linked to a leading role in foreign and security policy. Germany cannot and does not want to play this role.”
Instead the finance minister said the EU’s challenges, in particular the euro-zone crisis, made clear the need to move beyond national thinking to post-national strategies.
“Much more promising is co-operation with France, not as a dual hegemony but as joint pacemaker,” he wrote.
“Regulatory policy no longer can be described adequately with the adjectives ‘German’ or ‘French’.”
Instead, he suggested that EU economic policy should be shaped by France and Germany serving as “architect” and “builder” to produce a synthesis of proposals that promoted both domestic demand and exports.
Mr Schäuble acknowledged the doubts expressed last week by some EU members about the wisdom of rewriting euro-zone rules by reopening the Lisbon Treaty. “I’m not misjudging the risks the process [of treaty change] involves,” he wrote.
“But it is the case that he who doesn’t even try has already failed and leaves behind a huge construction site.”
The German finance minister suggested that last week’s Brussels summit was just the start of a new era in Franco-German economic co-operation.
In the coming year, he said, Paris and Berlin would have a chance to present joint proposals on further reform of the common market, the EU-wide restructuring of the banking sector and also, through France’s G20 presidency, the regulation of global markets for natural resources.
His thinking was picked up by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who returned to her roots as a physicist yesterday to explain European politics to students of the College of Europe in Bruges.
At a speech opening the institution’s 61st academic year, she cited Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr as great minds whose work showed that it was “difficult but possible” to move from a familiar world view to a new one.
“When one is able to think, act and research in the new space, everything seems easy and one finds it hard to understand why something remained closed to previous generations,” she said.
“This is how it is when we talk of Europe. We can hardly understand how a Europe of nation states can exist that for centuries were at war with each other.”