Germany abandons its ‘soft’ approach to Russia

With the crisis in Ukraine and Crimea, Germany’s foreign minister is taking a tougher line with the Kremlin, and wants to upgrade relations with the new Ukrainian government. But the new German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has throughout his career been among the promoters of Germany’s “soft” approach to Russia. How deep does this change by Germany’s new foreign policy elite go?

Steinmeier, from a provincial West German city, became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) at the time of the New Eastern Policy (Neue Ostpolitik) initiated by the first SPD Chancellor, Willy Brandt. Germany’s novel approach to the Soviet bloc aimed at defreezing Bonn’s relations with various communist Central and Eastern European regimes under the slogan “change via rapprochement” (Wandel durch Annäherung).

The most significant outcome of this new policy was the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki in 1975. Helsinki temporarily helped ease tensions between the two power blocs and led the way to economic cooperation between Western Germany and several Eastern European countries. The act included a provision of non-interference into the internal affairs of other countries (principle VI), a provision demanded by the Soviet Union. The West agreed to observe this rule only in exchange for Brezhnev’s official undertaking to adhere to human rights and basic freedoms (principle VII). This Soviet concession later became one of the factors that led to the dissolution of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Via the Helsinki Act, the West perhaps played an indirect role in the domestic delegitimization of communism.

The post-Soviet Eastern policy approach of Germany’s SPD has also been based on the core ideas of the CSCE Act — though with a significant modification. Whereas in the 1970s, human rights issues played a central role in the SPD’s approach to communist Europe, the party’s post-Soviet Eastern policy has put more emphasis on non-interference. Prominent members of the SPD, including former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, have repeatedly classified human rights violations as internal matters for states, which do not justify Western intrusion into, or even criticism of, authoritarian states. According to Schmidt, the rationale of this approach is the primacy of preserving peace. The avoidance of war was to be maintained through uninterrupted negotiations and good relations with governments, even if they do not always observe political freedoms and civil liberties. (Schmidt recently declared human rights to be a relatively young, Western concept that the West should not seek to impose on countries like China or Russia.)

This policy reached its climax during Gerhard Schröder’s SPD Chancellorship in 1998-2005. Going even beyond Schmidt relativism, Schröder developed a political friendship with Vladimir Putin. Its most notorious result was the building of Gazprom’s disputed Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, circumventing Eastern and Central Europe as well as Ukraine. The growing interest of German companies in the increasingly affluent Russian commodities market helped further to decrease the human rights component of SPD foreign policy.

The Kremlin’s rising authoritarianism and crackdowns on civil society didn’t stop Schröder from agreeing to the characterization of Putin as a “spotless democrat” in a 2004 talk show. He justified this by his interest in preserving Germany’s good relations with Russia. As is well known, Putin thanked Schröder for his generous support — and rewarded him with a lucrative post on Gazprom’s Nord Stream’s board. Oddly, when Schröder left German government service in 2005, he became an employee of the Russian state.

Steinmeier was a close collaborator of Schröder’s from the early 1990s, and became a central figure in his administration in 1998-2005. After the SPD lost the chancellery to the CDU/CSU in 2005, Steinmeier was promoted to foreign minister in Merkel’s first Grand Coalition (which existed until 2009). Together with Gernot Erler, the SPD’s leading Russia expert and then deputy foreign minister, Steinmeier initiated Germany’s so-called Partnership for Modernization with Russia (announced in 2008), which became an official EU policy in 2010.

The Partnership was based on the hope that Russia under its new president, Dmitry Medvedev, would cooperate in jointly developing not only a modern Russian economy, but also gradually providing civil society and opposition forces more space in Russian public affairs. During his first meeting with Medvedev in Yekaterinburg in 2008, Steinmeier praised the Russian president’s announcement that the rule of law would be his principal concern. Chancellor Merkel remained more sceptical — seemingly, because power was not really transferred in the hands of Medvedev, but remaind with (then prime minister) Vladimir Putin.

Merkel’s and Steinmeier’s differences in their assessment of the Russian leadership apparently led to policy disagreements within the coalition. Even after the short Russian-Georgian war in 2008, Steinmeier nevertheless said his approach was “without an alternative”. Only under Merkel’s next foreign minister Guido Westerwelle (who replaced Steinmeier in 2009 in a new conservative-liberal coalition), Germany’s Eastern policy took on a somewhat different approach. Westwelle, a liberal democrat, focused more on the central European states, and addressed human rights issues in Russia and elsewhere more openly. However, Westerwelle was too inexperienced and new to his new position to formulate a distinctly alternative approach.

With Steinmeier’s return to the foreign ministry in December 2013, critics of the “soft on Russia” approach (such as the foreign affairs editor of the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, Jörg Lau) warned of a return of Schröder’s old Eastern policy. Those fears diminished when Steinmeier said it was “outrageous how Russia has taken advantage of Ukraine’s desperate economic situation to block the EU association agreement.” Speaking of the escalating crisis in Kiev in his government re-entry speech on 17 December 2013, the new foreign minister also condemned “the violence perpetrated by the Ukrainian security forces again peaceful demonstrators on Maidan Square.” In early February, Steinmeier indicated, for the first time, German support for sanctions against Ukraine’s leadership: he said Germany and Poland, a country traditionally sceptical of Moscow and supportive of Kiev’s westernizers, had a common approach to the Ukrainian question. On his first visit to Moscow as Germany’s new foreign minister on 14 February, Steinmeier spoke openly about differences between Germany and Russia in defining the rule of law, thus expressing his disappointment at Medvedev’s unfulfilled promise of a modernization of Russia.

During the Kiev protests, Steinmeier took a harsher position towards then president Viktor Yanukovych’s violations of human rights, and openly supported the then opposition. Ulrich Speck, a leading German foreign policy expert at Carnegie Europe, said in January: “While Steinmeier will be keen to keep channels with the Kremlin open, he is going to look at Ukraine from the position of the Maidan and the opposition parties rather than from the Moscow perspective.” When Russia pressured Yanukovych, conditioning the provision of credits to Kiev on a pro-Russian government, Steinmeier and Merkel countered by announcing that Western money would be given only if the then opposition were part of the new government. Erler, coordinator of Germany’s policy towards Eastern Europe, admitted in a radio interview in February that the EU had been taking sides with the opposition in response to Moscow’s backing of Yanukovych. Yet Steinmeier still tried to soften the EU’s position towards Yanukovych and Russia, to keep communication channels to Kiev and Moscow open. The signing of the so-called Amnesty Law after Merkel’s telephone conversation with Yanukovych, and opposition activist Dmytro Bulatov’s permission to leave Ukraine for Germany, were seen by some as success for the German “silent diplomacy” approach.

While moving to a firmer position on human rights, Erler and Steinmeier were attempting to address Russian fears with regard to the West’s policies in Eastern Europe. For instance, in June 2013, Erler had criticized the fact that Russia’s unwillingness to accept western standards on human rights had been based on NATO’s enlargement to the East, US plans for basing anti-missile rockets in Poland, and the West’s disregard for Medevedev’s idea of creating a new security structure “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.

Steinmeier thought a solution to international conflicts throughout the world without Russian cooperation was impossible. (His article in the German weekly Focus in late January 2014 was titled “No way forward without Russia”.) He stressed Russia’s crucial role in world politics and its impact on the post-Soviet region.

But after the crisis in Crimea, this approach is coming under attack: Russia itself is turning into a major problem, and there seems to be no clear solution. So Germany is gradually joining the more Russo-sceptic countries led by Poland, which has increasingly taken the lead in the EU’s policy towards Ukraine. On their meeting on 12 March, Merkel and the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk put on a display of unity, and indicated that their recent joint policy towards Ukraine had been a successful good-cop/bad-cop game with Yanukovych.

Even so, at the start of the Crimea crisis, German politicians were among the most reluctant to impose sanctions on Russia. Steinmeier still maintains the need for talks and wants the current “road towards confrontation” to have as many exit options as possible, to prevent a new division of Europe, he explained in Germany’s influential Berlin direkt TV show on 9 March. He said he favoured only a step-by-step process in imposing sanctions, pointed out the risks of an overly harsh position by the West, and even justified his approach by alluding to the beginnings of World War I a hundred years ago.

The first weeks of Steinmeier’s second term have shown a considerable and perhaps continuing modification of his approach towards Eastern Europe. As the earlier policy of rapprochement failed to produce any tangible moderation of Russia’s domestic and foreign policies, he now seems ready to take a more confrontational stand towards Moscow while upgrading his engagement with the new Ukrainian leadership. How far this change will go and what it may achieve remains to be seen. As the West’s confrontation with Russia over Ukraine grows by the day, Steinmeier’s attempts to get Moscow back to the negotiation table appear dim.