#WEIMAR MOMENT DEFINITION HOW TO#
#WEIMAR MOMENT DEFINITION PLUS#

It has not spent a dime of the new special budget. Behind the rhetoric, however the coalition government failed to meet NATO’s 2% GDP defence spending commitment in 2022, and will likely miss the target again in 2023. Within a year, Germany drastically reduced its dependence on Russian gas imports. In Germany, the reassessment of foreign and security has been packaged under the label of “Zeitenwende”, coined by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s famous Februspeech, in which he announced the authorization of weapons exports to Ukraine (his government had been staunchly against weapons exports to active conflict sites) as well as a 100 billion euro off-budget fund to rebuild Germany’s chronically underfunded military. Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022 has led to a reorganisation of the European security architecture. Whose “Zeitenwende”? (c) College of Europe The need for a comprehensive strategic agenda remains. The pressing challenges the EU is facing have not gone away deep rifts about migration and asylum policy, the need to define a strategy towards China, management of the climate crisis, and all but forgotten, the rule of law crisis within the EU. However, the question of how best to manage the direct and indirect costs of the war, from energy crisis to inflation, has proven divisive.

The EU demonstrated relative unity in its response, not least with unprecedented sanctions and the first-ever jointly-financed military support under the European Peace Facility (EPF). Russia’s war on Ukraine has, of course, multiplied the stakes for European security.

Despite the current close cooperation with the US on European security, his remarks can also serve to remind the EU that the US has been trying to shift strategic attention to Asia for over a decade and that a less transatlantically-minded administration may well enter the White House in 2024. His first appeals to strategic autonomy came at a time when the Trump administration was unleashing a trade war on the EU and China, attacking European states for freeriding on security guarantees and hitting them with secondary sanctions in relation to business in Iran. But Macron wanted to return the strategic debate to one he had initially launched in 2017. Partners were right to be irked both by the timing and the contents of his comments.

It has also been the driving force in the West’s response to the war in Ukraine and is the largest donor of military assistance. His remarks regarding a need for a more autonomous European Union vis-à-vis the United States came at a bad time: China was just about to launch a military exercise around Taiwan, and the US has proven in the past months that it remains the key provider for European security within the framework of NATO.

#WEIMAR MOMENT DEFINITION PLUS#

This text draws on my article in Integration (1/23), as well as the Weimar Plus Discussion on Geopolitical Europe at the College of Europe in Natolin in which I participated in April 2023.įrench President Emmanuel Macron’s remarks on the margins of a recent visit to China sparked controversy – once again. But this is also an opportunity to leverage its normative appeal. It needs to reconfigure its neighbourhood and enlargement policy and define its strategic ambition vis-à-vis the US and China, all the while confronting conflicting visions for its internal functioning.

#WEIMAR MOMENT DEFINITION HOW TO#

But behind the relative unity of its reaction to the war, there remain disagreements both in how to acutely react to the crisis, and how to define the EU’s future geopolitical and institutional setup. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, the EU and its member states have had to make good on their promise to face up to geopolitics.

Weimar moment definition