Arms Exports: The Normality of a Scandalous Subject: A Comment

Abstract

Arms Exports: The Normality of a Scandalous SubjectA Comment Michael Geyer (bio) On February 19, 2022, just a few days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a German opinion poll found that 63 percent of respondents opposed sending weapons into "war and crisis areas," against 34 percent who thought this might be justified in some cases. A mere 3 percent did not know.1 The surprisingly high level of certainty in matters of arms transfers suggests deep-rooted convictions. A similar poll some five years earlier counted a whopping 83 percent who said they were opposed.2 These polls must be taken with a grain of salt, but they do confirm the overall sense, reinforced by still more polls, that Germans want their foreign relations to be peaceful, or, as one op-ed remarked, "want to do good in the world, but preferably the soft way."3 When on Sunday, February 27, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced in a policy statement to the Bundestag the rearmament of the Bundeswehr and direct, if still tightly circumscribed, arms exports to Ukraine in light of the Russian invasion on February 24, this was an epochal change—in the first place because it met with the overwhelming approval of the German public.4 Much will be written about this policy statement and what may come of it. Skeptics were quick to point out that nothing much or not enough came of it in the immediate aftermath, while critics feared that too much was happening already.5 Their call for prudence (Besonnenheit) instantly produced a media storm of indignation.6 Retrospectively, on the question of arms exports, the more tantalizing and, for a historian, more answerable question runs as follows: How did Germany emerge as one of the world's top arms exporters—reaching an all-time high in 2021—even though German opinion roundly rejected such exports on principle?7 This contrast need not be understood as contradictory, but the simultaneity of a high level of arms exports and widespread skepticism about them requires explanation. The argument here is that in order to find an answer to this apparent paradox we must examine the arms (export) control policy and [End Page 241] the politics of the social-liberal coalition governments of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the long 1970s, a model that is unraveling before our very eyes in 2021/22 at the hands of another socialdemocratic-liberal-green coalition under Chancellor Scholz. Implicit in this argument is a historical-temporal proposition. I will take the half century between the 1970s and 2020s as a single unit of analysis,8 viewed as a fifty-year European interregnum. As an effect of détente, Germany and Europe in those years began to move beyond the Yalta/Potsdam truce in Europe that facilitated a tense, conflictual and highly militarized, but experientially "miraculous" postwar reconstruction. Typically, this period is associated with the uncertainties of rapid globalization (1970s–2008) on the one hand and the end of the Cold War in Europe in 1989/1991 on the other hand, with the 1989/1991 caesura as the main turning point. But I agree with those who mark 1979 as a watershed year, and while this may have appeared as a mere periodization game, the events in 2022, foreshadowed in developments since 2008, suggest otherwise.9 This framing might appear as somewhat of an overreach for a comment on a set of papers about German and Austrian arms exports and their control, but not if we consider that one, if not the key feature of the 1970s–2020s interregnum was the making and unmaking of a Europe-wide arms control and disarmament regime that reduced force levels in Europe—notwithstanding the continuing presence of tactical nuclear weapons—to an all-time low, at least by twentieth-century standards.10 Arms export controls are an altogether minor, though not negligible, aspect of this overall regime of arms control. They can serve as a point of entry into the European arms control and disarmament regime that defined the era. This approach may even make sense of the initial puzzle of Germany and Austria "after the boom" with their simultaneous arms (export...