The global chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the reshaping of the international order

Abstract

In this book Kristina Spohr offers a major and long overdue reassessment of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. She sets out to challenge dismissals of him as essentially a crisis manager whose achievements do not measure up to Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl. Quite rightly, she assesses Schmidt in the bleak and difficult context of the 1970s: struggling with the aftermath of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the oil crises and the tortuous politics of strategic imbalance. This book makes the case that Schmidt was Germany's first truly global chancellor, an architect of a new world economic order and a ‘double interpreter’ between the superpowers. He also emerges as an ‘intellectual statesman’, on a par with Henry Kissinger but possessing the resources of an elected political leader. The book's real value arises from Spohr's copious use of archives in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States and above all Schmidt's private archive in Hamburg. Its strengths are most evident in the four chapters dealing with Schmidt's major contributions in the field of defence and security: ‘The strategist of balance’, ‘Defusing the neutron bomb’, ‘Constructing the dual track’ and ‘The double interpreter’. Here Spohr is at her best, and the book's claims to be original, significant and rigorous and to stand as an essential reference are well founded. Each chapter can be read with great profit. In particular, Spohr's claim that Schmidt was a ‘defence intellectual’ is well substantiated. He had read and thought hard about strategic issues in a way no one else had in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and published a major book which was internationally well received. It is here that the comparison with Kissinger stands.