When the Berlin Wall fell, on November 9, 1989, Olaf Scholz was already 31 years old, had long hair and had been a young leader of the left wing – and pacifist – of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) for a long time. He had been born in a country, the FRG, on the front line during the Cold War, with several hundred thousand American troops on its territory and neighboring a communist Germany, the GDR, with hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, was an 11-year-old boy growing up in a France proud of its own nuclear deterrent force and without foreign bases on its soil.
To understand the current Franco-German dispute regarding the French president’s words last Monday about a possible sending of troops to Ukraine, we must take into account the generational gap between the two statesmen and, above all, the disparate geopolitical culture between their societies due to their historical experience since 1945. Today’s France is still the heir of De Gaulle, who managed to join the club of the greats after World War II, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. That gives you more autonomy and self-confidence. Germany, despite its economic power, is still under the protective umbrella of the United States and is conditioned by Washington in many strategic decisions. Her story also invites her to humility and prudence.
Scholz, therefore, said a categorical no, an unnuanced nein, to the possibility that Kyiv’s allies would one day dispatch soldiers on the ground to prevent a Russian victory. The chancellor’s rejection came after Macron recalled, with ironic indifference, that some countries – in clear reference to Germany – have always been trailing and at first wanted to offer Ukraine only helmets and sleeping bags. It was not the tone that could be expected from two partner countries that have always been the indispensable tandem for European construction to advance.
German commentators reacted with alarm to the lack of harmony. The weekly Der Spiegel spoke of a “disaster” and lamented the battle of egos between the two leaders. “Putin’s most powerful weapon is the dispute in Europe,” wrote the economic magazine Wirtschaftswoche. The popular newspaper Bild described the “dangerous ice age” between Paris and Berlin. And former ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, who directed the Munich Security Conference for years, warned that “in Moscow they are uncorking bottles of champagne” due to the scuffle between the allies.
Faced with this crisis, the French Foreign Minister, Stéphane Séjourné, assured in an interview with Le Monde that “there is no Franco-German clash; “We agree on 80% of the issues.” From the Berlin Chancellery, his spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, also tried to remove the irony and said that “the dispute over the troops is not dramatic.”
The bilateral tension was exacerbated, in any case, by Scholz’s refusal to supply Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles, a highly precise, bunker-busting weapon that could be used to destroy the Kerch bridge, the umbilical cord between Crimea and Russia. The chancellor angered the French and British by suggesting that they have personnel in Ukraine to advise on the handling of their Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles, but that Germany cannot afford it.
To further complicate things, a few days ago the interception – supposedly by Russian espionage – of a half-hour conversation between German officers about the hypothetical use of Taurus by Ukraine was published on Russian social networks. There it became clear that Scholz did not tell the truth and that the transfer of the missiles would not require the presence of German soldiers on site. The recording has been a scandal in Germany and one more reason for mistrust and friction with the French partner.
