Against All Odds, Konrad Adenauer and the German Realignment, by Andreas Röder. Never talk about a political leader's age before considering Konrad Adenauer.The German statesman was 57 in 1933 when he was sacked as mayor of Cologne by the Nazis.
At the age of 69, he abandoned his enforced early retirement and started a comeback. He was once again appointed Cologne's mayor by the Americans, but dismissed five months later by British occupation authorities.This did not stop him either.
Four years later, in 1949, he became West Germany's founding chancellor.Aged 73, he was slightly younger than Clemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck had been when they left their chancellories, at ages 75 and 65 respectively.
And when Adenauer was finally forced to retire in 1963, he was 87.
Adenauer's chancellorship lasted 14 years and was one of the longest ever democratic governments, longer than Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, longer than any British prime ministership since Robert Salisbury, or any French president's time in office since Napoleon III, and only more recently surpassed by Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel.
Konrad Adenauer was the second of two politicians who dominated German politics in the middle third of the 20th century.The first was 13 years younger than Adenauer, Adolf Hitler.
While Hitler's regime ended in conflagration, when Adenauer left office in 1963, West Germany had become a respected player in the Western world on a scale nobody would have expected. when Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in 1945.
This was due to three revolutionary developments, domestic stability through a new catch-all political party, economic prosperity and social stability through a social market economy model, and a revolutionary change of Germany's world position through integration with the West.
From the 19th century, the German political landscape had been highly fragmented, and one of its major cleavages was religious denomination.This fragmentation was one of the reasons the unstable Weimar Republic gave way to the Nazi Party.
Forging the Christian Democratic Union, the CDU, as a new catch-all party was a revolutionary innovation within German political history.
How groundbreaking this was is easily underestimated in today's times of advanced secularization, but it was fundamental in 1949 when 96% of the German population were members of a Christian church.
And still, that the CDU served as the crucial institution for integrating the centre-right into the political system of the Federal Republic hints at the continuing relevance of the party for German democracy and liberty in times of growing right-wing anti-constitutional populism.
The question of political integration points to another challenge for the new democracy.Dealing with its Nazi past, Adenauer governed a country full of former perpetrators, followers, and opportunists.
As a realist, he was well aware of the unreliability of his compatriots, but was loyal to his people.He refrained from moral purism and expected opportunism from former opportunists,
engaging a former civil servant of the Ministry of Domestic Affairs who had provided a commentary on the racist Nuremberg laws ostracizing Jews in the Third Reich as head of his chancellery displayed his priorities.
He dealt with compatriots burdened with their past by integrating and adapting them to the newly established democracy and its institutions. Adenauer's personal integrity was beyond doubt.
He was always an opponent of the Nazi regime, and did a great deal to build up relations with the State of Israel.The 1952 Reparations Agreement is just one example.
Domestically, he prioritized stability, the integration of German democracy, and banked on pragmatism.Moreover, he displayed a readiness to compromise and to set priorities.
The second fundamental development, after 30 years of destruction and hardship, lies in the German model of the social market economy.
This is what the Danish academic, Jørste Esping Andersen, has described as the conservative corporatist continental European model, which he distinguished from an egalitarian Scandinavian model and a competitive Anglo-American one.
The model, however, had to be established, and this was not straightforward. After the war, within the CDU, ideas of Christian socialism were widely popular.
Adenauer, himself rather a pro-market liberal, helped Ludwig Erhard, the political figurehead of German auto-liberalism, which advocates for a free market but not a welfare state, to prevail.
Adenauer was also ready, however, to make concessions, as with pension reform, for the sake of election victory in 1957.
After more than three decades of war and depression, inflation and hardship, West Germany experienced what was called the economic miracle, more than two decades of extraordinarily high growth rates, a transition into a consumer society, and evidence of what Erhard called prosperity for all.
Even if much of this success was due to financial catch-up and advantageous global economic conditions, the German model had a fundamental role to play.
It always faced the challenge of balancing economic competitiveness and social welfare, and in its best times it managed to square the circle, but it developed its own circularity.
When the model was adored, it was seen as just missing necessary reforms, and when it was considered to be in crisis, reforms were always on their way.Thus, current complaints about German decline might be a harbinger for another round of reforms.
Unfortunately, history is not automated, and historical experience never provides reliable forecasts.
What the history of Adenauer and the social market economy do provide is a balance of principles and pragmatism, as opposed to absoluteness and dogmatism.
Becoming a liberal democracy and a successful social market economy was not only a consequence of domestic decisions, it was part of a third revolutionary change, German integration with the West.
No later than October 1945, Adenauer was convinced that the division of Europe between a Russian-occupied Eastern Europe and Western Europe was a hard fact, saying, only an economically and culturally sound Western Europe, led by England and France, can prevent further Asian encroachment.
He drew the conclusion that it was necessary for the West to include and to fix the non-Russian occupied part of Germany, and that it required support from the U.S.One could argue that Adenauer's insights preceded those contained in U.S.
Ambassador George Kennan's long telegram, which warned against Stalin and contributed towards the U.S.policy of containment. This was a strategic godsend for West Germany, and no one realized it earlier than Adenauer.
When West Germany's interests resided in security, liberty, prosperity, reunification, sovereignty, and resurgence as an equal European power, this circle was not to be squared.
The newly founded West German state, still under an occupation regime, might not have had a wide variety of options at hand. But Adenauer made two decisions.
First, he set priorities with geopolitical security as the foundation for liberty, prosperity, sovereignty, and resurgence.
Thus, he opted for an insoluble integration with the West, not because of vassalage, as Emmanuel Macron called transatlantic relations in 2023, but as a deliberate strategy. Modern Germany had been the middle kingdom in Europe for much of history.
It was a geographical buffer zone up to the 19th century, a half-hegemonic empire and nervous great power after 1871, a humiliated and revisionist power after 1919, and finally the desolator of Europe.
When Adenauer aspired to turn the country into a reliable part of the West, he combined German Realpolitik and interests with a tectonic shift of European politics.
Having set his priorities, Adenauer resolutely executed them, particularly through NATO membership and rearmament, and against heavy opposition from different quarters.
My own grandfather, a convinced Christian Democrat who had been a soldier in the Second World War and had come home with the conviction, never again, left the party when Adenauer embarked on rearmament.
Admirable as my grandfather's decision may have been, Adenauer had internalized the principle, Si vis pacem, para bellum, if you want peace, prepare for war, and was ready to bear ambiguity and dilemma.
Three years previously, Stalin had offered German reunification in return for its neutrality.What many welcomed, Adenauer saw as a threat to West German security.
He always, and primarily, regarded Russia, and then the Soviet Union, as the menace of world revolutionary communism and autocratic expansionism.
His assessment of the country as Asian or anti-Christian seemed somewhat obsessive, manipulative, since it diverted attention from Germany's Nazi past, and not very imaginative.
In 2023, this estimation seems more reasonable than at a time when Germany believed in change through trade.
Nevertheless, turning down Stalin's offer earned Adenauer the accusation of having missed an opportunity and squandered a chance for reunification.
Whatever Stalin's motives might have been, Adenauer deliberately subordinated reunification, the revisionist West German raison d'etat with constitutional status, to his strategic priority of Western integration,
He sustained the claim for reunification and simply deferred it.He built on the magnet theory, the expectation that someday the GDR would collapse and, attracted by a strong West, accede to the Federal Republic.
This forecast increasingly became out of touch with political realities in the 1960s.
And at the end of Adenauer's chancellorship, reunification receded into the distance, to be followed by the historical irony that the magnet theory indeed provided the blueprint for German reunification in 1989 to 1990.
Looking at the big picture of Adenauer's leadership, it is clear he prioritized principles over popularity and tried to combine realpolitik and German values and interests with international cooperation.
The multilaterally integrated, cooperative nation-state marked a fundamental innovation in a European history that for centuries had been beset with antagonistic states,
The German model turned out to be the historic game-changer of European politics after 1945.
This was particularly true for the experiment of West European integration and a real European revolution started in the 1950s with Adenauer's vigorous support. Again, he was no naive idealist and no representative of unambiguity.
He took into account the German situation of powerlessness and realised integration could serve as a tool for combining West German resurgence to an equal power in Europe with the French interest in security against Germany.
Being ready to take into account another's perspective has always been at the core of real rapprochement.
And even if it might not have always been explicit, Adenauer's engagement was founded in a moral conviction to overcome centuries of violent great power antagonism in Europe.
This was no less true for Chancellor Helmut Kohl when he pushed the transition into the European Union four decades after the beginning of the European integration process.
So let us finally compare Konrad Adenauer to those who came after him, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel.Kohl followed a set of a few core convictions, family politics, transatlantic relations, European integration and reconciliation with France.
In 1983, he implemented the NATO Dual Track decision against fierce domestic opposition, as Adenauer had done with rearmament.And regarding reunification, he always kept it in mind and acted vigorously when the unexpected opportunity emerged.
He understood European integration as a lesson learned from the history of wars, particularly between French and German territories.Cole himself came from one of those historical battlegrounds.
His uncle Walter had died in the First World War, his brother Walter in the Second, and he named his own son after them.
Even if Cole might have followed a somewhat naive idea of a United States of Europe, he moderated the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War Europe due to an underlying and indispensable idea of history.
Angela Merkel worked hard to hold things together and keep Europe running.During the Euro debt crisis, she was very good at realizing what was unrealistic and unrealizable.
But she was very bad at considering what might have been possible, thinking strategically in different scenarios.Pragmatism without strategy leads to a series of incoherent decisions. from energy to migration to Russian politics.
The German need for Zeitunwende, the historical turning point of eras, which her successor Olaf Scholz announced after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, was a result of this lack of historical imagination and of political priorities.
Ultimately, Konrad Adenauer teaches us several leadership lessons.
First, be ready to bear ambivalence and ambiguities, balance and reconcile antagonisms such as national interests and universal values, realpolitik and strategy, and pragmatism and principles.
Second, think strategically and let history open your mind.The future is open and it is shapeable, allow for the improbable, and imagine what might be possible.
And last, the essence of the exceptional leadership he displayed was to identify indispensable priorities.There won't be many, but stick to them against all odds.Place substance over popularity.Leaders do not follow, they lead.
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