The Lessons of History
Death and taxes are the only certainties in life, or so we’re told. It would probably be more accurate to say that death, taxes, and the never ending march of history are the only certainties. It doesn’t make for such a pithy line, but it’s honest. The ultimate problem with history is the fact it never ends. Many notable names have declared the demise of history over the centuries, only to have suddenly become history themselves, despite their best efforts. One of the more notable was American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 wrote a book on the subject. The End of History and the Last Man argued that the end of the Cold War marked the final destination for history, the “end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”. Clearly history didn’t enjoy being cancelled as only nine short years after the publication of Fukuyama’s book, 9/11 happened. Clearly history isn’t to be trifled with.
History may never end, but we are often told that it repeats. Sometimes it’s a lesson, as in Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s famous quote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”. Other times it’s because history doesn’t have any new material, as in Karl Marx’s line “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”. I’ve never been entirely convinced by either quote, sometimes history is just a series of constantly repeating tragedies.
The reason I’m thinking more and more about history these days is that it feels like we’ve lived through several centuries in only a few short decades. From the end of the Cold War, through the War on Terror, the 2007 Financial Crisis, Brexit, Trump, the pandemic, it feels less like history is moving ever onwards and more like history is actively hostile to our existence. This is obviously ridiculous, history doesn’t care what we do, only that we did it. Yet, in the online worlds we live in, filled with exaggeration, hyperbole clicks, likes and retweets it can feel like a new era every single day, to the point that we don’t even notice when things really change.
Perhaps this was the reason Olaf Scholz felt compelled to point out, with typical German clarity, that the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin was the beginning of a new and terrifying period of instability in Europe. “We are living through a watershed era” he announced to his fellow members of the Bundestag “And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before”. We might never know whether Scholz was concerned with the impermanence of our modern world, what we do know is that he was planning something that would turn our collective understanding of German politics, and possibly society, on its head. Scholz would announce an unprecedented post-war investment in the military and a commitment to further invest 2% of Germany’s GDP into the Bundeswehr going forward.
When Scholz delivered his speech last Sunday their were audible gasps of surprise from the audience of politicians, later we would know why this financial commitment had come as such a shock. The only other member of the government who knew what was coming was Finance Minister Christian Lindner. Everyone else had been kept in the dark. Much of Lindner’s FDP, coalition partners the Greens and even Scholz’s own party the SPD had no idea. Why all the secrecy? Again, we may never know, but given the German chancellors famously robotic nature, it’s unlikely he was doing it for dramatic effect. If anything, he was calling on his party and coalition partners to reckon with the changed world we now inhabit since the invasion of Ukraine, drawing a line in the sand and asking if they were with him. It turns out they were.
More surprisingly, for me at least, so were the public at large. It can’t be overstated how much has changed in only a week. I have friends who would cross the street if they saw a member of the Bundeswehr in uniform coming towards them and I vividly remember an older gentleman berating a solider while we were all sat on a train. German history, we thought, had made it clear that militarism was not a path to be walked. Germany may have an army, but it wasn’t seriously funded. As Lieutenant General Alfons Mais told LinkedIn followers a few weeks ago: “the Bundeswehr, the army that I am allowed to lead, is more or less blank”.
Moreover, at the beginning of the year only 20% of Germans surveyed agreed that Germany should send arms to Ukraine. I was discussing this very topic with friends on Saturday, bemoaning the slow movement of the German state to recognise the threat posed by Putin and the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Ukraine when news that the first shipments of weapons would be sent to support the victims of Putin’s aggression. If you had told me then what would be announced a day later by Olaf Scholz, I probably still wouldn’t have believed it.
Today surveys suggest that 65% of Germans support taking out a €100 billion loan to modernise the military, while as many as seven out of ten Germans believe dedicating 2% of GDP annually to support the Bundeswehr is the right decision. How the money will be spent is surely going to be a massive topic in the months to come.
What was made clear by Scholz on Sunday is that we are living in a different Germany, one that intends to lead rather than follow. Can history tell us anything about what to expect? There are plenty of English language comedians who will make light of a newly militarised German state, and I’m sure more than one will question whether we’ve actually learned our lessons from history. I don’t like to predict the future, but what I know is that sometimes history is a lesson, sometimes it repeats and sometimes history just is. What I can say, with 100% certainty, is that history never ends.
Image Credits
Photo by Sophia Müller on Unsplash
Photo by Kevin Woblick on Unsplash
Photo by Olga Subach on Unsplash
Photo by Maheshkumar Painam on Unsplash
Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash
