Throughout Europe, only falcons are still flying. They are stronger than ever before – and they are growing. We need a new peace movement, a new policy of détente and no world war. It would be the third and last. Europe is threatened with the fate of Carthage, or worse.
It is quiet. It is dead silent. Tomahawk cruise missiles, SM-6 missiles and hypersonic missiles are being deployed in Germany – and it remains silent in the country, it remains silent in Europe. No loud protests, no outcry, no demonstrations. Germany is the only country in Europe where these US weapons systems are stationed. They are directed against Russia. Why is it so quiet? Because it’s summer, because it’s the holidays? Because the statement by the USA and Germany on the deployment is so incredibly succinct and short? It is only nine lines long. Does the silence have something to do with the fact that there still seems to be time? After all, the deployment is not due to begin until 2026. Or is it because there is a general conviction that these missiles will “only bring peace”?
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Only peace will emanate from German soil in the future – at least that was the promise made by the two German states in 1990 in the Two Plus Four Treaty. The GDR and the Federal Republic were the two; the four were France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the USA. This treaty paved the way for German reunification. So does peace come from these new missiles, which could be equipped with nuclear weapons? Or has this promise taken on a different meaning since the war in Ukraine – because deterrence is now more important than disarmament? Are times so warlike that it makes no sense to talk about disarmament? Has the word peace lost its magic? There is silence behind these question marks.
Russian President Putin has announced that he will react in a “mirror image”. When one reacts to the other in this way and the other’s reaction is followed by a counter-reaction and the counter-reaction is followed by a counter-counter-reaction – this is called escalation. Escalation will then also mean that the long-range missiles, which can theoretically be equipped with nuclear weapons, will also be equipped with nuclear weapons in practice. Bert Brecht warned of such militarisation decades ago. “The great Carthage,” he wrote in 1951, “fought three wars. It was still powerful after the first, still habitable after the second. It could no longer be found after the third.” That sounds agitational, but it is the truth. And in the seriousness of the situation, agitation is better than apathy. In a third world war, Europe would be like Carthage, or worse. The horsemen of the apocalypse are now armed with nuclear weapons.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz has described the decision to station US missiles in Germany as a “very good decision”. Does he have to say that because in his oath of office he promised to prevent harm to the German people? How great is the danger of Germany becoming a battlefield? At least that was the fear back then, during the protests against rearmament in the 1980s, when the Pershing II missiles were stationed in the Federal Republic. Nuclear war, it was said at the time during the major protests, had become “more precise and more manoeuvrable” with these Pershing missiles; the inhibition threshold for their use would therefore fall. The Tomahawks that are now being deployed really do deserve the word precise. And, unlike the Pershing, they can reach Moscow. Does this increase or decrease the risk of Moscow trying to take out these missiles preventively
It is so quiet in Germany that you can still hear the echoes of the old protests, the protests from back then, when there was still a peace movement in Germany and Europe. That was forty, forty-five years ago. Back then, millions of people took to the streets under the slogan “Fight nuclear death” and protested against the Nato double-track decision. In Germany, this was the beacon for the protests the peace demonstration in Bonn’s Hofgarten in October 1981, followed by the many blockades against the missile transports in Mutlangen. The blockaders first included writers such as Grass and Böll, men and women of the church, artists and university lecturers, and then also hordes of nameless people.
The German judiciary punished the latter in particular for coercion and enforced the penalties even after the missiles against which the blockades had been directed had already been withdrawn. The trick of the Nato Double-Track Decision was that the rearmament was linked to a disarmament demand on the Soviets – it was risky, but it worked. The SPD foreign policy expert Egon Bahr later said that the intention was to create a kind of blackmail situation. It was successful at the time: in 1987, the INF disarmament treaty was signed by the heads of state Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan; however, it was then cancelled by the USA under President Trump in 2019 after they accused each other of non-compliance. People acted and still act as if disarmament is a cheese – a cheese with holes that is no longer produced because of these holes.
Has the word peace lost its magic?
At that time, in the era of disarmament, there was also a kind of disarmament in the German justice system: in 1995, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that sit-in blockades did not constitute violence. The sentences against missile blockaders therefore had to be reversed. A long time ago. But as recently as 2010, the Bundestag decided by a large majority that the Merkel government should “vigorously” campaign for the withdrawal of all US nuclear weapons from Germany. Also a long time ago. Are today’s Tomahawks less dangerous because they are more precise and faster than the Pershings of the past? Or is the world situation so precarious that we have to endure the fear that, if the worst comes to the worst, not one stone will be left standing in Germany?
It is striking that, unlike in the NATO Double-Track Decision of 1979, today’s rearmament announcement is not even linked to the demand for disarmament. Is this because people do not believe from the outset that possible agreements will be honoured? That would be a kind of diplomatic defeatism that resigns itself to a danger that is swelling today, which the physicist and peace researcher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker formulated as early as 1957: “The big bombs only fulfil their purpose of protecting peace and freedom if they never fall. They do not fulfil this purpose if everyone knows that they will never fall. That is precisely why there is a danger that one day they really will fall.”
The fear of this fuelled the Pershing protests in the 1980s. Today, fear paralyses. Back then it fuelled protests, but today it saps their energy. Many people switch off completely when it comes to war, armaments and weapons – because they have the feeling that they are standing in front of a mountain that they cannot see over because it is getting higher and higher. This is called hopelessness. And some people avoid fighting for disarmament because they don’t want to be seen as friends of Putin.
Defence Minister Boris Pistorius argues that there is a “capability gap” to justify the military build-up. However, the peace movement is also suffering from a capability gap. It has lost the power of protesting hope. Václav Havel once formulated it as follows: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that it makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We need to regain this certainty.
European society must learn peace again – because human beings are human beings. There is no security with even higher military spending, not with even more battle tanks, not with even more nuclear warheads. Security will not double if the numbers and expenditure are doubled. It will not halve if the numbers and expenditure are halved. It will increase if the opponents put on each other’s glasses. This is how learning peace begins.
Prof Dr Heribert Prantl was head of politics at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and a member of the editorial board for many years. Today he is a columnist for the newspaper. He will be giving three lectures on war and peace in Bolzano on 3 and 4 September.
