It is widely appreciated that the end of the Cold War led to changes in the material strength of the German military. During the decades after reunification, military spending dropped dramatically, as have troop levels. But less attention has been paid to the ways that German military culture—the role that the military plays in public life—has itself changed dramatically not only in the post-Cold War period, but precisely in the decades prior to reunification. Germany suffered immensely from the notoriously militarized cultures of Prussia and especially Nazi Germany. But even post-war West Germany granted military readiness and military service a morally privileged status. Today, the military has not only become less central to German public life—it has been actively marginalized in ways that have altered public understandings of military service and national security.
The German government has now made a commitment to restore the country’s military readiness. This readiness, however, has been defined in material terms only: The government is preparing to spend far more money than it has in recent memory on military procurement. The cultural component of military readiness—a potential political prerequisite to putting any military spending to effective use—has gone relatively ignored. That may be because history offers fewer precedents for successfully restoring a “bellicized” culture once it has been dismantled.
This presentation will trace the parallel changes in military readiness in Germany and raise the question of whether, and how, German culture could become “re-bellicized” in parallel with its coming rearmament.
Cameron Abadi is the Berlin-based deputy editor of Foreign Policy magazine, co-host of the Ones and Tooze podcast together with Adam Tooze, and author of Climate Radicals: Why Our Environmental Politics Isn’t Working (2024). His writing has appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel. Abadi is also a founding board member of the McCloy Transatlantic Forum in Frankfurt. He earned his BA in political theory at Yale University and MA at the Free University of Berlin.
Ivan Krastev, IWM Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow and Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, will moderate the discussion.
