Angela Merkel

by Stefan Kornelius

  Wrong, replied Merkel: Saakashvili started the war, and it would not have been good for NATO if he had done so under its auspices. In any case, during the conflict she had flown to see Medvedev, and then to meet Saakashvili in Tbilisi. She made it clear on the flight back that she had made up her mind. Weighing the foolishness of Saakashvili against the disproportionate Russian reaction, she said, “Georgia is a free and independent country, and every free and independent country can decide, together with the members of NATO, how and when it will be accepted into that organization. There will be a preliminary report in December, and then the way will be clear to apply for membership of NATO.” It was trademark Merkel: “together with the members of NATO” – in other words Germany also had to agree. Even four years later, the way had not cleared up. But Merkel wanted to stress to Russia that she would not tolerate occupations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

  After seven years as Chancellor, Merkel is pragmatic to the point of bafflement over Russia. At the beginning of her Chancellorship she made use of her predecessor's close relationship with Putin – as the direct opposite of Schröder it was easy for her to keep her distance and take advantage of the recognition she gained as a result. A meeting with opposition politicians, a glass of wine with the Democrats – and an appropriate distance from the political oligarchy was restored. The ostentatious machismo of men like Gerhard Schröder and Helmut Kohl's love of saunas were not to her liking. She is also at odds with the romantic view that many Germans have of Russia, who see a spiritual bond between the two countries. Merkel certainly loves Russia as a country, but in her own way. She has difficulty with the wing of the CDU that glorifies it, having formed its impression of Russia in the time of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and which now accuses her of failing to make strategic capital of that legacy. She replies that the days of Gorbachev are long gone – and that the old Russia no longer exists.

  The Russian initiatives taken by her first Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier – the joint modernization initiative and the Central Asian strategy – are now on the back burner, perhaps because the world has again turned and Russia has embarked on a policy of obstructionism, and not only over problems such as Iraq or Syria, which affect the international community as a whole. Russia now rarely accepts any foreign-policy initiatives taken by Germany or the EU. The country no longer seeks rapprochement: it wants distance, and is busy building a Eurasian Union, a new sphere of influence. A somewhat more pragmatic attitude to Russia has been adopted by Merkel herself. The country resists all attempts to come closer; after many years as both President and Prime Minister, Putin has hardened rather than softened; the country's opposition is stronger and is currently reinventing itself. In the midst of the euro crisis Merkel has been evading the subject – but as a European neighbour, Russia is not about to disappear from the map.

  Business or Conviction

  A Conflict of Systems with China

  Sometimes all it takes to see how quickly the world is changing is to look out of the car window. Angela Merkel has often had little choice but to do so, especially when she goes to China. The Chancellor has often been there, almost once a year. And, before he had to give up his post after the change of power in the Central Committee of the Communist Party, China's Premier Wen Jiabao used to come to Germany once a year. Presidents and heads of government come and go, which is why her relationship to Wen Jiabao was one of the constants in Merkel's Chancellorship.

  And that view out of the car window is also a constant on Merkel's visits to China: it shows her whether there are more bicycles or cars on the roads, what makes of car are stuck in traffic jams, how the various districts of cities are rapidly evolving. Since Merkel became Chancellor there have been far fewer bicycles on Chinese roads and many more German cars. In Beijing you sometimes take your life in your hands by riding a bike. And beside the unchanging, honeycomb-like houses, new ones have been built in the style of old colonial villas or those in the historic areas of the city. A touch of Disney, Chinese-style – but also a sign of increasing prosperity that goes hand in hand with a sense of what is beautiful and valuable.

  Angela Merkel cannot simply walk down the street when she is in China. It would offend her hosts if, as a guest of the state, she were to slip out of her hotel like a tourist and go for a walk. Security, protocol and political good manners all forbid it. Visits to the People's Republic – she always goes to Beijing and then visits one of the regions – are planned to the very last detail. China's leadership leaves nothing to chance. Once the German delegation tried to outwit their hosts and told them – on the spur of the moment – that the Chancellor would like to visit a street market. It didn't work: Chinese visitors to the market were carefully selected men and women from State Security. Only the stallholders couldn't be substituted in a hurry, as a brief conversation with the interpreter revealed.

  Merkel adores this kind of experience, especially in China. Like any tourist she loves anything exotic, such as looking out of her hotel window and seeing a group of pensioners doing earlymorning exercises. She likes to describe her visit to the Terracotta Army – a present to herself on her 56th birthday, which she celebrated in China. She was also impressed by the deputy governors whom she met over dinner at the German Embassy in Beijing. They were from regions that had hosted a travelling exhibition arranged by the Foreign Office and the Goethe Institute. Now they had come to Beijing, and had been invited to dinner by the German Ambassador, Michael Schäfer, who entertains regularly in his house on the Dongzhimenwai Dajie. During the meal there was simultaneous interpreting, which livened up the occasion. A simple question from Merkel elicited a torrent of responses from the guests: what did the governors think about when they went to bed at night, and what was the first thing they thought about when they woke up?

  The reaction was completely uncensored: the governors told her about the enormous number of jobs that had to be created every year, the problem of migrant workers, social tensions in their regions, environmental problems and the high number of students. Merkel gulped. She had seldom been given such an unvarnished view of the host of problems in China. That evening she realized how vast the country really is.

  Merkel's view of China has changed greatly during her two terms as Chancellor. Much of that is due to Wen Jiabao, the first Chinese politician she got to know. Over the years she built up a confident relationship with him. Wen Jiabao kept his promises, and in the same way Merkel was regarded in Beijing as reliable. The Chinese are masters at maintaining a distance in relationships. No one can truly penetrate their façade. It is quite possible that Merkel was deeply disappointed in her view of Wen Jiabao, whom she saw as honest and close to the people; one sometimes got the impression that she felt sorry for the man, who is very short, wears a permanently melancholy expression and has a heavy workload. Yet as she was unable to go any deeper, she has no real idea of the labyrinth of relationships and loyalties that surrounds a senior Chinese politician. Wen Jiabao's clan is regarded as very wealthy, and it is possible to pick up gossip about the combination of family interests and state power on every street corner in Beijing. Merkel has never said anything about that – but her respect for the achievements of the government of the diverse country of China, shaken by the explosion in its growth, has certainly increased with every visit.

  Her closeness to Wen Jiabao was obvious even physically – the Premier became more and more relaxed with her. On her second visit, in 2007, he received the Chancellor in what, by Chinese standards, was a private atmosphere, wearing an opennecked shirt, in the hermetically sealed quarter of Zhongnanhai, reserved for VIPs, where the Party leadership lives and works. Behind tall walls and gates, there is an extensive area of parkland with residences, guesthouses, meeting rooms and pavilions, all attractively located on the banks of a lake. Few foreigners are invited there. In 2012 it was decided that the interpreting of the delegates’ conversations should be simultaneous instead of consecutive, in order to save time. That was a con
siderable concession on the part of the cautious Chinese politicians, because spontaneity gives more time for conversation and less to thinking about the correct response. The art of dealing with these highly formal meetings consists, in any case, in getting through the worn-out subjects as quickly as possible, so as to leave that hackneyed conversation behind. Not an easy task, because the prearranged set of rules is inhibiting. Anyone who talks to a Chinese person and causes him or her embarrassment will get nowhere. Visits to China are also cultural case studies in openness and communication.

  As a child of the GDR, Angela Merkel's experience of China is full of contradictions. On one hand she was bound to feel a deep dislike for the one-party system, its authoritarian leadership and suppression of dissidents. On the other she is obviously fascinated by China's dynamism and resilience. As banal as it may sound, in German-Chinese relationships, imports, exports, money and commerce play a prominent role. Idealism versus realism – as Merkel's predecessors, Gerhard Schröder and Helmut Kohl, found out: the shrewdest approach was to strike a balance, avoid currying favour and insist on one's own values and the power of the law within certain limits. But what exactly are these limits?

  For Merkel, China is a learning process. In 2007, the second year of the CDU-SPD coalition, she received the Dalai Lama in the Chancellery, causing the first government disagreement over foreign policy as well as upsetting Beijing. One of the major concerns of the Chinese leadership is the disintegration of the People's Republic. Few subjects preoccupy the leaders of the Communist Party as much as the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. A vast amount of research has been commissioned in an attempt to understand the reasons for their downfall. The Chinese want to avoid suffering the same fate.

  China is an enormously diverse nation, with seventy officially recognized nationalities, as well as twenty ethnic groups that are not recognized. The strongest independence movement is found in Tibet, and to Beijing the Dalai Lama symbolizes the Tibetan separatist movement. In the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, anyone who receives him is encouraging the disintegration of the People's Republic of China. Does Merkel support Tibetan autonomy, or does she simply want to strengthen the rights of minorities and protest against oppression? She has never answered that question, but she did receive the Dalai Lama. The Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and his ministry advised her strongly against it. There were two particularly awkward areas: one was the location, the Chancellor's office, which gave the visit high political status and an official character. The other was the circumstances in which the visit became public knowledge: Merkel had not mentioned it during an informal meeting with Wen Jiabao only a few weeks earlier. The Chinese felt that she had been duplicitous. Diplomats were beside themselves.

  The Chinese reacted angrily and fast: meetings were cancelled, discussions about the rule of law came to a halt. Germany felt the full weight of Chinese indignation. Steinmeier had to soothe hurt feelings in a complex attempt at rapprochement, and produced a letter of apology in which Germany acknowledged China's territorial integrity – a kowtowing that is still regarded as excessive in the Chancellor's office, who were of the opinion that China had exploited an internal coalition disagreement over the incident. Of course that was not how it was viewed by Steinmeier's Foreign Office, where it was described as maladroitness on the Chancellor's part. Whichever way the pendulum between ethics and Realpolitik swings, the episode shows that Germany must calibrate its use of power towards China very carefully. From then on the Chancellor has always borne this practical insight into her relationship with China in mind. So far there hasn't been another Dalai Lama incident. But that may simply be because there has been no request for another meeting, although the Chancellor's office remains in contact with the representatives of the spiritual leader of the Tibetans.

  Whenever Merkel travels abroad, her information comes from two sources. Experts from the Federal Intelligence Agency present their findings to the advisers on those areas in the Chancellor's office. Briefing documents are then passed on to the Chancellor. This procedure is repeated by experts from the Institute for International and Security Affairs, the main foreign-policy think tank in Berlin, which is financed by the government. These two processes of information-gathering operate separately, both agencies requesting confidentiality. The Intelligence Agency in particular prefers to keep its cards close to its chest. Whenever there is to be a visit to China, the question of human rights is always raised, lists are drawn up of particularly delicate cases involving dissidents who have been imprisoned or who are facing the death penalty. Working on the margins of the discussions, Merkel's adviser on foreign policy, Christoph Heusgen, always produces a list of cases of human-rights abuse, and the member of the government who deals with such cases is asked to make further inquiries about the fate of the dissidents in question.

  Criticism of China and its human-rights abuses has become a bit of a show – and is treated as such by Beijing, although there are small signs of improvement. For example, just before he left office, Wen Jiabao wanted to have one last German-Chinese dialogue – he clearly liked the ministerial meetings that had been set up under Merkel and that became increasingly popular as an instrument of foreign policy. Wen Jiabao obviously wanted to establish this means of communication permanently before his successor took over. So he asked for the meeting to be brought forward to the summer of 2012. The Chancellor's office agreed on one condition: the discussions on human rights, which had been discontinued after a protest by the Chinese, had to be resumed.

  So the talks on human rights and freedom resumed, but what was the result? Were they still only a show? The Chinese Communist Party chooses those who take part and closely monitors the meetings. Even conversations involving less important political delegations from Germany are subject to strict checks. Christoph Heusgen has repeatedly failed in his attempts to maintain personal contact with his main counterparts in Chinese foreign policy. It is true that mobile phone numbers were exchanged, that there were mutual reassurances of close and straightforward cooperation, but then contact was suddenly broken off. Language barriers and other cultural differences are major obstacles, and the Chinese leadership doesn't like special relationships to be set up without due monitoring, still less if these are confidential. So now no one bothers to answer if they get a call from a mobile.

  It is all the more surprising that over the course of time Merkel has made a conscious decision to cooperate rather than confront. German-Chinese relations take place mainly at the level of the balance sheet. A volume of trade of 144 billion euros, exports increased by twenty per cent in 2011 alone, to what is now 65 billion euros, 5,000 German businesses operating in China: China is fast becoming Germany's most important trading partner outside the EU; no other EU country enjoys such an economic relationship with China as does Germany. The European Council on Foreign Relations has warned about German-Chinese “special relationships”. Economic dependency creates political pressure. Berlin is seen as being in a separate category from other European and Western countries. Germany is China's biggest supporter in transforming its industrial society from being purely one of mass production to that of a hightech country, and the rapid rise of China could not succeed without German engineering expertise. But at some point the pendulum will swing the other way – even now the majority of Europe is of no interest to the Chinese market.

  Merkel is unmoved by the criticism. She is guided by the conviction that China will develop rapidly even without Germany – Europe has to measure up to Chinese standards if it wants to withstand the pressure of globalization.

  She sees China itself as an exciting experiment: how long will the country remain under authoritarian rule, when the desire for prosperity and freedom is constantly growing? In a speech to the Party University in Beijing in 2010, she said that there comes a time when every country ceases to see difference as a threat, but rather as part of the human condition. Two years later she observ
ed: “The struggle for freedom is gaining ground in China. It makes people want to be free. When more people are better educated, when more people have enough to eat and can develop, the louder and more insistently that question will be asked.”

  There it is again, Merkel's leitmotiv of the competition between systems, the ability of the West and its values to prevail. Us or them – the freedom of the West or the authoritarianism of China. For Merkel, that is the real message behind all the visits, balance sheets and gestures of friendship.

  But there is one great risk: China's foreign policy is offensive rather than defensive, especially when it comes to its nearest neighbours. China is rearming: nationalist and aggressive notes set alarm bells ringing in other Asian countries – as well as among investors. Germany is too weak to challenge China in the game of geopolitics – the United States has taken on that role with the Obama administration's Pacific offensive, as well as a strategy of military equilibrium intended to give China's neighbours room to breathe, especially in the South China Sea. Merkel welcomes this policy, and sees it as Germany's duty to make Europe stronger in order to provide an economic counterweight. The time may come when she is forced to decide between US interests and Germany's economic interests in China. As yet she has not been faced with that choice – but there is little doubt which side she would ultimately take.