Helmut Schmidt: Germany will miss this voice of reason

At a time when Germany is struggling to find its European and international role, we will dearly miss the late former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s demanding and, at times, uncomfortable voice in the foreign policy debate.

Helmut Schmidt, who served as Chancellor from 1974-1982, was part of a political generation which rebuilt Germany as a true democracy, driven by the concern that everything should be done to prevent Germany from falling back into dictatorship and war. Important parts of this engagement were Schmidt’s efforts to anchor Germany in the European Communities, which, as he saw it, had to develop far beyond a single market. Reconciliation, friendship and trust with Germany’s European neighbours were at the heart of his European engagement. He was one of Germany’s Chancellors who built a solid friendship with his French counterpart, in his case Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and devoted a lot of energy to a good relationship with the US.

With his training as an economist and experience as Defense and Finance Minister before he became Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt combined an appetite for economic thinking with his strategic view of the future of Germany in Europe and the West more broadly. Schmidt, who himself had worked in Jean Monnet’s Committee “For the United States of Europe” in 1955, understood Europe’s move towards integration as a gradual one.

The anecdote of Schmidt sitting in his modest home in Hamburg with Giscard d'Estaing in the mid-1970s, pencelling the architecture of the European Monetary System on papers scattered over the kitchen table, give a sense of his approach not only to policy making, but also much later to journalism as a publisher of the weekly paper Die Zeit. In appetite for detail, combined with grand, strategic thinking, he was unrivalled by his successors.

Well after his time as German Chancellor, Schmidt remained strongly involved in European and international issues, on security as much as on economic matters. In the 1980s, once again together with his friend Giscard, he backed efforts to push for further integration of the single market, engaging the private sector in efforts to help make the single currency happen. It was then carried forward on the highest political level by Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl. The introduction of a European single currency, for Schmidt, was a deeply political project—monetary integration could not happen without solid political integration—and at the same time would cement achievements of integration and would anchor Germany in Europe more solidly.

When the European Union, and in particular, the euro area, was hit by multiple crises from 2010 onwards, his voice brought a long-term view into the increasingly short-termed discussion, both looking backwards into history and looking forward into the future. Despite his sometimes sober sounding hanseatic tone and sense of realism, which once made him say that “those who have 'visions' should go and see a doctor,” he was never free of hopes and aspirations.

As Germany rose to the center stage of EU policy making at the beginning of this decade, Schmidt regularly reminded Germans about their history, responsibility and the way they are viewed overseas. At the SPD party conference in 2011, Schmidt said that “we are not sufficiently aware of the fact that in almost all our neighbouring countries there is a latent suspicion of Germans that will probably persist for many generations to come.” As a result of this, Schmidt kept calling on German policy makers and the German public to be aware of the need to extend solidarity in the euro area and to refrain from any temptation to fall back into polarisation and nationalist rhetoric. Isolation was one of his major fears, believing it was of "cardinal importance for our long-term strategic interests that Germany should not isolate itself nor allow itself to be isolated.” For Schmidt, isolation within the West would be dangerous. Isolation within the European Union or the euro area would be extremely dangerous.

Schmidt, at times, was controversial, take for instance his criticism of the Bundesbank in the 1980s, his skepticism towards Eastern enlargement of the European Union two decades later, or his slamming the German government’s approach to the euro crisis. But he later acknowledged it was in Germany's interest to work both with France and Poland, and that it took the whole EU, large as it was, to move forward.

Germans look at Helmut Schmidt as a politician who, during his time in the German Chancellery, put his country’s and Europe’s strategic interests at a much higher priority than any tactical interest pursued by political parties. At the height of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, he kept reminding not only his party friends, but the German leadership more generally of this duty.

This voice of reason and responsibility, and his perspective on both political and economic challenges, will be noticeable by its absence at a time at which Germany is facing growing challenges in taking European and international responsibility as Europe’s largest state and economy. The deep sense of a huge political loss that German citizens have expressed since Schmidt’s death on November 10^th show that the messages of this true statesman, who never ceased to be a deep thinker and a true leader, were broadly heard.