Who would be German? Not so long ago Poland’s then foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski issued a plea for decisive German leadership of the EU. The other day the present Warsaw government demanded Berlin pay reparations for the second world war.
The turnround captures two of the EU’s contemporary challenges: how to respond when formerly communist member states turn away from liberal democracy towards the authoritarian nationalism that European integration was supposed to dissolve; and how to find a political dynamic that does not see unavoidable German pre-eminence slide into unacceptable hegemony.
Look around at what is happening in eastern and central Europe — at Russian revanchism and resurgent nationalism in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere — and you see history returning with a vengeance. With it comes an old question. Is it to be a European Germany or a German Europe?