The writer Thomas Mann framed the choice in 1953. The new Bonn Republic, he said, should discard any nationalist ambitions for a German Europe. The future lay in binding the nation to its neighbours to create a European Germany.
Fast forward 70 years and today’s reunified Germany is still struggling to make up its mind. This month the powerful constitutional court in Karlsruhe raised a nationalist flag by firing a legal broadside against the European Central Bank. Chancellor Angela Merkel replied this week with a plan agreed with French president Emmanuel Macron for a €500bn recovery fund for the EU states worst hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some saw the court ruling — the latest in a long line of the judges’ attempts to redraw the boundary between national and European jurisdictions — as a potentially lethal blow to the ECB’s operations in managing the euro. Others cheered the fiscal federalism inherent in the mechanisms of the proposed new recovery fund. Supporters called it the union’s “Hamiltonian” moment — imitating the decision of Alexander Hamilton and other US founding fathers to transfer the debts of the American states to the new federal government. To my mind, both descriptions veer towards hyperbole. Taken together, they expose the tensions at the heart of Germany’s European policy.