Berlin’s defeat exposed a state that lectures the world, backs war, excuses hypocrisy, and still expects prestige on demand
“Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall” (arrogance precedes a fall) says a proverb every German knows. That, you may say, is little wonder, considering how the last two world wars started and ended.
But the saying is much older. It is rooted in Martin Luther’s punchy translation of the Old Testament (in the English King James Bible, the relevant passage reads “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”). Clearly, the admonition not to preen and strut lest you stumble and fall flat on your silly, overbearing face is addressed to all of us, including, for instance, Americans and Israelis.
Yet recent events at the United Nations have highlighted the pertinence of – to use a term less harsh than arrogance – an over-optimistically biased lack of self-awareness to the case of contemporary Germany. Or to be precise, its political elites. Berlin, in essence, has been humiliated in public, before literally the whole world: Applying for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, it lost the vote in the UN General Assembly.
The rotating non-permanent seats on the UN Security Council are, to put it mildly, not terribly powerful resources. Their value is at least as much a matter of political symbolism and prestige as of practical benefits. But it would be foolish to conclude that Germany’s defeat does not matter. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that such a seat does not pack a mighty punch that makes the failure to obtain one even worse: How hard can it be? Obviously too hard for the current Berlin team.
Hence, ironically, although objectively the stakes were not that high, this is a massive setback and great embarrassment for official Germany. One reason is that a de facto routine has been broken. You might even say a tradition going all the way back to the last century’s Cold War. Since the 1973 admission as full UN members of both Cold War Germanies, East and West, first West then united Germany (in effect, West Germany after gobbling up its former rival), has held a non-permanent seat six times and, often forgotten now, the former East Germany once. This is Germany’s first ever failure to achieve what had come to look like the default: getting what it wants.
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