…all those German classes weren’t wasted after all – The Rise of the Fifth Reich? (Did I miss the fourth one?)
Corn’s sensitivity to the possibility that actions Americans do not anticipate based on the very different priorities of policy makers in other parts of the world could radically reshape the global picture animates his article on Germany. He begins provocatively:
“If Clausewitz is right that “war is the continuation of policy by other means”, then Germany is again at war with Europe, at least in the sense that German policy is trying to achieve in Europe the characteristic objectives of war: the redrawing of international boundaries and the subjugation of foreign peoples….
Germany’s goal?
A constitutionalization of the EU treaties, which would irreversibly institutionalize the current “correlation of forces,” and allow German hegemony in the 27-member European Union to approximate Prussian hegemony in the 27-member Bismarckian Reich.
This is much more exciting than the usual bland pap about European politics one reads in the US, and Corn’s analysis is deeply grounded in what serious people are thinking and writing in Paris, London and Berlin.
Exciting indeed, but I’m not sure if that comment at the end about “serious people” is meant to be irony or not…
As Mead notes, Corn may just be getting over-excited, but it’s still worth considering as a thought experiment. And in my case, it’s interesting as fodder for a future history — if a resurgent Germany dominated the EU like the Zollverein and succeeded in bringing a demographically cratering Russia to heel in exchange for help shoring up its eastern border defenses, etc., what would that world look like in fiction?