Helmut Schmidt – a German leader with a global vision

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/10/helmut-schmidt-german-chancellor-europe

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Helmut Schmidt does not grace the hall of fame of German chancellors. For many Germans, their “great”postwar leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl. But as a historian I would argue that Schmidt, who was chancellor from 1974 to 1982, ranks alongside the best global leaders.

Related: Helmut Schmidt obituary

Most German chancellors addressed the “German question”: the legacies of Nazism and of division in 1945. In the 1950s, Adenauer’s Westpolitik promoted friendship with France – Germany’s age-old enemy – and rehabilitated West Germany by binding it into the new Atlantic Alliance and the European Community. After 1969, Brandt’s Ostpolitik fostered reconciliation with the Soviet bloc and normalised relations with East Germany. In 1989-90, Kohl brought together the two parts of divided Germany as the “chancellor of unity”.

By comparison, Schmidt may seem less significant. German obituaries mostly praise him as a “doer” and “crisis-manager”; they single out his “cool head” in dealing with terrorism and his all-round “competence” as a supremely “pragmatic” politician. All such verdicts judge Schmidt largely on the German question. But during his time as chancellor further rapprochement with East Germany was impossible and talk of unification was pie-in-the-sky. Schmidt’s achievements were not so much in the national arena but as what I have called a “global chancellor”.

It is easy to forget the mess the world economy was in when Schmidt was catapulted to power in 1974. Not exactly the meltdown of 2008, but something close. The world had been forced off fixed exchange rates, Opec held the west to ransom over oil prices, and economic stagnation combined toxically with roaring inflation.

An economist by training, he saw the world economy as his number one priority as chancellor

For Schmidt, prosperity was central to security. He feared that the crisis of capitalism would undermine democracy, as in 1930s Germany, and threaten western survival in the cold war. An economist by training, he saw the world economy as his number one priority as chancellor. But his solutions were not national, let alone nationalistic. His mantra was “interdependence”; he saw the meaning of globalisation ahead of his time. Schmidt was one of the architects of the G7 in 1975 – based on the idea that political leaders, rather than those he derided as economic “nerds”, had to take more control and coordinate international economic policy. He was also the prime mover in creating the European monetary system – the precursor to the eurozone – in 1979. Whatever we may think of these institutions now, they were immensely important at the time in bringing stability and direction to a global economy that seemed rudderless.

Schmidt’s closest ally and friend was the French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, with whom he dined regularly in secret in their favourite restaurant in Alsace. But he was also close to British Labour politicians, especially Denis Healey and James Callaghan, and got on well with US policymakers such as Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. Equally striking, in the latter part of his chancellorship Schmidt played a decisive role in global cold war politics. Totally committed to the Atlantic Alliance and determined to avoid a nuclear war on German soil, he crafted Nato’s “double-track” decision of 1979. A response to the Soviet arms build-up, this was an intricate balancing act – modernising Nato’s arsenal of Euro-missiles, while also holding open the door for negotiations on arms reduction. The first track kept Nato strong in the new cold war of the early 1980s. The second paved the way for the 1987 Soviet-American treaty on the total abolition of intermediate nuclear forces – a dramatic step towards ending the cold war.

In this way Schmidt took his sovereign, non-nuclear country to the top table of international diplomacy. And from this platform in the early 1980s he tried to play a self-styled role as “double interpreter” between the White House and the Kremlin, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Olympics. He was desperate to maintain dialogue and avoid a total rupture between the superpowers, genuinely fearing “another 1914”.

His mission to Moscow at one of the iciest moments, in July 1980, was an attempt to talk face-to-face with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, as men who had experienced the eastern front in the second world war. There in the Kremlin, Schmidt felt, for a few hours that he had transcended the limits of West Germany’s geopolitical condition, speaking for once like the representative of a great power.

So Schmidt should not be judged simply as a German chancellor. He operated on the global stage, both in economics and security policy. His record was mixed, and his fall from power was ignominious. But he advanced West Germany to the status of an associate superpower. Helmut Schmidt deserves to be remembered as West Germany’s “global chancellor”.