Home ›› 25 Apr 2023 ›› Opinion
So far, Germany has been the blind spot in discussions over the Nord Stream sabotage. The economic disadvantages to the world’s fourth-largest economy from blasting the pipeline are too great. Of course, no one will seriously assume that the traffic-light coalition in Berlin stands behind the attack. However, the outwardly conspicuously indifferent and dismissive handling of the act of sabotage suggests that Berlin either has a particularly opaque approach to its MPs or has its reasons for downplaying the significance of the Nord Stream sabotage. Several observations in Germany’s handling of the sabotage suggest that, though Germany was a victim of the attack, it is advancing the line that it no longer has a national interest in the Nord Stream pipelines.
Parliamentary groups and individual members of the opposition have addressed parliamentary questions about the sabo-tage to the German government. Particularly exciting are the answers – some of which are verbatim identical – from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action to the members of parliament Matthias Hauer (CDU), Leif-Erik Holm (AfD) and Zaklin Nastic (Die Linke), which state, that the federal government assumed that sabotage had taken place, but that it had “no concrete insights of the facts of the case, in particular of the possible authorship.” “Furthermore, the German Bundesregierung, after careful consideration, has come to the conclusion that further information cannot be pro-vided for reasons of the state interest (Staatswohl) – not even in classified form” because they are subject to the “third-party rule.” The German state, according to the letter, would jeopardize the basis of trust with other intelligence services by publishing the information that “would result in a serious impairment of the participation of the intelligence services of the Federation in the international exchange of intelligence” and consequently: “If, as a consequence of a loss of confi-dence, information from foreign agencies were to be omitted or substantially reduced, significant information gaps would arise with negative consequences for the accuracy of the depiction of the security situation in the Federal Republic of Ger-many as well as with regard to the protection of German interests abroad. The disclosure of the information would fur-thermore make it considerably more difficult to further clarify intelligence activities in and against the Federal Republic of Germany. The requested information thus affects secrecy interests in need of protection to such an extent that the welfare of the state (Staatswohl) prevails over the parliamentary right to information and the right of members of parliament to ask questions must for once take a back seat to the secrecy interests of the Federal Government.”
This sounds plausible and yet like an excuse. Because in May 2017, the German government explained its understanding of the “third-party rule” in its response to a brief enquiry by the parliamentary group Die Linke: According to the Federal Gov-ernment, this is “not an absolute ban on the disclosure of information, but a ban with a reservation of consent… In doing so, the transmitting authority reserves the right of information control. Therefore, before dissemination, the consent of the transmitting authority must be obtained, which may legitimize the dissemination.”
On top of that, the Federal Constitutional Court imposed an obligation on the Federal Government to take care of the con-sent. Nevertheless, the traffic-light coalition is stalling with regard to the Nord Stream sabotage, as is clear from a response by the Federal Government dated February 17, 2023, to the Left Party’s question. While in principle it confirms therein its view on the “third-party rule” from 2017 and also the stipulation of the Federal Constitutional Court, the numer-ous inquiries of parliamentarians on the same subject matter make it impossible for the federal government to inquire in detail “whether, despite the confidentiality pledge, a release can nevertheless be made without putting credibility with the partners at risk.” Therefore, the federal government assesses the outcome of an inquiry and because it does not expect a positive answer, “no request for release in the sense of the respective question was made by anybody.” It is undoubtedly understandable that the federal government does not want to obstruct or even thwart an ongoing investigation by the au-thorities.
Nevertheless, this balking and squirming by the federal government leaves a sour taste in the mouth. First, it uses the “third-party rule” not to give an answer a priori, and now it estimates the outcome of an answer, which is why no enquiry is made at all. Such a lack of willingness to be transparent, especially for reasons of the “Staatswohl,” could be interpreted in another direction: As party or government welfare. Especially when the government might not want to reveal to its citizens that it had possibly withdrawn its protective hand from the pipeline project, although the cheap gas from Russia is of essen-tial importance as an affordable energy source for the German economy and private households – in short, it is an im-portant pillar for German prosperity. This idea is also underlined by the apparent lack of will to clarify the matter.
The Nord Stream project can be traced back to Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who attended the signing a letter of intent with Vladimir Putin just days before the 2005 federal election. His successor, Angela Merkel, continued the project. Her term in office also saw the start of construction of Nord Stream 2. Proponents from the SPD and CDU/CSU understood Nord Stream 1 and later Nord Stream 2 as a private-sector project, a means to supply Germany with cheap en-ergy, a way to replace coal, a bridge to Russia and, above all, a sovereign German and European decision. Moreover, there was a suspicion that the threats from the U.S. against Nord Stream 2 were self-interested in order to sell U.S. LNG gas to Europe.
Attempts to attach “moralizing” values to Nord Stream have bounced off the government of Angela Merkel. Yet such at-tempts date back at least to 2016. Der Spiegel reported at the time that Green Party politician Robert Habeck, the current federal minister of economics, had used the Russian war in Syria as an argument against the pipeline to deprive Putin of sources of revenue. Also, as early as 2021, the EU had tried to link the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to the arrest and conviction of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after he returned to Russia following his poison attack. This was re-jected at the time by the majority of SPD MEPs, as the Vorwärts reported.
A first softening of the German position is visible in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s farewell visit to Washington, when a German-US agreement in the conflict over the opening of Nord Stream 2 was in the offing, and the Biden administration confined itself to limiting Russia’s ability to use energy as a weapon against Ukraine and other states. Only with the loom-ing Russian attack on Ukraine did the attitude in Berlin begin to change under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who won the Sep-tember 2021 federal election and has since governed Berlin in a coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals.
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