Berlin’s Europe?

The Rome Office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) is delighted to invite you to the  panel discussion to launch the Italian edition of Hans Kundnani's book “The Paradox of German Power” (published in Italian by Le Monnier as “Europa secondo Berlino. Il paradosso della Potenza tedesca”, with a preface by Lucio Caracciolo).

Since the euro crisis began, Germany has emerged as Europe's dominant power. During the last five years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Bismarck and even Hitler in the European media. And yet few can deny that Germany today is very different from the stereotype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. After nearly seventy years of struggling with the Nazi past, Germans think that they more than anyone have learned its lessons. Above all, what the new Germany thinks it stands for is peace. Germany is unique in this combination of economic assertiveness and military abstinence. In some ways, as Lucio Caracciolo argues in his preface to the book, Germany today looks like a big Switzerland. So what does it mean to have a “German Europe” in the twenty-first century?