MSC Hosts Night Cap Session on the German Zeitenwende at DFS 2022

Titled "Zeitenwende: What Structures Are Needed to Implement Germany's New National Security Strategy?" and moderated by Boris Ruge, Vice-Chairman of the MSC, this topic will be discussed by Lord Peter Ricketts, Member of the House of Lords and former senior diplomat, and Julia Friedlander, Director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative Atlantic Council.

In December of last year, Germany’s new coalition presented its “coalition agreement”. The agreement, for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, committed the government to producing a national security strategy which should be finalized before the end of 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dramatically highlighted the need for such a document. Articulating an overall assessment with regard to national security as well as key objectives and combining this with a narrative represents real progress. But the adoption of such a document can only be the first step.

Recent experiences have highlighted the deficiencies of Germany’s national security architecture, as in the example of Germany’s energy policy. As Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock remarked in a speech on 29 March, since 2014 Berlin had known that ending Germany’s massive dependency on Russian oil and gas was necessary. But energy policy was not part of a broader national security policy and Germany’s dependency actually increased since 2014.

This failure cannot be ascribed to individuals. Instead, in the future, appropriate institutions and processes must ensure better policy-making as well as the national security strategy’s full and sustained implementation, preventing Germany from falling back into old patterns of improvisation. This MSC Night Cap Session aims to think two steps ahead by dealing with the challenges of and necessary conditions for putting the national security strategy into practice. It will discuss whether and how the Federal Security Council or the creation of new coordination structures can pave the way for a credible implementation of the new national security strategy.

In his contribution to the book "The Art of Diplomacy," MSC Vice-Chairman Boris Ruge takes a look at the national security architecture in Germany. Read it in our MSC Blog.

This Night Cap Session is part of the Deutsches Forum Sicherheitspolitik 2022 (German Forum on Security Policy 2022), organized by the Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik (BAKS) (German Federal Academy for Security Policy). Please find the full program here.