"Germany is in favor of integration precisely because we don't want dominance"
About this Quote
A politician denies the very thing everyone suspects he wants; that denial is the point. When Gerhard Schroder says Germany backs European integration "precisely because we don't want dominance", he’s performing a careful rhetorical judo move: flipping Germany’s sheer size from a threat into a reassurance. The line is engineered for neighbors who still read German power through 20th-century muscle memory, and for Germans wary of sounding like they’re back in the business of leading Europe.
The key word is "precisely". It doesn’t merely defend integration as a nice ideal; it presents integration as a strategic constraint. The subtext: Germany knows it will be influential no matter what, so it prefers influence inside a rule-bound architecture rather than in the open air of unilateral sway. In that frame, Brussels becomes an alibi and a guardrail at once: decisions are "European", not "German", even when German preferences largely prevail.
Placed in the Schroder era (late 1990s to mid-2000s), the quote also reads as an answer to a new kind of anxiety. A reunified Germany, anchored by the euro project and expanding EU membership, needed legitimacy for its growing economic gravity. Integration is pitched as a self-binding promise: Germany will accept shared rules, shared institutions, even shared constraints, to prove it isn’t returning to old hierarchies.
It works because it speaks to Europe’s central paradox: the continent needs German capacity to function, yet fears German command. Schroder’s sentence offers a bargain - power domesticated by process - and asks listeners to believe that restraint can be an ambition.
The key word is "precisely". It doesn’t merely defend integration as a nice ideal; it presents integration as a strategic constraint. The subtext: Germany knows it will be influential no matter what, so it prefers influence inside a rule-bound architecture rather than in the open air of unilateral sway. In that frame, Brussels becomes an alibi and a guardrail at once: decisions are "European", not "German", even when German preferences largely prevail.
Placed in the Schroder era (late 1990s to mid-2000s), the quote also reads as an answer to a new kind of anxiety. A reunified Germany, anchored by the euro project and expanding EU membership, needed legitimacy for its growing economic gravity. Integration is pitched as a self-binding promise: Germany will accept shared rules, shared institutions, even shared constraints, to prove it isn’t returning to old hierarchies.
It works because it speaks to Europe’s central paradox: the continent needs German capacity to function, yet fears German command. Schroder’s sentence offers a bargain - power domesticated by process - and asks listeners to believe that restraint can be an ambition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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