Politics & Power Quote by Gerhard Schroder

Schroder’s line is doing two jobs at once: selling alignment and quietly redefining what “national interest” is allowed to mean in postwar Germany. The word “really” is the tell. It’s a reassurance aimed at multiple audiences who don’t automatically trust the claim: skeptical Germans wary of entanglements, European partners anxious about Berlin’s weight, and Washington, which has long expected German loyalty to sit inside a broader Western script. By insisting the interests are “identical,” Schroder isn’t describing a fact so much as trying to make it one.

The subtext is strategic discipline. If national and European interests are the same, then surrendering certain freedoms of action stops looking like concession and starts looking like prudence. That’s the rhetorical trick that makes integration feel less like sacrifice and more like common sense. It also inoculates against the old fear that Germany might pursue a special path: no Sonderweg here, just a merged destiny.

Context matters: Schroder governed during the euro’s early consolidation, EU enlargement, and the post-9/11 security realignment, when Europe was arguing about sovereignty in real time. His tenure also included high-profile moments of divergence from the US (notably Iraq), which sharpened the need to frame Germany as reliably European even when it was stubbornly German. The sentence functions as a diplomatic pledge, but also as a domestic instruction: patriotism, in this era, is supposed to route itself through Brussels. Whether that “identical” holds up is exactly the point; as a claim, it’s aspirational, and as politics, it’s a constraint.