Prof. Dr. İ. Hamit Hancı– Attorney Dr. Alp Aslan

Germany is rearming. It is expanding its defence budget, attempting to increase the size of its armed forces, deploying a brigade to the Baltic states, and preparing to assume military leadership in Europe. Yet Berlin faces a problem that cannot be solved with money, tanks, or technology: while the German state is preparing for war, German society does not want to fight.

When Attorney Dr. Alp Aslan and I wrote this article, we observed that, according to a survey conducted by Forsa in August 2025, only 16 per cent of Germans said that they were definitely prepared to defend their country with weapons. While 22 per cent stated that they would “probably be able to fight,” 59 per cent said that they would definitely or most likely not take up arms. Among women, the proportion of those refusing to fight rises to 72 per cent. By contrast, 27 per cent of the population believes that Germany could be directly attacked within the next five years, while 59 per cent believes that Germany may be compelled to enter a war on behalf of another NATO country under attack.

There is an obvious contradiction: Germans regard the possibility of war as realistic, support increased defence spending, and want the NATO umbrella to be maintained, yet they do not want to participate personally in such a war.

It would be simplistic to explain this situation merely by saying that “the national sentiments of Germans have weakened.” The political consciousness of contemporary German society is the product of the defeat of 1945 and the order established in its aftermath. Following the Second World War, German militarism was not merely dismantled militarily; the entire public sphere, from education and the constitution to foreign policy and collective memory, was reorganised on the basis of opposition to war.

The Basic Law, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, regards the preparation of a war of aggression as an unconstitutional act that must be punished. The Bundeswehr was established solely for defensive purposes, and the deployment of the armed forces was placed under parliamentary control. For this reason, the military in Germany is not merely a military institution; it is a specially restricted “parliamentary army,” designed to prevent the repetition of past state crimes.

It is not legally correct to claim that Germany remains under occupation today pursuant to the surrender agreements of the Second World War. Under the 1990 Two Plus Four Treaty, the occupation rights of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France over Berlin and Germany as a whole were terminated, and it was explicitly recognised that reunified Germany possessed full sovereignty over its internal and external affairs.

However, legal sovereignty and strategic independence are not the same thing.

The real shadow hanging over Germany is not a still-valid “instrument of surrender,” but the security architecture established in 1945. Germany is formally independent, but it has largely tied its security to NATO, its nuclear deterrence to the United States, and its military logistics to the Atlantic Alliance. The American military presence in Germany is based not on the law of occupation, but on the NATO Status of Forces Agreement and Germany’s consent. Nevertheless, the weight of US bases, command centres, and the American nuclear umbrella within Germany’s security structure makes the debate over whether Berlin possesses full strategic autonomy a legitimate one.

In other words, although Germany is not legally under occupation, it has not been able to move entirely beyond the post-1945 era in terms of its security mindset.

With the suspension of compulsory military service in 2011, the armed forces became even more detached from the everyday life of society. In the eyes of German citizens, war increasingly became a distant state activity to be conducted by professional soldiers, NATO forces, and American technology. At the present point, generations raised within the welfare state are being asked to fight on the Baltic frontier, return to shelters that only a few years ago were said never to be needed again, and risk their lives on behalf of the state.

While the state’s security discourse is changing rapidly, society’s political culture is not changing at the same pace.

This is where Germany’s fundamental dilemma lies. Berlin can construct a war machine by increasing military expenditure. It can purchase new tanks, aircraft, missile defence systems, and unmanned vehicles. Yet the will to fight cannot be produced through a budgetary decision. Parliament can approve a defence fund worth billions of euros overnight, but it cannot eliminate an antimilitarist social identity built over seventy years through a few propaganda campaigns.

Moreover, German society is expected to defend not only its own country, but also NATO’s eastern frontier. From the perspective of today’s young Germans, fighting for Lithuania or Estonia does not appear as concrete or convincing as defending their own homes. The state says, “Europe’s security is Germany’s security.” The citizen asks, “Is this war really my war?”

Germany’s problem, therefore, is greater than a shortage of soldiers. The problem is the rupture between the geopolitical objectives of the state and society’s capacity for sacrifice.

Germany is rearming, but those who disarmed it were not merely the victors of 1945 who confiscated its tanks. Germany learned from its own history how militarism had driven both society and the state into catastrophe, and it built its new identity upon the rejection of that militarism.

Berlin is now being asked to reverse this identity.

Yet a country cannot easily carry the guilt of its past wars while simultaneously assuming leadership of future wars. The issue confronting Germany is not how many tanks it will produce, but how it will persuade people raised since 1945 around the ideal of peace to put on uniforms once again.

Germany’s legal occupation has ended. However, the military, political, and psychological order of 1945 continues to live on in the corridors of the German state, in American bases, in NATO plans, and in the anti-war memory of German society.

Germany is rearming.

But a Germany willing to fight has not yet been created.