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So long as the memory of German militarism hung in the Continental atmosphere—alongside Soviet supersensitivity about the guns of Bonn—it seemed imperative not to make waves. It was far safer for West Germany to think of itself, in the European context, as a banker than as a politician, and certainly not as a general. Willy Brandt recounts that John Kennedy once asked him to tell him candidly how Germans perceived themselves. Brandt's blunt answer: "Of course, I hold my head up high, but inside I bow and scrape."
Five years ago, Brandt, the idealistic crusader for Ostpolitik, was forced to resign as Chancellor after one of his closest aides, Günter Guillaume, was arrested as a spy for East Germany. Along came Schmidt, and the new West Germany is progressively spreading its wings with little apology. Its self-confidence has been amply demonstrated, and not only in open defiance of U.S. preferences on a variety of key issues. Pursuing a more active diplomacy in the Third World, Schmidt has ranged far afield; earlier this year he visited Brazil, Peru and the Dominican Republic, leaving no doubt that he means to expand West German commerce in Latin America. Increasingly Schmidt has been cutting the most forceful figure at European Community summits. Says a Danish diplomat ruefully: "If the Germans don't agree, it can't be done in the E.C."
The launching pad for West Germany's political takeoff has been there all along: its rock-solid economy, second only to that of the U.S. in the industrialized West. The Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 60s and early '70s continues. Last year West Germany had another immense trade surplus, $21 billion; its gross national product is expected to grow more than 4.5% in 1979, and despite the rising cost of oil to a country that produces almost none of its own, inflation will probably not exceed 4%, by far the lowest figure of any major Western economy.
Unemployment is also down, from 5.9% in early 1976 to the present 3.8%. The jobless figure has remained remarkably low despite the country's profound restructuring of key industries, which, as in the rest of Europe, have come under pressure from low-cost foreign competition. West Germany's textile industry is now oriented to high fashion, steel toward high-grade specialty alloys, shipbuilding away from supertankers to small, specialized vessels. Unlike many other industrial countries, West Germany foresaw the problem of competition and moved swiftly.
It drew on the workaday cooperation among management, labor and government that has long been a touchstone of the country's stability. While Britain, for instance, still suffers from class conflict, Germany already had a limited form of worker participation in management as early as the Weimar Republic. In his state of the nation speech, Schmidt singled out the trade unions in particular for their "admirable wisdom and sanity." Schmidt's friend and only rival as the leader of the E.G., French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, has often cited West Germany as a model for his own country's economic development.
In part because it can well afford to, West Germany has also produced something of a