There was a bit of an outcry when Robert Habeck went to Qatar and “magnificently” announced a new “energy partnership” there, followed by a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Both countries that hardly meet our moral standards. You once said about the war in Ukraine: “What we need is stability…some dirty deal.” Here too?
In such situations, which are very complex and which, as Jürgen Habermas correctly put it recently, mean dilemmas for us, it is a matter of choosing the lesser evil. We’re talking about ambitious central powers, some of which use sharp elbows to achieve their goals. The Emirates, for example, are also warring parties in Yemen. However, we believe that they are predictable in their dealings with us, and that is what it is about at the moment.
Do you still understand the indignation?
I don’t like indignation as a reaction pattern very much in the political sphere, but the question of who you get involved with is absolutely legitimate: what kind of contract is that, who do we pay to, how are the payments used? The fact is: We are not deciding between good alternatives, we have to decide between bad alternatives.
A story from the current issue of the FAZ magazine “Frankfurter Allgemeine Quarterly”
Germany’s economy is dependent on exports, but at the same time it is also a major importer of important raw materials from all parts of the world. Freedom, democracy, human rights usually do not play a major role. Is our prosperity largely based on unscrupulousness?
One should not expect a generalization of the EU model, which has succeeded in combining close economic coupling with a common normative orientation. One can hope that one thing leads to another, that’s the idea of ”change through trade”. I think the current criticism of this policy is completely exaggerated, it has had real effects. You just have to realize that this is a tug of war, a form of power politics. What is really naïve is the notion that trade will automatically bring about harmonization. An economy based on multilateral trade relations has to deal with partly fundamentally different societies and political systems, for which we need a complex grid of different standards. And then you have to see where there are areas of similarity, where there are areas of conflict, where can we work together on what basis, so that something new can be created together. We are thus entering morally uncertain territory where we have to struggle for a future that suits us better.
Does “turning point” also mean that morality has to play a bigger role in the economy?
I’m not very good with morals. What definitely plays a role is what US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called “friendshoring”, i.e. cooperation between countries that have similar ideas about doing business and doing business, a friendship-based orientation of the economy. The EU, NATO, the G7 are all “friendshoring” models. We tend to distance ourselves from a world in which we can easily fall back on categories such as law or even morality. Habermas reminded us that international law is not that far off. Then the reference to morality or universal values seems particularly outdated. We need to be clear about where we stand and what we want to relate to in Europe.
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