German "Pacifism" and the Zeitenwende

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a major reorientation of German security policy, committing the federal government to a significant increase in defence spending as well as arms deliveries to Ukraine. Scholz’s announcement of a Zeitenwende (sea change) has triggered a renewed debate about continuity and change in German security policy, with some observers claiming that the Zeitenwende marks the end of German ‘pacifism’, the country’s traditional culture of military reticence. In this article, I challenge this framing of the issue. I argue that both talking about German military reticence in terms of ‘pacifism’ and conceptualizing it as a rather stable element of culture fail to grasp the messy empirical reality of post-Zeitenwende security policy and leads to false expectations regarding future foreign policy behaviour. I argue in favour of complementing this perspective with a more differentiated discursive approach.