IS IT Angela Schroder, Angela Schmidt – or Angela von Bismarck? Maggie Merkel or George W Merkel? It is certainly not Angela Kohl.
This is one way to describe the heated contemporary debate on where Germany’s European policy is going under Angela Merkel’s leadership. She is now 10 years as leader of the German Christian Democrats, having replaced Helmut Kohl in 2000, and has been chancellor for five years. Kohl is 80 this year. And the Federal Republic marked its own 60th birthday in 2009.
These anniversaries provide an opportunity to examine whether Germany is becoming a “normal” European state once again. Is it now driven as before by its own national interests rather than the Europeanised and transatlantic ones which enabled it first to re-establish itself after the war from the 1950s to the 1980s within the EEC and Nato, then to deepen its European engagement under Kohl from the mid-1980s to deal with German unification and gradual EU enlargement?
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