On all recent questions of war and peace, Germany has disagreed with the other leading European powers. Berlin opposed the intervention in Libya in 2011. It was reluctant to help France in Mali in January, and it is only very slowly giving up its resistance to arming the rebels in Syria. While leading on eurozone efforts to save the euro, Germany remains passive in security affairs; it often appears like a detached spectator. The result is deadlock – a Europe unable to rise to the many foreign policy challenges in a world that is marked by waning American power.

For years, the idea of “normalisation” drove German foreign policy. Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrat chancellor who followed Helmut Kohl, and Joschka Fischer, his Green party foreign minister, were prepared to participate in wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan to show that Germany had come of age. France and Britain were seen as role models. But that time is over.

Frustrated by the Afghan war, and empowered by a growing sense of its own weight, Germany is once again finding comfort in the pacifism it developed in reaction to the horrors of the second world war. Its people are proud they opposed the Iraq war and feel vindicated by the subsequent mess in the region. War is not an answer – what was once a pacifist slogan is today in common usage.

So the country has become more complacent, more inward looking, and is increasingly getting tired of being challenged by western partners for its attitude. Last Friday in Brussels, Chancellor Angela Merkel presented the German position as the new European norm. “Just the fact that two have changed their minds doesn’t mean that the other 25 have to follow suit,” she said in response to a push by Britain and France to lift the arms embargo on Syria. In the past, it was Germany that had to defend its reluctance to use hard power. Now, as the balance of power has shifted within the EU, France and Britain must justify their calls for action.

The risk is that Europe becomes more German in foreign policy terms, increasingly adopting Berlin’s passivity. Germany can slow or prevent action by France and Britain by denying access to its own and EU resources. In the past, the US leadership coaxed Berlin to action. But Barack Obama’s administration expects Europeans to take responsibility for their own interests. Left to their own devices, the three big European powers, roughly equal in strength, struggle to define their roles. The danger is a deadlock at a time when Europe needs to give a strong response to the unravelling of the old order on its southern borders. Inaction will damage its interests in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. A comprehensive approach is urgently needed.

That does not mean that everybody must do the same. Countries have specific strengths that must be integrated into a common strategy. France and Britain, the former world powers, have military assets that Germany will never have. Berlin is weak on the hard power side but it has everything needed to become a great soft power. In world affairs, it is widely seen as a neutral player that does not take sides. Often it literally does business with both sides. It should bank on the trust it has built up as part of a new foreign policy role.

Syria could offer an opportunity for Germany to shape such a new identity. Berlin should try to bring all players together to set out a map for a transition of power in Damascus, including the outline for an internationally backed post-civil war order. Berlin should make plain, especially to Moscow, that if diplomacy fails, Europe will give its full backing to the rebels.

By putting together a Syria conference in Berlin, Germany could act as an honest broker in the best Bismarckian tradition. For Ms Merkel, this would be a golden opportunity to advance German and European interests in the Middle East, to move the EU out of its foreign policy deadlock and to shine as a peacemaker in the eyes of German voters in an election year.

The writer is a foreign-policy analyst and commentator based in Heidelberg

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