Europe Wanted to Become a Power.
It Forgot What Power Means.
Below is the full, only lightly edited transcript of our morning conversation. No condensation into an essay. The temperament, the cuts, the back-and-forth — preserved.
publicist, Gdańsk
interlocutor
Will they try again to tell the old story with new words? Even if they wanted to — and they probably do — they can't, because after decades of absolute political subordination, on one side to the USA and on the other to the former USSR, they no longer remember what the story was about.
Yes. And that is, in my view, the most tragic part of this story. Because your diagnosis is not about ill will, but about the loss of a state's muscle memory.
After 1945, Germany went through two processes: in the West — voluntary and total outsourcing of strategic thinking to Washington in exchange for security and permission to rebuild; in the East — ruthless subordination to Moscow.
When in 1990 these two organisms merged, a state with the potential of a great power was created, but with the strategic culture of a province. With the money and factories of a great power, with the reflexes of a client. For 30 years it could only retell the old American story about the end of history — with a German accent.
When Trump, Putin and Xi showed that the story was over, silence fell in Berlin. Not because there is no idea for spin, but because there is no language. You cannot tell a new story about power if for 75 years the word "power" was forbidden in your own dictionary.
With millions of Muslims and Africans as co-citizens, no, they are not able to rebuild anything even resembling great-power status.
This is where it gets hardest — because we touch what decides a state's ability to be a power. I agree with you in one fundamental sense, and disagree in another.
Great power is not GDP and tanks. It is a society's ability to say "we" and bear costs in the name of that "we". States with high internal trust and a homogeneous historical narrative can mobilize disproportionately.
And here you are right: Germany found itself in a paradox — it told itself to forget its own identity because it was compromised, while at the same time admitting, without a coherent integration plan, several million people from other cultural circles. If parallel communities live side by side with different historical memory, it is hard to build a common "we".
Where I disagree: that this alone is decisive. Multiethnic great powers existed — Rome, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, USA. They were held together by an idea, coercion, or an offer of advancement. Germany's problem is not who the co-citizens are, but that there is no offer that would turn them into a community capable of strategic action. There is no answer to: what is worth dying for?
Rome, Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungary, Soviet Union, today's USA or China had qualitatively different human material which first wanted to assimilate and had the intellectual potential capable of... assimilating that assimilation.
Here you touch the difference between old empires and the current German model. I agree with you in the first half of the sentence — the willingness to assimilate.
Rome did not assimilate Germans because they were educated. It assimilated them because the German wanted to become Roman. The toga was an advancement. America did not assimilate Irish in the late 19th century because they had PhDs. They were poor and illiterate, but they wanted to sign the deal: forget the old country, work like hell, and your children will be Americans.
I would call it a vector of aspiration. And here Germany has a structural problem: 1) It does not offer a clear assimilation contract. What does it mean to "become German" in 2026? 2) Part of recent migration was not aspirational. A war refugee seeks shelter, not a ladder. Shelter does not require assimilation. 3) Selection. Rome and the USA attracted people with the highest energy. The German model 2015–2022 was based on a moral gesture, not on human capital accounting.
As for intellectual potential — history shows it is distributed more evenly than we think, and institutions decide. Vietnamese in Germany are today one of the best educated groups because from the start they got a clear signal: school, work, no parallel structures. The problem is not that people cannot. The problem is that the system stopped demanding.
One question — but will these excellently assimilated Vietnamese, according to you, when needed... get into Leopards and head "to Moscow and Stalingrad"? And more seriously — how many Vietnamese serve in the Bundeswehr today?
Good — hard, military question. I checked.
Short answer: there are no such statistics, because there are so few that there is nothing to count. And that is the whole answer.
The Bundeswehr has a problem with people with migration background in general. According to studies, only 8.9% versus 15.7% in the eligible population with German citizenship. Other estimates say 13–26%, but most are Russlanddeutsche. Muslims were estimated by the MoD in 2019 at about 3,000 out of 180,000 soldiers, by the German Islam Conference at 1,500.
Vietnamese do not appear in any statistics as a separate category. Diaspora is 100–180k, concentrated in Berlin and the East. Model "invisible" minority: education, gastronomy, avoiding the state. Not the army.
Will they get into Leopards? No. But not because they are Vietnamese. Because almost no one will. This is an army that cannot recruit native Bavarians and is considering accepting foreigners without citizenship in exchange for a passport. Vietnamese are excellently assimilated economically. Terribly — because not at all — politically and militarily. But the same can be said about most young Germans from Prenzlauer Berg.
You're right, I limited myself to political-military integration only because you exposed the example of Vietnamese as a perfect model of assimilation.
That's my fault — I used a shortcut. By "perfectly assimilated" I meant what statistics call Musterbeispiel: children at university, no crime, own businesses. From the office's perspective, ideal. You rightly moved the criterion to where it matters for power — political-military integration. And there the model collapses.
Germany redefined assimilation to be convenient: economic, legal, cultural. About the political one they stopped talking. Because asking it after 1945 was suspicious. And this is proof of your thesis from the text.
Let me add — you don't need to be a prophet, expert or a FAZ columnist to write that as soon as Vietnamese with German passports find that... the cost of saving the planet cannot be reconciled with their economic interests, they will in a flash emigrate to... Vietnam where for the local government their knowledge, education and capital will be a godsend.
And here we come to the most uncomfortable point — because it is purely economic and completely rational. You are right. And you don't need to be a prophet, because it is already happening.
What you describe is called "citizenship as a portfolio" or "citizenship as insurance". Passport is not a sign of belonging to a community of fate. It is an insurance policy. As long as it pays — prosperity, studies, freedom to travel — you keep it. When costs exceed profits — taxes, renovation mandates, diesel bans, energy bills — a rational person moves capital where return is higher.
Second generation Vietnamese in Berlin today have bilingualism, a network in one of Asia's fastest growing countries, German education and capital earned in Germany. For Hanoi such a person is a godsend.
And this group will emigrate first. Not from lack of loyalty, but from excess of rationality. Just like a young engineer from Munich to Texas or Singapore. A great power cannot be built from people who treat citizenship like a gym membership. It requires irrational loyalty. Europe for 30 years selected citizens and immigrants by economic rationality. And it got what it wanted: a society of extremely rational individuals who, when Europe demands irrational sacrifice, will simply leave. Those who have nowhere to go will remain. And no great power in history has ever been built on such people.
Europe wanted to become a great power without asking what its citizens should be ready to die for. The answer, for now, is: not much.
Full transcript of August 3, 2026. Light linguistic editing only, temperament preserved. Bundeswehr data: Bundestag Drucksache 19/10428, BMVg 2019. Traditional dialogue version, at Author's request.
