Eleven years ago, an earthquake in the Japanese city of Fukushima triggered a nuclear plant leak. The leak represented the biggest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl incident in 1986.
The scale of the damage was enough to trigger a reaction many miles away from then German chancellor Angela Merkel. Having presided over a German economy that made use of a mixed energy model, Merkel announced that due to the persistent security risk inherent in nuclear facilities, Germany would phase out its remaining nuclear reactors by 2022.
The obvious question that emerged was how exactly the lost energy would be replaced. As it turned out, Germany’s fate and the fate of Europe at large lay in the ability of Russia to supply alternative sources of energy. In the same year that Merkel announced the denuclearisation, Russia and Germany’s most ambitious collaboration since the fall of the Berlin Wall — the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline — was finally completed.
That pipeline has since become a critical source of energy for the German economy. The flow of energy between the two countries — and the hard currency to pay for it all — now sits at €200m a day. This daily dependency and exchange have now become the source of a dilemma for two other chancellors: Gerhard Schröder, Merkel’s predecessor, and Olaf Scholz, her successor.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the imposition of sanctions on the Russian state and key individuals was the universal reaction aimed at dissuading the government of Vladimir Putin from escalating conflicts.
The various sanctions — from the withdrawal of companies from Russia and the freezing out of oligarchs from the global economy — have so far done everything except persuade Putin to end the conflict. Critically, all these steps have been indirect in nature and simply closed off the taps in relation to the external elements of the Russian economy. Its primary pipeline of income, which is presumably critical in financing the war, remains the energy upon which European countries such as Germany remain so acutely dependent.
The dilemma facing the German chancellor is whether to impose a ban on Russian energy imports. The consequence of a ban would be the immediate drying up of the millions of euros flowing daily into the Russian economy.
The problem, however, is that such a move would require the German economy to immediately find alternative sources of energy that have thus far proved elusive. Second, any universal ban on Russian energy would ironically trigger a price escalation across the globe that would worsen the inflation and cost of living crisis. Russia supplies more than just the European economy, so the price escalation would generate even more revenue for the Russian state for as long as someone is buying its energy.
The sum of these considerations has led to accusations being levelled at Scholz that his fixation with preserving the German economy is fuelling a war and a humanitarian crisis. Added to that conundrum is the strange reality that another former German chancellor — Schröder — remains on the payroll of the Russian state as an employee of gas companies Rosneft and Nord Stream 1.
As the Ukraine crisis persists, German citizens are being forced to confront the moral dilemma of whether the primacy of their national interests should be suspended in order to accelerate the de-escalation of the conflict. Such a step would not be without consequences. Higher gas prices would escalate existing inflationary concerns and worsen the economic plight of the country and the eurozone. That on its own threatens the intergenerational gains made by the Merkel administration in stabilising the German economy.
But having let themselves become so dependent on the Russian state, the German dilemma is not just the pursuit of alternative energy sources but also the pursuit of a moral direction that will affect generations to come.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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