New answers tagged germany
7
Germany spends a lot on defense
Situation in absolute values:
Germany is among the countries with the highest absolute defense spending with 49.3 billion US dollars (2019; Source: SIPRI). It is surpassed by the United States, China, India and Russia. Each of these countries is much larger and has major geopolitical ambitions. Then there is Saudi Arabia, ...
10
For historical reasons I won't go into here, Germany and its neighbours are very wary indeed of "big military" in Teutonic hands.
For the last 70 years German schools (at least in the West), the press and public bodies have tried to make Germans more pacifist than they were before. They have succeeded to a great extent. So any increase in defence ...
17
Two reasons. First, because there's simply no internal pressure to massively increase defense spending (over 50% in 10 years) in Germany - other answers cover that part in detail and from different angles. Also, for historical reasons the other European NATO powers do not apply external pressure to make Germany take the top spot when it comes to military ...
-5
The single reason is that Germany lost World War II as stated in o.m.'s answer, but the conclusion is a different one. It's not something the Germans wanted, it's what the Allied forces wanted (on the contrary, every defense minister that I can recall during the last 3 decades would get an instant boner at the mere thought of sending more troops to places ...
48
Absolute and relative amounts
Germany has come much closer to the 2% goal due to the COVID crisis -- the GDP went down, the defense budget stayed the same, so the percentage went up. Similarly, good years reduced the percentage without any defense cuts.
Rejection of war as a means of policy.
Germany has spent 40 years at the frontline of the Cold War, a war ...
25
The main factor has to be the fear of public debt and symbolic importance of balanced budgets (schwarze Null) in the German political discourse. The notion that the state should avoid building up debt and strive towards a balanced budget every single year plays an oversize role in the way the German media and public judge many issues. That's not the case in ...
63
The 2% goal for defense spending of all NATO countries originates from the Wales Summit of 2014. However, the people who made that commitment are heads of governments, many of which don't actually have the authority to make budgeting decisions. This includes the German Chancellor. The Bundestag (German parliament) which actually has that authority never ...
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