By Dr. Jochen Kleinschmidt

Germany has long embraced the concept of “multipolarity” – or the idea that there are multiple centers of power in global politics that necessitate engagement with all on equal merits. However, that approach is plagued by empirical as well as normative problems, and is indicative of serious deficits in German strategic culture. For Germany to really have a Zeitenwende, it should adopt an idealist approach that places its values over short-sighted utility calculations.

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, critics have called into question many implicit assumptions underlying German foreign policy. The most prominent of these is the doctrine of Wandel durch Handel, or “change through trade.” For many, this practically amounted to little beyond shameless profiteering from deals with resource-rich Russia, though others continued to convince themselves of its noble purpose, despite all evidence to the contrary. One could quip that there was a lot of Handel for very little Wandel—or, as a Polish expert pointed out, the Wandel, such as it was, may have actually consisted of injecting the characteristic Russian mix of “business, politics, secret services and the criminal world” into German politics, economy, and civil society – rather than any change for the better in Russia.

This failure to revise judgements in the face of widespread domestic and international criticism and indeed, the clear need for a different approach based on realistic analysis of the geopolitical situation and Germany’s role in it, is indicative. The transformation that was proclaimed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in his famous Zeitenwende speech fell short of expectations – and what was needed. Germany did not adopt a fundamentally transformative stance towards the war, contenting itself with contributing significant, but not decisive, military support. The delivery of equipment and munitions stayed well below the overall capacity – and, crucially, the Scholz government never targeted its support at a Ukrainian victory. While public opinion in Germany may be ahead of the country’s political leadership—a recent study found that pluralities of all mainstream political parties’ supporters wished for continued or much stronger support for Ukraine, a trend that continues into March 2025—political elites have done little to show the way towards a successful conclusion of the war, which would require a much more dedicated material commitment from European countries, including Germany.

A Dishonest Diagnosis

Part of the failure of Zeitenwende could be attributed to the lack of actual, deep engagement with the deficits of German foreign policy thinking. Much of the intellectual framework underlying the crass commercialism of the Schröder and Merkel chancellorships remains intact, though under different slogans. One indicator of this continuity is the prominent usage of the term “multipolarity” in current German foreign policy documents and debates. And while such a perhaps purely rhetorical preference might not seem like a big deal at first, it illustrates more than just the lack of a successful strategy. Rather, it demonstrates the lack of a strategic culture which would allow for an intellectually and morally honest challenge to failed policies and disproven assumptions.

’Multipolarity’ itself is not commonly used in corresponding documents of other countries or international organizations: It does not feature at all in the U.S. National Security Strategy, the U.S. National Defense Strategy, the European Union’s Global Strategy, the U.S. Integrated Country Strategy for China, the UK’s National Security Strategy, or the National Security Strategy of Poland. In the German Federal Chancellery, however, multipolarity has long been en vogue. In the introduction to Germany’s first National Security Strategy (2023), Chancellor Scholz asserts that “new centres of power are emerging, the world in the 21st century is multipolar”—without giving any indication of his precise understanding of the term. In other parts of the strategy, the word is vaguely associated with Chinese and Russian challenges to world order, but never defined in any conceptually satisfying way. In a recent speech to the diplomatic corps in Berlin, Scholz used the term four times, nebulously alluding to the necessity of adapting existing frameworks to the realities of a multipolar world, but also describing a necessity for “China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and many others” to work for peace in Ukraine. Otherwise, little could be achieved.

Scholz’ usage of the word displays remarkable continuity. Apparently, he understands multipolarity as a necessity to involve a great number of states from all over the world in the solution of important problems in order to get anything done. In an interview with a Japanese periodical, Scholz again described an unusually inclusive vision of the coming world order, with “India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam” as well as unnamed countries in “Africa and South America” all acting as poles, besides the U.S., China, and the European Union. This understanding of multipolarity is not just extremely broad. It also appears as dishonest, or at least as highly incoherent, when considering how Scholz continuously emphasized the overriding importance of emulating the Biden administration’s slow-rolling delivery of military aid—at one moment pointlessly delaying the delivery of main battle tanks to Ukraine until the U.S. delivered tanks first, and thus behaving exactly contrary to the above public assumptions regarding multipolarity.

A similar pattern has been noted regarding the question of Ukrainian membership in NATO: Ignoring the stated will of important allies such as France, Great Britain and Poland, as well as the confident stance of the Baltic countries or Romania, Scholz has unquestioningly adopted the U.S. position. Apparently, the world is only multipolar when it fits his preferences. Now, it wouldn’t be noteworthy if a concept stemming from theoretical International Relations were slightly distorted when transferred to a more practical context. In this case, however, the German understanding of multipolarity, at least as demonstrated by Scholz and some other members of his party, amounts to almost the opposite of its original meaning.

From Academia to Politics

In the academic field of International Relations, the concept was originally coined by Kenneth N. Waltz (initially as “multipower”, later to be renamed) to differentiate the “bipolar” order of the Cold War, dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, from earlier, “multipolar” constellations of several great powers. What exactly turns a country into a great power, and thus into a “pole” relevant for international polarity, is hotly debated—but it generally involves the requirement of being able to compete with any other country in the conventional military realm, and the resources to sustain such competition indefinitely. Clearly, Brazil or Indonesia do not fit the bill—and, considering its economic dependency on China and its military performance in Ukraine, even Russia, the national identity of which was traditionally bound to its great power role, doesn’t. Among International Relations theorists, it is close to consensus that currently, world politics are either still unipolar, due to the overwhelming might of the United States, or that they might be evolving in the direction of bipolarity due to the emergence of China as a competing great power.

But those are essentially academic debates, with little obvious relevance to the workings of German foreign and security policy. What are the benefits in injecting an apparently misunderstood academic concept into important policy documents? A hint to the political aims of this specifically German variety of multipolarity is a book review in an online journal published by the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD’s) Friedrich Ebert Foundation, written by the party’s powerful parliamentary chairman, Rolf Mützenich. In the text, he lays out his interpretation of the vision of Herfried Münkler, a renowned political theorist popular among German social democrats (and himself a party member), for the future organization of world politics. Münkler, to simplify somewhat, assumes that any future world order will have to be co-managed by a consortium of five great powers—the U.S., China, Russia, but also India and the EU, echoing the pentarchy of the 19th century.

Such a scenario has little to no fundament in scholarly debates in International Relations, where hard-headed analysts of global power politics would point towards the lack of economic, especially manufacturing, capacities in Russia, the continued dependence of India on foreign military technology, and the absence of centralized administration and decision-making in the EU as important deficits that would preclude them performing their assigned roles according to Münkler’s model, among other problems. However, a senior politician like Mützenich writing a lengthy discussion of rather abstract geopolitical concepts indicates the important ideological role that this interpretation of multipolarity seems to play for some participants in German foreign policy debates. Similar ideas have also been echoed by party chairman, Lars Klingbeil, which seems to guarantee their presence in post-election foreign policy debates.

Mützenich arrives at the conclusion that in the world to come, there will be five different spheres of influence, formed by each of the members of the pentarchy, and that each of those spheres will operate according to the specific values of its hegemons. Yet, in contrast to the Cold War, significant cooperation will be possible across the limits of the spheres of influence, though without any pretense of common norms or values. In other words, in his ‘multipolar’ world there will be… Handel ohne Wandel.

This version of multipolarity is a racket. It is also terribly familiar to anyone following Germany’s Russia policy in the first quarter of this century. It is a rhetorical trick which permits the justification of just about any foreign policy decision with a scientific-sounding term which has been stripped of any meaning.

More precisely, it is a racket which allows unscrupulous leaders to propagate a stealthy return to the commercialist German practices of the past in the guise of an intellectually respectable analysis of supposed cold, hard truths. In fact, like much ‘realist’ analysis it conflates a description of the world with a desired outcome. This is an aspect that it shares with the multipolarity rhetoric that is used by autocracies such as Russia or North Korea—here, the desired emphasis is on the international importance of dictators, not on the justification of unethical trade links. This also appears to be the version of the term which is frequently used by the far-right AfD. In both cases, it is precisely the implicit desire which reveals much about the real malaise in German policy, as well as the task ahead of those who would wish to address it.

From the Misery of Multipolarity Towards Idealist Strategy

While Germany’s outgoing chancellor has been performatively working towards a restoration of German-Russian ties, his lieutenant, Mützenich, is providing an academic justification for a neutralist German approach to foreign policy, which explicitly includes the recognition of Russia as a co-equal manager of the international system. It is hardly surprising that Russian leaders enthusiastically embrace a similar multipolarity rhetoric: In St. Petersburg, there has even been a “Multipolar Music” festival celebrating Tchaikovsky, with a German far-right AfD politician playing the cello.

This illustrates several problems with the new German ‘multipolarism’. It is not just a badly made-up notion, wrongly named after a theoretical concept in order to feign intellectual respectability—and play to the unreflected anti-Americanism of parts of the German political spectrum. While this alone should be sufficient to discard this multipolarism, there are also practical and strategic reasons to do so. One is that multipolarism is a basically amoral stance vis-à-vis the realities of world politics which is fundamentally at odds with the far more principled and robust geopolitical idealism practiced by Central European and Baltic states. It is increasingly clear that these states will be keystones in any European approach to the Russian problem for years to come – for both practical and ethical reasons. Beyond their impressive material contributions to the defense of Ukraine, they also pioneered the courageous, values-based reaction to Russian aggression which led to larger countries finally dropping their resistance to heavy economic sanctions and arms deliveries.

Under the leadership of Kaja Kallas as High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, this approach will increasingly be anchored within EU institutions, and provide the fundamentals for the common defense of democracies. It will be based on the logic that under contemporary (and likely future) conditions, effective resistance to authoritarian threats cannot be exclusively framed in terms of material might—as any foreign policy concept framed in terms of polarity necessarily would. Rather, in order to harness the power of democratic societies for the common defense, it is necessary for political narratives to break through the social entropy caused by consumerism, political polarization, and social media distractions. Therefore, a strategy for democratic countries needs to speak to shared values and credible hopes for a better future, and connect these aspirations to concrete steps to be taken against a concrete adversary, not some abstract balance of power. In short, democratic states have to be clear about what they stand for, how that differs from what others stand for, and who threatens their ability to deliver on that vision.

Before external threats can be balanced, citizens need to be convinced that their individual and collective perspectives in life depend on the successful preservation of the democratic order—a perspective called “neo-idealism”, in contrast to the fake realism underlying multipolarism. Any strategy based on the latter (in any case, empirically false) diagnosis would be unable to achieve this, even if it were superficially correct, but would, for example, most likely end up accepting a politically dangerous settlement in Ukraine, seeking to appease the aggressor with territorial concessions. German social democrats’ concept of a multipolar world is thus not only at odds with the realities of 21st century power distribution, and of the social-psychological underpinnings of the common defense. It also runs the danger of ignoring the autotelic character of Russian aggression—that is to say, the fact that external wars are useful for the Russian leadership in order to mask their internal disputes and rivalries, and that their country’s almost purely extractive fossil economy leaves its long-term future very much in doubt.

Therefore, even if handed more Ukrainian territory under the guise of a peace settlement, Russia cannot perform the role of a rational co-manager expected of it in the Münklerian (or rather Mützenichian) vision, because it needs external conflict in order to pacify its fundamentally demodernized, de-institutionalized intra-elite relations. Betting on a future arrangement with Russia, as the multipolarity rhetoric clearly suggests, is therefore irresponsible, and risks not only vulnerability to future acts of aggression and genocide, but might split Europe down the middle. As Central European leaders criticize the outgoing German chancellor for his timid stance towards Russia, scholars and foreign policy experts should also condemn the great-power kitsch that provides its intellectual justification. Multipolarity, in its usage discussed here, may be described as kitsch because, as in the work of Milan Kundera, it serves as “a folding screen set up to curtain off death”—an aesthetic formula designed to distract from the dangerous issues which are at stake.

The irony (to complement the kitsch) is that if this vision of multipolarity became dominant, Germany wouldn’t even end up being a pole or part of a pole in the international system. The multipolar vision runs so counter to that of its EU and European NATO partners—save Hungary, Slovakia and possibly soon Austria—that it is hard to imagine Europe as anything like a pole in this system. Potentially, without such a unified European pole, Germany itself would be exposed as a lesser actor in the international system, beholden to the whims of the great powers it helped elevate. To imagine that Germany can simply determine the direction Europe will take, again despite all evidence to the contrary, is the result of self-delusion and hubris. It is not encouraging that the putative next German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has started using the concept in position papers as well as in speeches, though in the latter case, he seems to be confused about the term’s meaning, describing Russia and China as working against the “multipolar order”, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Multipolarity has also caught on with a leading representative of the recently inaugurated Trump administration. It has been used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a much-discussed speech, in which he proposed a world of several great powers, each with their own sphere of influence, as the historical norm. This has been interpreted as being in line with the Vice President J. D. Vance’s proposal to essentially retreat from U.S. hegemony made at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, the theme of which tellingly was “multipolarization”, a more cautious approach to the same general concern, while International Relations scholars pointed out the dissonance between Rubio’s interpretation and the established concept in academic literature.

What is worrying here is the possibility that the U.S., in contrast to other actors discussed here, could bring about actual multipolarity—by withdrawing from international engagement, disregarding its alliances, supporting the great power claims of rogue actors such as Russia, or even by destroying its own power potential through the implementation of hardcore anti-state ideologies. In that increasingly plausible scenario, however, Europe would still be far from constituting a pole for itself in the emerging great power competition—it would need to work very hard to establish the capabilities necessary to deter authoritarian threats. An analysis based on the concept of multipolarity described here would probably ignore that necessity, considering Europe as already a member of the great power club.

In any case, for German foreign policy, ‘multipolarity’ as discussed here offers nothing but the prospect of German decline by resisting the real change that is needed, applying sticking plasters to the country’s open wounds rather than addressing them in a sustainable fashion, and couching all that in the comfort of seeming inevitability. This version of multipolarity is a dangerous racket that portends Germany’s isolation from democratic partners and allies. That cannot be dismissed as a mere academic quibble or just a lack of strategy—it represents a lack of strategic culture that must be addressed.

Dr. Jochen Kleinschmidt is a Lecturer and Research Associate with the Chair of International Politics at TU Dresden. This text represents the views of the author alone, not those of the Democratic Strategy Initiative e.V. or any other institution.