{"id":337927,"date":"2025-08-12T08:03:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T08:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/337927\/"},"modified":"2025-08-12T08:03:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T08:03:10","slug":"germanys-staatsrason-undermining-schengen-elevating-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/337927\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany’s ‘Staatsr\u00e4son’ – undermining Schengen, elevating Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Permanent border controls are illegal under Schengen rules<\/a>, which govern much of Europe. As a workaround, participating countries can apply for an \u201cexception\u201d by justifying a need to impose temporary ones.<\/p>\n

Though these \u201cexceptions\u201d are supposed to be a ‘last resort’, the European Commission has normalised granting them. Still, since they are time-limited, both the commission and member states can claim the exceptions fall within the law.<\/p>\n

Thus, Schengen is preserved in principle even as it is hollowed out in practice \u2014 one temporary exception at a time, and renewable to confront supposed threats that, conveniently, rarely have a specified end.<\/p>\n

Germany is one of 10 Schengen zone countries with so-called temporary border controls in place. Given its size, the number of borders it shares, and its location in Europe \u2014 not to mention its history with checkpoints and expulsion \u2014 the EU\u2019s largest member does more damage than others to one of the bloc\u2019s most fundamental norms.<\/p>\n

German officialdom, however, has shown itself not only unbothered by, but openly celebrating its drip-drip dismantling of rule of law. Of late, it can\u2019t even muster the decency to pretend it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

In a recent Instagram post<\/a>, the Christian Democratic Union, which governs the country with the Social Democrats in tow, celebrated Germany\u2019s \u201cintroduction of permanent border controls\u201d (emphasis added) as a means of enforcing \u201claw and order.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blatant admission fazed no one. <\/p>\n

Neither the German interior ministry, controlled by the CDU\u2019s Bavarian counterpart, the CSU, nor the EU Commission responded to a request for comment. A CDU reply arrived by way of doublespeak generator, with a party spokesperson explaining that Germany\u2019s border controls couldn\u2019t be permanent because officials have said they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Guess the CDU social media team didn\u2019t get the message.<\/p>\n

The obfuscations are not only annoying politics as usual; they are dangerous. <\/p>\n

If Schengen is the law, then implementing \u201cpermanent\u201d controls does not enforce \u201claw and order,\u201d as the CDU claims; it undermines them. <\/a><\/p>\n

Without technically breaking the law<\/a>, these quasi-legal antics make the law increasingly optional, and its application arbitrary. The exception \u2014 even if officially \u201ctemporary\u201d \u2014 starts to look more like the norm.<\/p>\n

A red flag from German history<\/p>\n

States of exception, who gets to decide what they are and when they apply, should raise a big red flag. <\/p>\n

Carl Schmitt, the German jurist who belonged to the NSDAP, is most infamously connected<\/a> with the concept, which was instrumental in giving the Nazis the jurisprudential legitimacy to pervert Weimar Germany\u2019s constitutional order.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this sense, the Nazis rarely broke the law. <\/p>\n

They went around it, suspended it, or redefined what \u201clegal\u201d meant. That\u2019s why some Nazis argued, in subsequent war crimes trials, that they may have been morally culpable of atrocities but not legally accountable.<\/p>\n

International law was the answer to that cynical logic, but it\u2019s still up to states to enforce it. Yet thanks to the politics of permacrisis, which the EU seems trapped<\/a> in, an ongoing threat can justify almost any deviation from the legal norm.<\/p>\n

As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued, liberal democracies have been ruled by exception \u2014 that is, structures outside the law \u2014 for a long time<\/a>. Schengen is just one prominent example. Suspending deficit rules<\/a> explicitly for national military spending is another.<\/p>\n

Germany and Israel<\/p>\n

But the biggest state of exception is Israel \u2014 and Europe\u2019s near pathological denial of the egregious crimes committed against Palestine long before, and with exponential ferocity and intent since 7 October.<\/p>\n

Germany, whose performative memory culture<\/a> makes it unfit to credibly weigh in on the issue, leads the way on this exception.<\/p>\n

The Germans call this exception by their own neologism: Staatsr\u00e4son. Elsewhere, it\u2019s known better as raison d\u2019etat or the national interest.<\/p>\n

By definition<\/a>, Staatsr\u00e4son is incompatible with constitutional law or democratic norms. <\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s own Federal Agency for Civic Education describes<\/a> it as an \u201cabsolutist or authoritarian principle\u201d that \u201cjustifies the use of all means, regardless of morality or law\u201d to preserve state power.<\/p>\n

If Germany’s Staatsr\u00e4son is the protection of Israel<\/a>, as it is and \u00fcber alles, then Germany can only subjugate itself to Israeli state prerogatives. Paradoxically, it also forces Israel into Germany\u2019s service \u2014 a different kind of \u201cdirty work,\u201d<\/a> absolving it of crimes that Israel is in no position to forgive.<\/p>\n

Such a dynamic carries more than a whiff of colonial subjectification and antisemitic implications.<\/p>\n

Since former chancellor Angela Merkel popularised the term<\/a>, in an address before Israel\u2019s parliament in 2008, Staatsr\u00e4son has helped normalise increasingly violent expressions of state power in both countries.<\/p>\n

It gave rise to the Bundestag\u2019s 2019 resolution<\/a> condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which as a nonbinding expression of the legislature has become another kind of exception. <\/p>\n

Despite its lack of legal significance, Germany\u2019s domestic intelligence agency leaned on it to classify<\/a> BDS and other activist groups, including Jewish ones, as \u201cextremist threats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to Staatsr\u00e4son, German state and federal authorities have been able to squeeze<\/a> legally protected artistic and cultural expression, shut down<\/a> events, issue<\/a> travel bans, deport<\/a> EU citizens, ratchet up<\/a> police brutality, and implement<\/a> Israel loyalty oaths as a precondition for German citizenship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even when officials ultimately back off<\/a>, or get rebuked by domestic courts<\/a> or European oversight<\/a>, the damage \u2014 to lives, livelihoods, and the democratic system as a whole \u2014 is already done.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It also trickles up and out, rippling across EU institutions. <\/p>\n

The German conservative at the top of the commission is cut from the same cloth; it\u2019s no accident that the bloc\u2019s first anti-antisemitism coordinator<\/a> is, too. <\/p>\n

Germany is a leading obstacle<\/a> to EU action against Israel, putting it in much the same category as Hungary when it comes to confronting Russia.<\/p>\n

German officialdom defends its Staatsr\u00e4son as a recognition of its \u201chistorical responsibility.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yet employing one state of exception in response to the crimes that emerged from another is more likely to replicate those authoritarian effects than compensate for them.<\/p>\n

This year, we turn 25 and are looking for 2,500 new supporting members to take their stake in EU democracy.\u00a0<\/strong><\/b>A functioning EU relies on a well-informed public \u2013 you.<\/strong><\/b><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n