The New Old Berlin

Legal Nihilism and Cynical Opportunism

“German postwar history is over. [And] it has all been in vain.” That was the response of a German political scientist and historian living in Switzerland to chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent declaration that he is all for international law, just not when it’s in the way of what is, in reality though not in Merz’s fantasy world, the textbook-case war of aggression against Iran.

The expression of desperate exasperation was richly deserved. Factually misleading his national audience, Germany’s leader also clearly implied that the attack on Iran could be justified as a necessary form of prevention and argued – probably reflecting a residual awareness that preventive war is, actually, prohibited – that Iran had not observed international law. He then offered a short, demagogic, and breathtakingly unsound theory: International law “meets its limits,” he argued, when the opponent does not comply with it. As in: If they don’t play by the rules, we don’t have to do so either.

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