LONDON — There is at least one European export sector that continues to find a ready market around the world — weapons.
In the week in which the European Union received the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, protestors in the Norwegian capital were not alone in pointing out the irony that its member states account for a third of global arms exports.
It is an irony that has a particular resonance in Germany right now, where the government’s decisions on a series of weapons deals have created unease among parliamentarians who complain they were kept in the dark.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was among the European leaders in Oslo for Monday’s Nobel award ceremony, has been described as the architect of a new doctrine to boost the country’s weapon sales.
“Germany used to be extremely careful about where it exported its weapons,” wrote Der Spiegel, the German magazine, which has been at the forefront of revelations about Berlin’s weapons policy. “In recent years, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown a preference for sending high-tech armaments abroad rather than German soldiers — even if that means doing business with questionable regimes.”
Legislators and German media have seized on the magazine’s reporting of a secretive federal security committee, chaired by Ms. Merkel, allegedly involved in discussions of high-tech arms sales to countries that include Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.
The latest is the possible sale of state-of-the-art Boxer armored vehicles to the Saudi Royal Guard, which is responsible for protecting the royal family.
Berlin has already approved the sale of up to 270 Leopard 2 tanks to the kingdom in a deal that provoked a fierce debate in Germany.
“Merkel wants to bolster countries that — at least from the German point of view — can provide for stability in their regions,” according to Der Spiegel, which warned it was a risky policy.
But the argument for boosting German weapons exports is economic as much as it is strategic.
“At the end of the day, it’s elementary budgeting,” according to Ben Knight of Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster.
“Germany, along with most European countries, is in the middle of making drastic cuts in order to bring down its national debt,” he wrote last week. “So instead of costly military operations in the world’s many conflict zones, it has apparently decided to sell more weapons to ‘partner countries’ in those regions. What was once hefty expenditure suddenly becomes vast revenue.”
The so-called Merkel Doctrine has prompted an inevitable backlash from peace advocates and others concerned that German weapons could be used to suppress civil unrest.
Jürgen Grässlin, spokesman for a campaign that opposes arms exports, told Deutsche Welle, “The German government is essentially abetting mass murder in various conflict zones in the world.”
Legislators have also expressed concern that potentially far-reaching decisions are being taken by an inner circle of government without the benefit of parliamentary oversight.
In its latest report on what it described as the secret weapons deals, Der Spiegel this week quoted Markus Löning, the government’s human rights commissioner, as saying, “Citizens have a justified interest in being informed earlier on about arms sales.”
Germany is not alone, of course, in wanting to maximize its weapons sales.
Mark Bromley, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told Deutsche Welle, “A number of countries in western Europe are seeing declines in defense spending, which is having an impact on both defense acquisitions and production.”
“In an attempt to counter that, several governments — including Germany’s — are getting more focused on the promotion of arms exports to regions where budgets haven’t been cut, including parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America.”
As my colleague Judy Dempsey wrote from Berlin earlier this year, not all these markets are in stable, conflict-free, democratic countries.
“This raises the question,” she wrote, “of how Europe can square its commitment to defending human rights with selling weapons to such countries.”
