Europe, once again at a moment of crisis, faces the quandary of how to deal with German power. The German Question is back.

It has existed, in different forms, since 1945, that moment of complete self-annihilation the Germans call “Stunde Null”, or “zero hour”. How to rebuild the country while keeping it under American tutelage? How to ensure it remained a political pygmy even when it had grown from the ruins to become an economic titan? Whether to reunite it, and how to do so within the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union? How to take the “Sonderweg” special path or integrate Germany so completely in Europe that it would never again be tempted to stray down some wayward path?

By the early 21st century, these issues had been resolved. The United States had helped fashion the German Federal Republic and underwritten its security. The European Union had defused Franco-German enmity, Europe’s perennial scourge; a tacit understanding gave France political primacy even if Germany had the economic muscle.

German unification had been achieved without German neutrality at a moment of Russian weakness and American deftness. A common currency, the euro, had been introduced that obliged Germany to give up the Deutschmark, a revered symbol of recovery, and bound the country’s fortunes irrevocably to the rest of Europe. A united Germany, anchored in the West, its borders undisputed, existed within a Europe whole and free.

The heavy lifting was done. America could lay down its European burden. If a French intellectual had observed in Cold War days that he liked Germany so much he was glad there were two of them, now, slowly, Europeans were getting used to one of them.

But the euro was a poisoned chalice. Conceived to bind Germany to Europe, it instead bound far-weaker European countries to Germany, in what for some, notably Greece, proved an unsustainable straitjacket. It turbo-charged German economic dominance as Berlin’s export machine went to work. It wed countries of far laxer and more flexible Mediterranean culture to German diktats of discipline, predictability and austerity. It produced growing pressure to surrender sovereignty — for a currency union without political union is problematic — and this yielding was inevitably to German power.

RESENTMENT ACROSS THE EUROZONE

Two other developments thrust Germany into the very leadership role its history has taught it to mistrust. France grew weaker. Charles de Gaulles’ all-powerful presidency became an indifferent sort of office presiding over a country of sullen introspection. No fig leaf could disguise that the Franco-German partnership was no longer one of equals. Europe, perhaps to Henry Kissinger’s belated satisfaction, had a phone number — in Ms Angela Merkel’s office.

The second development was that the US decided it was time to leave Europe to the Europeans. In a matter of war and peace — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his stirring up of a small war in eastern Ukraine — Washington is not even a party to the Minsk accords that constitute an attempt to clear up the mess.

Germany, of course, is. How times have changed.

Precisely the thing that Germans were most uneasy about, and their neighbours, too, has now occurred. Germany dominates Europe to a degree unimaginable even 15 years ago. When I lived in Berlin around the turn of the century, Germans were still debating whether they could ever be a “normal” country and whether they could ever feel “proud”. Now such rumination just seems quaint. Germany has decided it has no choice but to assume its power.

It wants to use it well. But its domination is stirring resentment, on a massive scale in Greece, where flip references to the Nazis are common; in France, where the feeling has grown that German severity with an already humiliated Greece is overblown; in Italy, where German-imposed austerity is resented; and in other countries of high unemployment and economic stagnation, where old anger towards Germany has not been entirely effaced by the passage of seven decades.

In Britain, the case for staying in the EU has been complicated by the fact that, as a non-euro country, it will never be part of the inner sanctum of power, the German-dominated eurozone. Anti-European British politicians, not to mention the powerful anti-European Murdoch press, find plenty of fodder with this theme.

Yes, the German Question is back. Is German domination compatible with further European integration or will it prove a fracturing force?

Ms Merkel has tried to tread a fine line between the rage at Greece within her centre-right party and her determination to hold the euro — and Europe — together.

She has resisted the many German voices saying: “To heck with Greece. Enough!” But, overall, notwithstanding the provisional Greek bailout deal reached after marathon negotiations, she had erred on the side of rigidity, austerity and responsibility lessons.

German methods are good for Germans. But if Berlin now wants all Europeans to follow those methods, the Europe that offered post-war Germany a path to salvation will break apart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Roger Cohen is a columnist at The New York Times, where he was previously foreign editor