The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is one of Germany’s most conservative and respected newspapers. So it makes perfect sense that the country’s interior minister and ally of chancellor Angela Merkel, Thomas de Maiziere, chose the paper to make a rather bold suggestion last week. In light of rising extremist attacks across Europe, including an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 12 people in December, Mr de Maiziere argued in a column that Germany had to reconsider the structure of its internal intelligence and security services.
While it might seem like an innocuous or even mundane suggestion for an interior minister to demand a reorganisation of security services in the aftermath of a terror attack, the claim has started a rigorous and far-reaching debate about combating extremism in one of Europe’s most powerful countries. Since the end of the Second World War, power has been deliberately decentralised in Germany. The Allied forces that occupied the country after the war decentralised the power of the federal government to prevent the rise of another fascist leader.
Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the issue of centralised power has been raised several times in parliament, and each time it has sparked a spirited debate. The German federal government still lacks authority to have its own centralised domestic intelligence agency. Instead, each of Germany’s 16 states has its own intelligence services and sharing information has proven to be difficult.
In light of the mutating threat of extremist attacks, Mr de Maiziere has argued that Germany needs one centralised bureau that can manage threats in real time. This argument is not unique to the Germans, but the way they debate the issue is important for us all to learn from. Germany has long had rigorous debates about the nature of governance and the balancing of individual rights. The conclusions that the German people reach along with their compromises will have effects on all countries grappling with extremist threats and the issue of good governance.
