Introduction

‘Maritime security is the foundation of our prosperity’ said Chancellor Scholz, highlighting a key dimension of what he deemed the ‘Zeitenwende’, Germany’s rough awakening to the realities of aggressive systemic rivalry and global great-power competition triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022. The fact that a Chancellor expressed the strategic importance of the sea this clearly, demonstrates a significant evolution in strategic and maritime culture and thought in Germany, in the course of the more than three decades since 1990. Linking maritime security and national interests so prominently would have been uncommon at a top political level when Germany emerged from the Cold War as a reaunified country. In parallel to the rise of the commercial significance of the sea, Germany moved from having been more or less gently ‘nudged’ by its allies to use the navy in the 1990s, to appreciating its utility in demonstrating solidarity after 9/11, and subsequently employing warships with greater initiative and according to certain discernible patterns in cases the federal government deemed this beneficial to its interests.