Weimar Triangle summit: 1991 vs. 2023

In a remarkable shift in opinion, the overwhelming majority of French people, opinion leaders and statesmen lost attraction to Putin’s Russia and started to express solidarity with Ukraine and its struggle for survival.

French military aid to Ukraine included air defense and artillery as well as light armored vehicles (used mainly to transport infantry) and portable heat-seeking missiles (used mainly against helicopters).

President Macron made headlines for the so-called Weimar Triangle summit of French, German and Polish premiers in Paris on Monday, June 12. He hosted and championed the summit. He also made most prominent remarks among the three leaders. Macron’s promising focus on Germany and Poland will compensate for his lack of cordial relations with Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni who is irritated by Macron’s ambitions, liberal views and his stance on illegal migrants.

The three-country meeting got its name from the German town where it was held for the first time in 1991 right after the failed coup d’état in the Soviet Union. It discussed the collapse of the USSR and the path to democracy in all of Europe.

Since then, these were mostly minister-level officials of three countries that were meeting something like once a year but with no regularity. Tensions between these three countries prevented the Weimar Triangle from becoming a prominent venue.

In the past, France and Germany had a major disagreement over energy and climate. Germany put its bets on wind and Russian gas, and decommissioned nuclear power plants. France, on the other hand, sticked to nuclear power as its main source of energy.

Less fundamental yet harder to swallow has been the animosity between Macron, a proponent of Liberal in power since 2017, and the Polish conservative government that consolidated power since 2015 (with the fall of the Liberals from the Civic Platform party).

Just like in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the Weimar Triangle summit of 2023

• renewed the vows of the leaders of the three prominent European nations to democracy and to fighting authoritarianism,
• gave Ukraine a path to the NATO membership as a way to preserve democracy that struggles with the belligerent authoritarianism, and possibly,
• the downfall of Putin’s regime.

While the third bullet has not featured in the official statements, the analogy to the first Weimar Triangle summit of 1991 and the forces that draw the three European nations together suggest that it has been in the air.

This summit is an opportunity to reverse the bad reputation of the town of Weimar for the Weimar Republic, a failed attempt to make democracy work. Officially known as the German Reich, the Weimar Republic existed as a democracy in 1918 to 1933 but at the end, it is remembered as the system that gave power to Hitler.