The Shifted Horizon
Two hundred and twenty years separate Jena from the Swedish signing with Naval Group. Two hundred and twenty years during which France and Germany hated each other, reconciled, married on paper, then slowly drifted apart — without any of the seven installments preceding this one ever naming, in a single word, the cause running through the entire second half of the twentieth century up to this final week of August 2026: the renunciation of May 1963.

One should not be mistaken, however: this renunciation is no German fatality. Sweden, during the same period, made the opposite choice — building, alone, the autonomy Bonn refused to pursue. And Poland, as early as 1938, illustrated a third path, more dangerous still: the myopia of one who exploits a weakened neighbor without seeing that it will, the following year, be next on the list.

And yet, in this same month of August 2026, a first crack deserves to be noted for what it is: a German chancellor publicly calling his country’s exit from civilian nuclear power a grave strategic error. This is little, measured against sixty years of renunciation. But it is the first admission, coming from Berlin itself, that the problem is not merely a lack of resources — Germany now has these in abundance — but the older absence of a doctrine that the 1963 preamble had made almost unthinkable to formulate.

Should Germany one day come to understand that it still lives on this founding renunciation — not as a verdict, but as a diagnosis it now has the means to overcome — then this eighth installment will not only have closed two centuries of history. It will have addressed to today’s Germany what de Gaulle already addressed to its youth in 1962: the sincere recognition of a great people, and the equally sincere demand that it finally assume itself as such.