Pacifism Changes Sides

by Matthias Döpfner

This essay first appeared in Die Welt on November 28, 2025, and is translated here by permission of the author. Translation and notes by Russell A. Berman.

The self-proclaimed angels of peace are now on the right—as the debate surrounding the war in Ukraine demonstrates. But if the West truly submits to Putin’s aggression, then the open society will have failed.

For decades, pacifism was primarily a left-wing project. The Green Party was largely founded on pacifist principles. The hippie movement during the Vietnam War propagated the idea just as passionately as the anti-nuclear power movement and the Easter marches. And from the first international peace congress in 1848 to Bertha von Suttner’s pacifist novel manifesto Lay Down Your Arms! (1889) to the platform of the Left Party, it was always primarily communists, socialists, or social democrats who embraced this seemingly attractive idea.

For some time now, however, pacifism seems to have switched sides.

While the German Greens have become some of the most ardent hawks, doves are suddenly appearing, especially in the conservative or far-right camps. Increasingly, one hears from the American or Hungarian governments, other right-wing populist parties in Europe, and not least the AfD, statements that one would have more readily attributed to John Lennon, Heinrich Böll, or Rudi Dutschke.

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