With the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis in 2009, Germany came back centre stage in European politics, and continued to play a central role in the 2010s, for example through its initially leading role in the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16. Overall, therefore, the 2010s clearly saw the increased political weight of Berlin in Europe, sparking debates about what kind of power Germany had become. Several of those debates were explicitly framed around the notion of ‘reluctance’: for example, Paterson (2011) famously argued that Germany was a ‘reluctant hegemon’ in Europe, and The Economist took over this notion on one of its covers in 2013, calling for a more active engagement of Germany in Europe, arguing that ‘Germany's current footdragging poses larger dangers’ (The Economist, 2013).

The notion of reluctance was often used with reference to Germany's unwillingness to engage militarily (Maull, 2000a: 57; Breuer, 2006: 211; Dyson, 2011: 244). Moreover, several authors depicted the German government as indecisive and erratic in its foreign policy, highlighting that, particularly during the Eurozone crisis, ‘Leadership from Berlin has been hesitant’ and plagued by a ‘capacity-expectations gap’ (Bulmer, 2014: 1245). Quite the opposite of these assessments, a range of other observers maintained that Germany was not ‘reluctant’ at all. The more apologetic ones argued that German policies actually reflected a careful approach to policy making (Münkler, 2015: 162), and that Germany had a long tradition of quiet, lowkey leadership and engagement in European affairs and global governance (see, for example, Mützenich, 2015: 276–7). Critical observers argued instead that Germany was only ostensibly hesitant since it consistently pursued its policy of austerity throughout the Eurozone crisis, imposing its will on the rest of Europe (Beck, 2012). This assessment reflected a more general criticism of German policies coming from Anglo-Saxon economists and Southern European publics and politicians (Spiegel Online International, 2015), and a widespread uneasiness about a revival of German power and assertiveness related to fears of a re-emergence of the ‘German question’ in geo-economic and geo-political terms (Kundnani, 2014; Hellmann, 2016; Fix, 2018).

Similar discussions about indecisiveness and muddling through in German foreign policy characterized the months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Dempsey, 2022a; The Economist, 2022).