ABSTRACT
Germany’s continuous cooperation with Russia on the Nordstream project, despite the Ukrainian gas crises and the outbreak of the Ukrainian–Russian war in 2014, its accelerated nuclear phase-out in the aftermath of Fukushima without consulting domestic big energy businesses, or the multi-layered dynamic of the ambitious project “Energiewende” are at times hard to fully comprehend. This chapter unpacks the wider dynamics of German energy policy by scrutinizing energy security logics that drive it in the specific historical, political and socioeconomic context. In the process it becomes clear that, as opposed to the states in the CEE region, German pipeline politics is dominated by the subsistence logic, that making a U-turn policy decision in the aftermath of Fukushima was driven by a strong prevention imperative rooted in a number of contextual factors, and that the ambitious German energy transition implies much more than the decentralization of the energy system and shift to renewables. Namely, the latter is marked by an emerging distinct energy security logic of emancipation that implies regaining control over energy affairs by local actors, the rhetoric of social empowerment and liberation, and a changed approach to energy security that starts to be perceived in more inclusive and humanistic terms.
