WORLDVIEW:Some say a German Europe better describes the state's thinking than a Europeanised Germany, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
IS IT Angela Schroder, Angela Schmidt – or Angela von Bismarck? Maggie Merkel or George W Merkel? It is certainly not Angela Kohl.
This is one way to describe the heated contemporary debate on where Germany’s European policy is going under Angela Merkel’s leadership. She is now 10 years as leader of the German Christian Democrats, having replaced Helmut Kohl in 2000, and has been chancellor for five years. Kohl is 80 this year. And the Federal Republic marked its own 60th birthday in 2009.
These anniversaries provide an opportunity to examine whether Germany is becoming a “normal” European state once again. Is it now driven as before by its own national interests rather than the Europeanised and transatlantic ones which enabled it first to re-establish itself after the war from the 1950s to the 1980s within the EEC and Nato, then to deepen its European engagement under Kohl from the mid-1980s to deal with German unification and gradual EU enlargement?
The “Berlin Republic” is certainly different from Bonn’s Rhineland version. Prominent commentators believe the current euro zone crisis over Greece is the tipping point for the final transition to a third post-war period in which a German Europe will better describe its policies than a Europeanised Germany. Others say Merkel’s tougher line is not a historic shift at all, but the expression of a longer trend under a new generation towards a more conditional or contingent willingness to fund and support deeper European integration. Because of Germany’s central role, it is important to get this judgment right. But because of its modern history, “normality” may be deeply problematic.
Germany forcefully denies any “bailout” for Greece, and insists special EU loans should be at current market rates and that it must make its own economic corrections. In that case, why should the Greeks bother to seek a special EU deal? Beyond the short term, they may not be able to meet the loan conditions unless they are developed into a more sustainable arrangement capable of helping other peripheral euro zone members.
German policy is driven by its own changing macroeconomic interests and by a public opinion increasingly hostile to any such solidarity. The euro zone was designed in the 1990s under German influence without a fiscal capacity to deal with such crises, and with strict limits on state indebtedness and deficits. Simultaneously, Germany bore the cost of its reunification. EU economic and political union was the trade-off insisted on by France.
Gradually, German wage levels and standards of living were then driven down by labour market reforms, enabling it to become cheaper than its competitors. EU enlargement gave it a geopolitical buffer against Russia and huge new markets for its manufactured goods and finance capital, in addition to those already established in the Mediterranean – and in Ireland.
So Germany now bestrides the European economy, but it resists correcting the resulting imbalances of demand throughout the euro zone.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Timesadds that this violation of the central principle of universalisability, put forward by Germany's greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was compensated for by a Spanish (and Irish) property bubble in antithesis, as Hegel might have put it. The overall synthesis is a euro zone fiscal disaster.
Such is the macro-economic case for a continuing Europeanised Germany.
The political case has to do with maintaining the EU’s capacity to add supranational governance to the 500 million population already within its remit, and the further 250 million in its near abroad. The creation and deepening of this historically benign security and political community has depended crucially on Germany’s ability to acknowledge these benefits by contributing actively towards maintaining them.
Critics like the German sociologist Ulrich Beck and former foreign minister Joschka Fischer say this is being abandoned by Merkel.
For Beck, it is definitely
George W Merkel, who used the euro zone crisis to assert unilateral German interests just as Bush used the 9/11 crisis to launch his wars on terrorism and Iraq. It is a retrograde step, risking the cosmopolitan achievements of Germany’s post-war history.
Fischer says it is not sufficient for a new governing generation to say that like the other European states, Germany should look after its own interests. Germany, he says, is not like the others. Bismarck is the last figure to invoke, notwithstanding his popularity in the Bildtabloid, which welcomes the end of Germany's paymaster role and runs polls showing four out of five Germans do not want to aid Greece. That influences Merkel's attitude to forthcoming regional elections which threaten her majority.
But that is normal everyday politics, insists the political scientist Werner Weidenfeld. “This isn’t about departing from traditional German policy, but making sure the Greek model doesn’t become a magnet for others. Merkel hasn’t communicated things properly.”
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