‘Don’t mention the war’ even when economic chaos looms
“Don’t mention the war.” It is one of those well worn clichés, a gentle dig ostensibly designed to spare Germans embarrassment while doing the exact opposite. But when Germans themselves start mentioning the war everyone in the neighborhood gets nervous.
In a week in which the euro debt crisis turned dangerously political Angela Merkel talked war in the Bundestag. “If the euro fails, Europe fails”, the trained physicist expounded with scientific bluntness. “It is our historical obligation to protect by all means Europe’s unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and bloodshed.”
After summoning the ghosts of history, the controversial vote passed in the Bundestag and Angela had just raised the rhetorical stakes by several unnecessary notches.
It’s a bit a like a pilot, who has trouble with the landing gear telling passengers that if it can’t be fixed we will all probably crash and die. Too much information. No need to go there, Angela. And yet I can see why she went “nuclear”.
War is the emotional trump card in German politics. It did the trick in parliament. The avoidance of future conflict was after all the original reason for embarking on an “ever closer” European union in the ashes of World War Two.
The need to tie a unified Germany into an increasingly unified Europe was invoked by the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl as a reason for giving up the cherished Deutschmark for the untested euro.
But mentioning the war in the current climate doesn’t exactly help. The Daily Mail inevitably ran a piece imaging Europe’s splintered nations at each other’s throats a decade from now. Alarm bells rang in a dozen different languages.
Perhaps Frau Merkel, as an Eastern German, was not brought up with the same sensitivity towards the term “war” as her Western German counterparts. West Germans were raised on a diet of collective guilt, prompting a whole culture of soul searching in schools, in the media, in politics.
East German propaganda spinned that Communism exonerated those Germans lucky enough to live on the Eastern side of the Wall from the national crime of Nazism. The word war tripped off the tongue more easily. I digress.
Europe’s immediate problem is financial. The funds are there to solve it. It is about making the Heath Robinson contraption of the eurozone work when you have a single currency but vastly diverging economies and cultures.
On one hand dismantling the euro is a bit like putting the toothpaste back in the tube. On the other many politicians in Paris or Berlin may feel that this crisis is the ideal opportunity for lunging towards a fully fledged fiscal union and embarking on the next phase of a Federal Europe.
In the current climate of fear and loathing that would very unwise. If anything the last week has reminded everyone just how local European politics has become.
When was the last time people in Beijing and Washington were glued to their TVs to find out how the Bundestag would vote, what the Northern League would do to torpedo the Italian coalition government and how youths in Athens would react to the cancellation of a referendum? It’s enough to make your head spin.
No wonder the Chinese are reluctant to crack their nest egg to prop up the euro.
If and when this storm has passed, Europe probably needs to go back to the drawing board and figure out what exactly it wants from “the unification process”, as the German Chancellor called it and whether the undoubted benefits of a single currency outweigh the now obvious risks. Until then please don’t mention the war.