By Christopher Caldwell
Last week Germany reclaimed its status as the leading power in Europe. In
the two years since it became apparent that Greece was, essentially, bankrupt,
there have been dozens of emergency meetings of the countries that use the
common European currency, the euro. Most of the euro-using states believe that
Germany—with a booming industrial economy, vast trade surpluses, a reputation
for fiscal probity, and a history that makes it reluctant to reject the counsel
of France—ought to cover the bill. Germany has long argued that Greece must
become competitive again by selling off state assets and cutting government
handouts. More recently, Germany has added another demand—that EU authorities
be empowered to discipline Greece and other delinquent countries. At the Brussels
summit on January 30, the Germans won.
Germany is fortunate to have, in the moment of its triumph, a chancellor who does not scare people. Angela Merkel is an East German intellectual, a physical chemist, the childless daughter of a clergyman. She mumbles. Her taste in clothing runs to pantsuits. She isn’t brawny and forceful like her Christian Democrat mentor Helmut Kohl, who presided over the reunification of Germany at the end of the Cold War. She isn’t eloquent and haughty, or tempestuous and randy, like her Social Democratic predecessors Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder, respectively. “This lack of a presidential demeanor is a big advantage,” says longtime Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber, whom Merkel replaced as party leader. Germany’s economy naturally provides it with a leadership role, but its history means that that role is something Germany cannot be seen to claim. “Neither personally nor politically does she come off as wanting to blow her own horn, along the lines of ‘I am the leader of Europe.’ ”
By “Europe” Stoiber means the 27 countries that make up the European Union.
The EU was launched in the wake of the Second World War as a way to organize
Europe through economics, not war. This is a polite way of saying it was meant
to keep Germany from dominating Europe with its army. A decade ago, the EU
acquired a common money, the euro, which replaced the franc, the lira, the
peseta, and the super-strong deutsche mark. The new monetary regime was meant
to keep Germany from dominating the continent with its currency.
But the euro has backfired. In 1990 British trade secretary Nicholas Ridley
was forced to resign for calling the EU “a German racket designed to take over
the whole of Europe.” Ridley was quite wrong about Germany’s intentions, but he
was right about the result. Joining Germany in a currency union meant playing
by its rules. In fact, so big and rich is Germany—particularly now that
reunification has brought its population to 80 million—that joining it in
anything means playing by its rules. This is not Germany’s fault. It is the
classic “German problem” that has confronted Europe for the whole modern era.
It was camouflaged for six decades only by Germany’s reluctance to express any
wishes whatsoever.
As long as Germany wasn’t complaining, others could make free with
Germany’s credit card. Once in the euro, Greece, Italy, Spain, and other
countries that bankers used to consider reckless or unstable could borrow at
the same rates. (The treaties that bound all these dissimilar countries
together stipulated that there would be no bailouts for those who borrowed too
much, but bankers obviously didn’t believe that.) A boom in lending pushed up
wages and prices in those “peripheral” countries, rendering them uncompetitive.
After the financial crisis of 2008, the countries that had overborrowed were
saddled with more debt than they could comfortably repay. The eurozone’s
Mediterranean members have come to think that Germany ought to rescue them. But
the Germany to which they are addressing their petitions is not the penitent,
diffident, and easily browbeaten land that they came to know over the last
three generations. Germany has its own ideas about economics and morality, and
it is ready to insist that its weaker neighbors adhere to them.
On Your Mark
Those ideas are idiosyncratic. Germans never made their peace with
twenty-first-century consumerism in the way other Westerners did. Their
attitudes about money combine punctiliousness and distrust. Any business
traveler who has ever asked for a receipt in Germany will have been astonished
by the elaborate ritual of writing out a Quittung: You buy a
newspaper for a few coins. The shop-owner retreats into a back room, emerges
with stationery, writes a description of the transaction in elegant longhand,
saves a carbon duplicate, stamps or embosses the paper, staples or clips the
cash-register receipt to it, folds it, and slides it into an envelope for
you.
Credit is frowned on. There are quite elegant restaurants that don’t take
credit cards, and installment buying in general has been slow to take hold.
Walmart tried to expand into Germany in recent years but had to close all 85 of
its stores in 2006. Germans didn’t take to the faux-smiley demeanor of
Walmart’s employees, and the company found it hard to keep prices low while
complying with national labor laws. The car loan market is underdeveloped. Home
equity loans are practically unknown. That is one reason why Germany had no
mortgage bubble of the sort that upended so many Western economies over the
last decade. Another is that Germany does not really have an investment banking
sector as we would understand it.
Germans usually explain their eccentricities about credit by referring to
the hyperinflation with which their leaders tried to mitigate the burden of
reparations from World War I. Germany’s treasury printed so much money that, in
1923, prices were quoted in the trillions of marks, shoppers pushed their
shopping money around in wheelbarrows, and restaurant menus were edited hourly.
That inflation, and the austerity required to purge it, may have played a role
in the rise of Hitler. Germans associate their emergence from the rubble of
World War II, by contrast, with the deutsche mark, the currency set up under
American military rule, and the Bundesbank, the conservative, incorruptible,
and coldly competent institution established to preserve its value. Bundesbank
presidents were revered figures, more often than not at loggerheads with the
elected chancellors they served. And they cast their shadow over German
democratic politics, according to Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, foreign editor of
theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “You don’t advance your electoral
prospects by loosening the tap of monetary policy,” Frankenberger said this
fall.
The German public was dragged into the euro reluctantly and would never
have consented to it had they been consulted. “The euro has always been the
‘Golden Calf,’ so to speak,” says Barclays’s economist Thorsten Polleit. “It
was forced upon Germans.” There is still a lot of debate about how it
was forced upon Germans. The most common explanation is that French president
François Mitterrand insisted on the euro as a condition of Germany’s
reunification. A number of Germany’s top politicians and economists assured
citizens that the new currency would hold prices stable. That turned out to be
right. They also promised that this would not mean sharing wealth and bailing
out laggards. That turned out to be wrong—and perhaps catastrophically,
apocalyptically wrong. In the late nineties, “many chief economists did a lot
of client presentations where they told people the euro would be as stable as
the German mark,” says Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank. “I am quite
happy I was young enough not to have had to do this.”
In Berlin, Germany’s political capital, one can still occasionally hear the
argument that Germany is the “main beneficiary of the euro.” It is an
export-dependent economy, after all. Without the euro, Germany’s money would
appreciate against that of its neighbors. Those neighbors would therefore buy
fewer German goods. But among the bankers of Frankfurt, the country’s finance
capital, this argument cuts much less ice. In his office at the top of Deutsche
Bank’s twin towers (known in town as Haben und Soll, or Profit and
Loss), Thomas Mayer, the bank’s chief economist, warns against the view, common
among nonspecialists, that a weak exchange rate makes an economy more
competitive. “A weak exchange rate is good for old industry,” Mayer says. “They
can sell outdated products at cheaper prices. A strong exchange rate forces you
to continuously adapt to new technology and consumer tastes.” He gets no
argument from Hans-Werner Sinn of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in
Munich, who says, “It is ridiculous to say Germany was the winner of the euro.”
Sinn notes that from the mid-1990s—roughly the time when Europe’s interest
rates began to converge on the euro—Germany has had the second-lowest growth
rate (behind Italy) in Europe. If Germany is profiting now, Sinn thinks, it is
partly because its savers no longer dare to take their money out of the
country.
Political Shifts
Germans grow up getting the lesson drummed into their heads that they, as
the perpetrators of the twentieth century’s worst atrocity, owe a large and
perhaps unpayable debt to humanity. Some Germans draw the conclusion that the
European Union is entitled to collect this debt on humanity’s behalf—that it is
entitled to obedience, even deference, from Germany. Finance minister Wolfgang
Schäuble, 69, has at least some sympathy with this view. So do some other
senior members of Merkel’s party and cabinet. The EU’s own bureaucrats, of
course, believe to a man that Germany’s responsibility for making Europe whole
is limitless.
It is difficult to say how many people in politics sincerely accept this
view, because enormous pressure is brought to bear on people who dissent from
it. Jürgen Trittin, the senior politician in the Green party, calls those who
would do anything to slow down European integration regressive nationalists.
When Wolfgang Bosbach, one of the most loyal members of Merkel’s party, decided
that the liabilities to Germany in vouching for Greece were growing dangerously
high, party regulars gave him the cold shoulder. This September, Merkel’s aide
Ronald Pofalla strode across the floor of the Bundestag during a vote about
contributing more German money to another European rescue package and told
Bosbach: “I’m sick of looking at your face and listening to your sh—.” What
upset Merkel’s people about Bosbach was precisely that he had long been one of
the party’s most loyal soldiers. Fifty-nine-year-old Bosbach recalled a few
weeks later: “There have always been naysayers, always. But I was never one of
them. That was really the first time I said no, and a few people were
absolutely shocked.” Other German politicians worry that Germany’s neighbors
are taking Germany for a ride, but their worries are practically
inaudible.
In the barrooms and TV talk shows of Germany, however, impatience with
Europe and the euro is at a boiling point. The opinion pollster Renate Köcher
of the Allensbach Institute found recently that in the course of 2011, the
percentage of Germans uneasy about the eurozone rose from 38 percent to 55
percent. Whereas at the turn of last year voters opposed kicking any country
out of the eurozone by a margin of 40 percent to 36 percent, by September they
favored kicking out the biggest debtors by 46 percent to 29 percent.
The almost universal reaction of European leaders has been that the German
people don’t know what they’re talking about, and many German politicians have
paid lip service to the same idea. For Bosbach, this is a danger to democracy.
“It may well be that people don’t understand every last detail about the Greek
budget and the situation on the financial markets,” he says. “But they have a
keen grasp of how successful the rescue measures are likely to be. And up till
now, at any rate, the skeptics have been vindicated.”
I spoke about this democratic disconnect with Michael Fuchs, the deputy
chair of Merkel’s party in the Bundes-tag, who is responsible for economics and
the euro. He was sitting in his office near the Brandenburg Gate, preparing for
a trip back to his constituency the following day, and he admitted his voters
were getting restive. “We are growing far apart from our people,” he says. “I
tell you, the questions I get are not really . . . convenient. Somebody will
say to me, ‘Michael you’re a nice guy, but can you explain to me why I have to
work until 67 and I get [as a pension] 46 percent of my final salary, while a
Greek guy is retiring at 57 with 94 percent of his last salary?’ ” In the past
two years, German journalists have coined the word Wutbürger—a
rough translation might be “rageniks”—to describe such people.
Jörg Krämer believes the tensions between voters and politicians may now be affecting the financial rescue efforts themselves, because markets believe popular discontent constrains governments and undermines their credibility. “Sooner or later, politicians will pick up this ‘anti’ sentiment,” says Krämer. “A new government may step away from the guarantees the last one gave. This, in the end, explains why the bailout policy doesn’t work. Because on paper it looks perfect.” In fact, France’s Socialist presidential candidate, François Hollande, favored to beat Nicolas Sarkozy in April’s elections, has threatened not to honor the arrangements Sarkozy reached in France’s name at a November Euro-summit and last week’s meeting in Brussels.
Like Sarkozy, Merkel has been dealt a difficult hand. She would not be
paranoid to worry that, sooner or later, some eloquent member of her party will
topple her by rallying the nation’s natural majority against the bailouts.
Germany’s Supreme Court ruled last fall that all further efforts to aid
struggling eurozone countries must be approved by a vote in the Bundestag, not
by ministerial sleight-of-hand. So her binding undertakings on solving Europe’s
debt crisis must be public ones, not backroom deals. To complicate matters
further, her Christian Democrats rule as part of a coalition with the Free
Democrats (FDP), traditionally Germany’s pro-market party, and the FDP is a
zombie party.
The FDP’s problem is that its leadership insists tax cuts are the answer to
every policy question. German voters apparently believe that tax cuts are the
wrong answer, at least when the questions involve debt. The FDP’s national
popularity has lately fallen to 2 percent—below the threshold at which parties
can enter the Bundestag. And the country, more generally, is moving left. A
year ago, antigrowth protesters in Stuttgart, furious at plans to demolish the
city’s beloved train station to make way for a $6 billion commercial complex
called Stuttgart 21, gathered by the thousands for weekly demonstrations. Last
spring those protesters played a role in booting Christian Democrats from the
governorship of Baden-Württemberg, which they had held since 1953.
Merkel is more an operator than an ideologue. She is a perspicacious
observer of both allies and adversaries. As evidence, people who know her say
that she is uproariously, if sometimes cruelly, funny, and does devastating
imitations of Sarkozy and King Abdullah of Jordan. Although raised in East
Germany, she did not travel in dissident circles before the end of communism.
Indeed, a curious report in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel on
the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall revealed that she had
spent that fateful day at the sauna. She has got to where she is not by sharing
her party’s instincts and opinions but by sizing up its leaders and
outmaneuvering them. An entire generation of conservative leaders who vied with
her for leadership of the party—including Stoiber, former CDU chairman
Friedrich Merz, former governor of Hesse Roland Koch, and the present
(figurehead) federal president, Christian Wulff—have found new employment. Her
only remaining potential challenger within the party is Ursula von der Leyen,
the Brussels-born labor minister and leonine mother of seven, who is the
daughter of the former governor of Lower Saxony.
Merkel has responded to shifting public opinion by shifting her party to
where the votes are. At the Christian Democrats’ annual convention in Leipzig
this November, there was much grousing among the party rank and file about the
“Social Democrat-ization” of the CDU, especially as Merkel tried to rally her
mostly free-market loyalists behind a minimum wage. (She succeeded.) Last
March, during the two weeks that separated the Japanese tsunami from that
Baden-Württemberg governor’s election mentioned above, where environmental
issues loomed so large, she reversed years of party policy and committed
Germany to the dismantling of its nuclear power plants. She has taken up the
Social Democratic positions on limiting compulsory military service and
reforming secondary schools. “Tell me one difference between Social Democrats
and Christian Democrats right now,” says SPD economics spokesman Carsten
Schneider. “I can’t name one.”
While Merkel, by temperament, could change her position on the euro, that
is easier said than done. Journalists who have spoken to her privately say she
expresses frustration that if she invites 10 economists to a meeting, she gets
100 opinions. She sees the difficulty of rescuing Greece and has dropped broad
hints that Greece might need to leave the euro. According to a senior CDU
politician it was she—not Sarkozy or European leaders more generally—who laid
down the law to Greek leader George Papandreou when he announced a referendum
on an EU bailout package last fall.
By contrast, a German exit from the euro is a course that Merkel is
unwilling even to discuss, and she has been categorical in her commitment to
the single currency. “If the euro fails,” she said recently, “Europe fails.”
Her attempts to balance the needs of Europe and those of Germany have often
left her with the worst of both worlds. That is, while many in her party
consider her a spineless and indecisive Europhile goody-goody, those in
neighboring countries see her as a predictably Teutonic stickler for Ordnung.
You can see her depicted in Greek and Italian editorial cartoons wearing a
Bismarckian Pickelhaube or a Stahlhelm of the
sort favored by the Wehrmacht early in the last century.
Words and Bonds
The simplest method of rescuing the euro is for the debtor countries to
leave the eurozone and adopt new currencies. Unfortunately, that appears to
Europe’s best economists highly dangerous. Once you rule that out, there is no
point in mincing words: The choice is between (a) allowing the currency to break
up and (b) rescuing it by having prudent countries pay the debts of profligate
ones.
Option (b) means consolidating fiscal authority in Brussels, and allowing
that central authority to issue debt in the names of the formerly sovereign
member states. Effectively, it means disbanding the countries that make up the
EU. Economists speak of “fiscal union” among European countries. There is,
however, little agreement on what these words mean. “In Germany,” says Thomas
Mayer from his office atop the Deutsche Bank tower, “fiscal union basically
means you send fiscal policemen into southern European countries to force them
to have austerity budgets. When the southerners talk about fiscal union, they
expect large-scale transfers from north to south. With such a different debate,
we never will get fiscal union.”
Most economists think real fiscal union will eventually require some kind
of “eurobond”—a common pot of credit on which all countries can draw. Eurobonds
represent everything that the historical experience of Germans warns them
against. The more irresponsible the country, the more irresistible the appeal
of eurobonds. That is why German politicians, with few exceptions, deplore
them. Barely has the word “eurobond” formed in my mouth when Michael Fuchs
replies, “Nonsense. We need pressure on those countries to do something. If you
don’t use pressure, they will start partying again.” (This moralistic
language—describing indebted countries as “partying”—is common in German
discussions of money. Countries deep in the red are called Schuldensünder—“debt-sinners.”)
Germany’s bankers are even more skeptical about eurobonds than its
politicians. Axel Weber—formerly head of the Bundesbank, formerly a prominent
German member of the European Central Bank, and formerly viewed as the likely
next head of the ECB—resigned from his posts when a plan for the bank to buy
troubled countries’ debt on the secondary market passed despite his opposition.
When the ECB started buying Italian bonds last summer, its second-most
prominent German, chief economist Jürgen Stark, resigned, too, rather than
participate.
Even in the finance ministry—where Wolfgang Schäuble, the 69-year-old
arch-Europeanist, serves as minister—there is skepticism. “People the
minister’s age and older are very conscious Germany was given a second chance,”
says one ministry aide. “They see the EU as the vehicle for Germany’s
redemption, and they are willing to make concessions to protect the euro. But
they can’t make concessions that don’t work.”
Still, there has been a subtle change in the way the ruling coalition’s
politicians address the issue of eurobonds. Last year they said: No eurobonds.
This year they say: No eurobonds until Europe has the proper rules in place. In
fact, the way Germans use the word “eurobond” in arguments over the euro crisis
has a lot in common with the way Americans use the word “quota” in arguments
over affirmative action. Some people genuinely hate the thing. Other people
merely hate the word, because they think it costs them votes. Sigmar Gabriel,
head of the Social Democrats, made this point last fall when he argued that the
Christian Democrats, despite their professed abhorrence of shared liability,
had laid the groundwork for a eurobond by agreeing to buy rickety European
debt. I asked one politician in Berlin in November if he thought eurobonds were
an inevitable part of the solution to the euro crisis. “On the record I say
no,” he said with a smile. “Off the record I say yes.”
‘They are all going to hate us’
Under pressure of the euro crisis, Germans have taken on the traits,
ostentatiously and publicly, of an older Germany, with which recent generations
of Europeans are unfamiliar—an aphoristic, proudly provincial Germany that
tends to present everything as common sense or home truth. “You cannot fight
debt with debt!” says a provincial finance minister. “Sovereignty ends where
solvency ends!” says a national newspaper editor. “You don’t ask the frogs”—the
Greeks are the frogs in this one—“if you can dry out their pond.”
Certain Germans are, for the first time in decades, willing to say they
know better and to needle those who don’t. The rental car magnate Erich Sixt
ran an ad in Greece over the summer: “Dear Greeks! Sixt is accepting drachma
again!” The Germans’ newfound confidence is visible to anyone who comes from an
English-speaking country drowning in debt. Volker Kauder, the leader of
Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the Bundestag, warned Britain on the eve of a
November summit that it ought to fall into line behind Franco-German plans
because “Europe is speaking German now.” This attitude worries some people.
They see it as a step towards nationalism. “Go into a German football stadium
sometime,” said a friend of mine who was raised in the West Germany of the
1980s, when patriotism was still taboo. “Suddenly everybody knows the national
anthem.”
That is a misplaced worry. But the traditional German deference to American
judgment, which received a severe blow during the Iraq war, has been further
damaged by the debt crisis. On a train from Munich to Leipzig I ran into an
executive who managed to convey a bottomless contempt for both America’s tort
lawyers and its designers of derivatives. “In your country,” he said, “where
you have to a put a sticker on your microwave saying ‘Don’t put your pet in
here!’ how could you make these financial weapons of mass destruction?” Other
Germans express impatience with Timothy Geithner’s frequent visits to lecture
Germans, and America’s stewardship of its own debts is universally ill viewed.
Economist Hans-Werner Sinn believes certain Americans support eurobonds as a
way of having someone else pay for the losses of American investment funds. “I
think everyone here understands that game.”
The bleakest view of American irresponsibility comes from the largely
pro-American Edmund Stoiber, who believes the country’s $15 trillion in debt
will have “unforeseeable consequences” for the world. “This is something I
could not have imagined five years ago. Democracy is for me a sacred thing, and
today the democracies are losing their prestige. They are associated with debts
and crises.” He notes scathing remarks made by Chinese deputy foreign minister
Fu Ying about the tendency of Western democracies to rely on debt and adds,
“That is a terrible insult that unfortunately has a grain of truth in it.”
Last year, the labor economist, central banker, and Social Democratic
politician Thilo Sarrazin wrote the most controversial German nonfiction book
since the Second World War. Deutschland schafft sich ab (“The
Abolition of Germany”) addressed the mismanagement of the country’s welfare
state and the demographic decline that would make its programs hard to fund in
the future. It added a few home truths about declining scholarship and
productivity in Germany’s increasingly immigrant workforce. Sarrazin made his
points with a freewheeling bluntness that certain Germans deemed unseemly in a
countryman. Angela Merkel was one of those certain Germans. She forced his
resignation from the Bundesbank.
In his pleasant house on the outskirts of Berlin, surrounded by larches and
pines, Sarrazin is writing a book on the euro. While still in the early stages,
he says a lot of the discussion about the currency’s merits reminds him of a
speech by Brezhnev to the Communist Central Committee or the pope’s Easter
message. “You understand?” he says. “You can do nothing else but applaud, but
it doesn’t get you any further.” Sarrazin has a reputation for stating plainly
what many Germans think but don’t dare say, and so it is with the euro. When one
gets past political piety, Sarrazin believes, one is brought face to face with
the simple cause that has doomed most currency unions: different national
habits. Modern Italy, he notes, has existed for 150 years. “They still have not
come to grips with the economic problems of the south,” he says. Europe is
unlikely to do better with habits that vary even more widely.
The idea that such differences could be transcended arose in the immediate
aftermath of the Second World War. “Germany was not only militarily but morally
defeated,” Sarrazin reflects. “One discovered the Europe of Charlemagne, of
Franco-German friendship. Many Germans wanted to give their nationality up in
favor of being part of Europe. But in a Europe where all the neighbors choose
to stay Dutch and French and Czech and Polish, you have no choice but to stay
German. Even if some Germans don’t like it.”
Others see Germany’s role in Europe changing, too. “The assumption that we
finance Europe, that’s over,” says Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger. “That because of
history, the war, we have to spend ourselves out of historical guilt. That’s
over. Unification made a difference.”
Germany may not be changing as quickly as Frankenberger thinks. Germany
still has an unusual—that is, an unusually diffident—relationship to Europe.
There is still a limit to how far Germans will permit themselves to go in
expressing discontent. “They run amok over Stuttgart,” says the independent
economic adviser Bernhard Eschweiler, who worked for 17 years at J.P. Morgan.
“But not over the euro. The public in the end will not give the green light to
pull out of the euro.”
Germany, unlike other Western countries, has no party built on hostility to
the European Union and no hot-blooded anti-euro populist. The closest
approximation thereof is Peter Gauweiler, a sharp-witted Bavarian lawyer who
belongs, like Edmund Stoiber, to the Christian Social Union (the Bavarian
sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats). He was a protégé of the CSU’s
charismatic orator and leader Franz-Josef Strauss in the 1970s. This fall, he
narrowly lost a bid to become the CSU’s deputy leader and to set the party on
an overtly anti-euro course. The battle pitted the party establishment against
Gauweiler and most of its rank and file. Gauweiler has launched a number of
lawsuits over the years, including most recently the one that resulted in the
decision requiring a parliamentary vote for any new bailout funds.
Gauweiler is a welcoming, voluble man with a big, white moustache. He often
wears Bavarian Tracht. He is also well read. It is tough for an
American journalist to get him off the subject of American literature (Twain,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein), for which he has considerable fondness.
He, too, likes moralistic aphorisms. (“Going into debt is like taking drugs,”
he says.) And yet, when you ask Gauweiler, the most ardently anti-euro
politician in Germany, whether Germany should pull out of the single currency,
he is brought up short. “Well, that’s very hard,” he says. Almost at a loss for
an aphorism, he explains that the decision to adopt the euro is probably not
something that Germany can undo. “You can make a fish soup out of an aquarium,”
he continues, “but that doesn’t mean you can make an aquarium out of fish
soup.”
Europe is about diversity more than unity, Gauweiler thinks. In their
assumption that Europe can be made into a single market, a single culture, it
is the EU’s builders and not their opponents who have set themselves against
European values. Gauweiler recommends a speech that Thomas Mann gave shortly
after World War II in which he explained that what Germans wanted in the
future—or ought to want—was a European Germany, not a German Europe. “This
whole business with stability and so on is about making a German Europe,” Gauweiler
says. “You understand? We give them money and vouch for their credit, and we
tell them: ‘Do this and do that.’ They are all going to hate us.”
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