Germany

Saturday

Daniel Korski

A more German Europe?

From our UK edition

Timothy Garton Ash asked an important question in the Guardian recenty - is Europe becoming more German? Or, to put it more accurately, does the EU have to become more German to survive? "If the eurozone falls apart, it will be because Germany did not do enough to save it. If the eurozone is saved, it will be thanks to Germany. This is the greatest challenge to German statecraft since the country was peacefully united 20 years ago." "Yet here is another horn of Germany's dilemma. For half a century, German politicians have repeated, like a mantra, Thomas Mann's call for "a European Germany, not a German Europe".

Wednesday

Matthew Sinclair

The British taxpayer should not be bailing out Ireland

From our UK edition

Everyone is talking about the royal wedding today.  It will be a great occasion but the public finances are tight and people are already asking about the cost.  There is a bigger issue for British taxpayers, though.  Our politicians have arranged for them to get hitched to the bride from hell: the ongoing fiscal disaster in the eurozone.   Under current plans it is reported that we could be liable for up to £7 billion in any Irish bailout.  At the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we have just this morning started a petition against British taxpayers’ money being put at risk for a euro-bailout of Ireland; you can sign it here.   The eurozone is fundamentally broken.

Monday

David Blackburn

Apocalypse soon

From our UK edition

Writing in the Irish Times, Morgan Kelly has denigrated the Irish government’s handling of the economy. Comparisons are often counter-factual – Irish politics is not divided along lines of left and right, and the Celtic Tiger was made of tissue paper. But, to English readers - servicing a colossal national debt with their punitive tax bills, facing crumbling house prices, waiting for the moment when mortgages become beyond the reach of all but the cash rich, and encumbered with billions in worthless global bank assets - it is a truly terrifying read. I urge CoffeeHousers’ to read the whole piece, but here is its essence: ‘By next year Ireland will have run out of cash, and the terms of a formal bailout will have to be agreed.

Sunday

Daniel Korski

What happened to Germany’s European identity?

From our UK edition

What has happened to Germany? Policy-makers and analysts have been pondering the question for the last few years. No longer happy to be the pro-European par excellence, Germany has become more assertive, more self-centred - in others words more normal. German scholar Ulrike Guerot has called the new Germany "post-Romantic", ie more interest-based and less willing to let its history determine its future. Dominic Moisi says Germany has become "a second France." Part of the reason is the change among the country's political elite. The post-war generation has left the scene and the new leaders - on the Left and Right - have little time for Helmut Kohl's cheque-book diplomacy.

Saturday

David Blackburn

Cameron’s euro battle is just beginning

From our UK edition

David Cameron sold himself a hospital pass in Europe this week. His failure to secure a budget freeze has revealed that Britain's clout has been wildly exaggerated. The likely 2.9 percent budget increase is mildly inconvenient for Cameron politically, but it is immaterial in the grand scheme of the next round of budget discussions and the mounting wrangle about the Lisbon treaty. He will have to compromise, as he did this week. He made some ground, finding allies to resist an untrammelled treaty change - the Irish, the Dutch, the Danes, the Czechs and the Poles. The biggest prize will be Sarkozy, whose antipathy towards Merkel is arch - the ongoing diplomatic and military discussions between Britain and France must be about more than sharing aircraftless carriers.

Saturday

Alexander Starritt

Land of poets and thinkers

From our UK edition

The reason Peter Watson gives for writing this long intellectual history of Germany since 1750 is a convincing one: that British obsession with Nazism has blinded many British people to the achievements of German culture. Watson describes the complaints of German commentators about the emphasis on Nazism even in British schooling, which were borne out by the 2005 report of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and “Hitlerisation” of post-1914 history.’ Watson also discusses the importance of Nazism to America, and his most intriguing point is that interest in the Holocaust is a comparatively recent phenomenon. A study in the 1950s found that the effect of the Holocaust on American Jews was ‘remarkably slight’.

Saturday

Juliet Gardiner

What we did to them . . .

From our UK edition

The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Nick Clegg’s 15% Opportunity

From our UK edition

Who would have thought, even a year ago, that the future of the Liberal Democrats would arouse such interest? Perhaps I was too harsh on Nick Clegg's speech to the party's conference; certainly Fraser was more impressed by it and the gang at Liberal Vision also seem pleased. Perhaps I was wrong to hope that Clegg would disavow the social democrats in his party in this speech. One should always be wary of criticising politicians simply because they decline to do what you would have them do. Equally, one should not assume that doing what one would want them to do is the path to either political or policy success. Clearly there needs to be a "nevertheless" here.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Blow-out in Berlin

From our UK edition

D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). Not only was it brilliant, it was also a first novel, and apparently by an American. Holden Caulfield was invoked, and Liam McIlvanney called it ‘the most vital slice of American vernacular since Huck Finn’. It turned out, though, to have been written by a Brit, ‘on the floor of a box-room in Balham’. D. B. C. Pierre is the nom de plume of Peter Finlay, an evolved childhood nickname — ‘Dirty But Clean’, which is evidently his motto as a writer. Foully satirical, he is also sweetly allegorical.

Friday

Alex Massie

The Liberaltarian Future?

From our UK edition

Liberaltarianism is, in case you haven't been following this mildly esoteric debate in Washington, the notion that rather than hitch their wagons to conservativism American libertarians and libertarian-minded folk should also explore relations with (US) liberals in order to further the libertarian agenda. This has proven an oddly controversial idea and, generally, has been dismissed as a) a joke, b) a fool's errand or c) simply impossible. Now Brink Lindsey, who first coined the awkward term "liberaltarian" in a now famous-for-DC essay in the New Republic and his colleague Will Wilkinson* are leaving the libertarian Cato Institute. This has tongues wagging. In some circles anyway. See Tim Carney's Washington Examiner column, for instance.

Saturday

Margaret Macmillan

The threat of holy war

From our UK edition

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a story about German attempts, headed by the unlovely Kaiser Wilhelm and the glamorous and suitably ruthless Hilda von Einem, to stir up a world-wide Muslim holy war against the Allies during the first world war and ultimately build a vast German empire stretching to India itself? Now Sean McMeekin shows that fiction, after all, was not so far from the truth, and he makes the most of what is a very good story. He starts in the late 19th century with the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway.

Saturday

Michael Henderson

The sound of eternity

From our UK edition

The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. That honour is surely shared by the Eroica, in which the composer changed the course of orchestral writing after two prentice works (and what works they were!), and the Seventh. Beethoven’s last symphony, known in the English-speaking world as the ‘Choral’, for its unprecedented use of the human voice, is magnificent but flawed. The meditative slow movement may be the greatest Beethoven ever wrote, but the joy that Beethoven strove for in the finale finds finer musical and dramatic expression in the hymn to liberty that closes Fidelio. If it is not his greatest symphony it is certainly the one that has cast the longest shadows.

Monday

Alex Massie

Karma

From our UK edition

Yes, it might well, nay would, have changed the momentum of the game*. No, video technology is not needed (not least because it hasn't improved any game in which it has been introduced). And anyway, to adapt Wodehouse, what you gain on the roundabouts of 1966 you lose on the swings of 2010. Consider this, then, an open thread to moan about the World Cup:   *I didn't actually see it since I was playing cricket. Against Langholm. We won. I took, rather astonishingly, two wickets. It should have been three. Or even four. But that would be greedy and massively above and beyond expectations.

Thursday

David Blackburn

The euro crisis is an opportunity for Cameron

From our UK edition

Gerard Baker has written the cover piece for this week’s magazine and it’s a must read. In it, he explains why ‘closer fiscal union’, as Rompuy terms it, is not to Germany’s advantage: ‘Any attempted fiscal union might well yield to Germany the biggest single vote in how much to raise in taxes and how to spend it. But it could still be outvoted by an alliance of smaller countries. Such a set-up would become an institutionalised mechanism by which German taxes will be siphoned off permanently to weaker European states.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Of Pigs and Cucumbers

From our UK edition

Pleased to be back in Blighty and pleased too to see that the Economist has launched Johnson, a blog about language and politics. From the most recent entry: Germany has a cranky coalition government and garrulous politicians, and so conditions are good for political insults. In one intramural fight a health ministry official from the liberal FDP likened the CSU—Bavarian conservatives—to a Wildsau, or wild pig, for its rough handling of the liberals’ health-reform ideas. But the better insult was the riposte by the CSU man, who called the liberals a Gurkentruppe, literally a troop of cucumbers. Anglophone journalists have been puzzling over how to turn this into recognisable English.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Achtung, Liam

From our UK edition

Defence Secretary Liam Fox is used to looking across the Atlantic for military inspiration and across the English Channel to France for the future of defence cooperation. But he might do well to look somewhere else – namely to Germany where the young defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, has launched one of the Cabinet’s most ambitious cost-cutting programmes. He is planning to cut the number of active-duty soldiers from 250,000 to 150,000 as part of a an effort to find  €1bn (£840m) worth of cuts as part of the government’s €80 billion austerity programme. He is even contemplating an end to compulsory military service -- something normally seen as a fundamental principle for the CDU and CSU.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Trans-Atlantic  powwow

From our UK edition

I’m in Washington DC at a high-level seminar on trans-Atlantic relations with the “who is who” of Europe and the US, talking about issues of common concern. The Germans are here in force, as are the French, with high-ranking officials speaking about topics like Russia and Iran. Interestingly, the Brits are notable in their absence. It is probably a sign that the British government is still in transition mode, unable to explain any new policies, unready to stake out new positions. Or they may not be bothered with unofficial events such as these given the privileged access they have. But it is worth noticing nonetheless.

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

German lessons

From our UK edition

Angela Merkel's fall from favour is something David Cameron ought to bear in mind as he looks for lessons to guide his term in office. The German chancellor could do no wrong when she was first elected. A new "Iron Lady", she was seen as a giant among pygmees. Tony Blair was leaving the scene, Nicolas Sarkozy had yet to be elected, the newspapers swooned, the voters applauded. Mrs Merkel was respected in the US and Europe. She made her unwieldy coalition with the Social Democrats work, almost singlehandedly picked the NATO secretary-general and ruled over EU meetings.

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Goodbye Euro?

From our UK edition

I have just visited the two countries that are making the headlines in the European newspapers – Germany and Greece. During my trip, I met officials, journalists, and key advisers to both Prime Minister Papandréou and Chancellor Merkel. Sitting on the flight back to London I have regrettably come to the conclusion that the Euro is probably done for – or that Greece will default inside the Eurozone. Until now, I have dismissed the pessimists, thinking that the Euro would be saved. But after my trip I have changed my view for a number of reasons. Nothing I saw in Greece has convinced me that the Greek government is able, ready and willing to oversee the kind of austerity programme required to restore faith in its economy.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Who’s Afraid of a Hung Parliament?

From our UK edition

So it seems you have to vote Conservative to accept the party's invitation to join the government of Great Britain? Who knew? Tory warnings of the dire consequences of a hung parliament are understandable but, I suspect, unfortunate. There is little evidence that the electorate believes that a hung parliament will be a disaster, far less than they can be cajoled into thinking that they're letting Britain down if they don't vote Conservative. And that, my friends, is the underlying message sent by the Tories' blitz against a hung parliament. A hung election might not be ideal but it might also be a fitting end to this exhausted, depressing parliament. But it need not be the disaster the Tories claim. The PDF they released today - and the advert - is thin gruel.