flagging ? © Baron Frankal
Outside an obscure local factory on the outskirts of a non-descript suburb in Germany fly five flags. Four bear the name and emblem of the company, but on the fifth are the familiar yellow stars of the EU.
There is no country more thoroughly infused with the EU than Germany, no country with which the eu itself is more infused. Everything about the EU rests on Germany - from its earliest beginnings, to its ultimate end. Though today eu officials talk of lofty ideals, single markets and being a counterbalance to the hyperpower, the single reason the EU was created was simple: germany. To bind it, to hold it down, to connect its very innards so tightly to France that the spectre of German nationalism could never rise again. In this, the EU has been a spectacular success, and in many other ways too, and due almost entirely to the EU’s paymaster. Still today Germany pays more than a quarter of the entire EU budget, and it is on Germany’s largesse that the EU has previously expanded so smoothly, subsidised agriculture so outrageously generously and continually funnelled pots of gold to the continent’s poorer regions. But no more.
To understand why the new Member States got such a raw deal compared to their predecessors, one word will suffices: germany. A prolonged and deep recession, the continuing effects of rebuilding east germany and a new postwar generation edging away from the core war responsibility on which German generosity was always based mean that Germany is unable or unwilling to bankroll the munificent EU that its beneficiaries have become used to. The former democratic republic is the one former Warsaw Pact country that has been in the eu almost 15 years now, and joined the euro long ago. Yet the cost of its ‘upgrading’ fell totally on Germany, and it never recovered its confident ‘economic miracle’ stride.
Also, at the same time as the eu’s bottomless wallet both ceased to be unending and began to face competition, so a new generation came to power. Schroeder, born in 1944, is Germany’s first true “post-war” chancellor and rides carefully the increasing wish of Germany’s youth to end the so-called culture of restraint. Already, with the capital back in Berlin, the 1990’s moniker of economic giant, political dwarf seems outdated. Like the echo in Schroeder’s own life though - his father was killed in the war and never met his son - so Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and the rest still resonate, and Germany cannot yet, even in its present dire situation, claim what it might otherwise be due. Certainly its overt influence is growing (whilst brussels was essentially built on the french civil service model, the EU’s ‘state of the art’ institution, the ecb, is thoroughly bundesbank) and it is not (see the enlargement) taking on new burdens, but in the talks for the new 6-year budget currently underway, Germans will still end up paying, both proportionately and gross, vastly more into the eu than any other country: French farmers will live in luxury for many years still as poorer Germans struggle. It may be the last time.
The question on which the future of the EU rests, is whether others are prepared to share the burden, or whether instead the good in the EU will slowly be strangled by selfish nations eager to wave handbags and take what they can without seeing that acorns planted now bring oaks a generation on. From its inception until today the single most important word in the EU lexicon was Germany. Tomorrow it must be either Europe or die.
First published as “easing the burden” in the budapest sun, 27 may 2004,
http://www.budapestsun.com/cikk.php?id=18471