Austin Bay Blog

Last night in the University of Texas honors seminar I teach, I used a column I wrote in November 1991 to illustrate a “course of action analysis.” The subject was Yugoslavia’s war of disintegration and I specifically focused on the fighting around Dubrovnik. (For what it’s worth, Jim Dunnigan and I later published this column as an appendix to our Balkan chapter in the 1996 edition of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War.)

A couple of students responded to one line with very curious expressions. Here’s the line: “It is time for the members of “next year’s superpower,” the European Economic Community, to start to quench through collective political action those terrible ethnic fires that are the threat to peace in the common European home.”

One problem was “the European Economic Community.” Most of the students in this class were five or six years old in 1991. I told them the EEC is the European Union. But it was the wisecrack (next year’s superpower) that was a bit puzzling. I told them”EU advocates made that claim, and made it vociferously in the heady post-Cold War years of 1990 and 1991. The past fourteen years have not only failed to produce a super-power, they have revealed extensive, embedded problems. I briefly discussed the French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution and moved on to discuss ex-Yugoslavia. (I should have mentioned that “next year’s superpower” is a term often applied to Brazil, but I didn’t.)

The French and Dutch “no votes” actually make me more optimistic about Western Europe. The French “non” tells me that in some buried cerebral zone even the pompous brats in Paris know they confront fundamental economic changes. The Dutch value their liberal democratic traditions and don’t want to cede power to an imperial bureaucracy.

I think the recent German election was also on the minds of two or three students. Germany’s political gridlock –as displayed in the recent election– delays reform. It also reveals the leadership vacuum we all knew existed.

Timothy Garton Ash addresses the German election in a column appearing in today’s Guardian. His lede:

The Indian restaurant owner in Berlin said this kind of post-election confusion was quite normal where he came from. The politicians would sort it out eventually and form some kind of coalition government, he reassured the German television reporter. His smile implied: relax, and have another drink. “Well, that’s interesting … Indian conditions!” commented the fiercely competent German studio anchor, with unconscious ethnic condescension. And her tone implied: have we really sunk so low? Indian conditions, here, in Germany?

To which I would say: “If only…” If only Germany had anything like the economic dynamism of the world’s largest democracy - a democracy, incidentally, slightly older than that of the Federal Republic of Germany. Just to remind you, India’s growth rate over the past 12 months was 7%, while Germany’s was 0.6%.
The result of the German election - if one can call it a result - will not help to close that gap, or address the chronic problems of stagnation and mass unemployment in what is still Europe’s largest economy. We are in uncharted territory, with the leaders of both main parliamentary parties, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder, staking their claims to lead a coalition government as federal chancellor. (Schröder has broken with established political precedent, which calls for the leader of the largest parliamentary group to have the first crack at putting together the parliamentary coalition needed to be chancellor.)

Ash hopes for new elections. A coalition government, in his estimation, wastes time:

The results in economic and social policy - and probably in foreign policy - will be more of that soft fudge in which German attempts at reform have been suffocating for more than a decade. This will be bad for Germany, bad for Europe and bad for the world economy.

As for the leadership vacuum:

The last time there was a grand coalition, in 1966-69, it prompted a strengthening of the left- and right-wing extremes, since the established mass parties were both in government. Harold James, a distinguished historian of modern Germany, argues that the time before that when Germany had something that might be described as a grand coalition was in 1928-30. This had the disastrous effect, under the impact of the great depression, of sending voters off in herds to the communists and Nazis, hastening the end of the Weimar Republic. If one accepts his interpretation then, it would seem that Germany has an impulse to reach for a grand coalition roughly once every 35 years. But few people are suggesting this one would have anything like the same disastrous consequences. More likely, it would represent an unstable transition period between one reasonably stable coalition government and another, as it did in the 60s. In which case, better to shorten the agony with new elections.

I think these grafs do a good job of describing France and Germany’s current paralysis, and echoes the wry “next year’s superpower” line from my 1991 column:

The French communist newspaper L’Humanité crowed that the Germans have shown a red card to neoliberalism. Just as the French did in the referendum that killed Europe’s constitutional treaty earlier this year. Nein and non to neo-liberalism, to any radical change to the old “social market economy” that they feel has served them so well; nein and non to innovation, risk, immigration and Turkey’s membership of the European Union; nein and non to America, or what they take for America. That is the characteristic Franco-German refrain today.

Between them, these two nations central to any version of the European project have achieved one great thing: they have made a war between France and Germany, and hence in western and northern Europe, unthinkable. (I would not be quite so confident about eastern or southern Europe.) And for half a century, France and Germany have together been the motor of European integration. Now, however, the Franco-German motor has become the Franco-German brakes.

This election is just one more proof of what we have seen for some time. Instead of the new start hoped for in London, Warsaw and Jose Manuel Barroso’s Brussels, with a “black-yellow” coalition between a reforming chancellor in Merkel and the free-marketeering Free Democrats, followed in 2007 by a like-minded French president in Nicolas Sarkozy, we face a further period of stagnation and confusion. The so-called Lisbon agenda of economic reform will continue to be stalled. The EU’s always vainglorious claim that it will become the world’s most competitive economy by 2010 will look ever more absurd.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Neo-neocon has additional thoughts on the German elections.