I worry about what is happening in Europe and what I most worry about is the future for my children. Angela Merkel does not have any childre. Maybe that is of no signifcance, yet it is a fact that she will not worry about her children as I worry about mine, because as pointed out she does not have any.
Perhaps the citizens of Germany are her children but read extracts from this article in the London Review of books
The result of all the equivocation,
double-talk and Merkelspeak, this difficult-to-disentangle mix of self-interest
and sentimentality, is an immense political and institutional mess caused by
the imposition on Europe of German policies disguised as European policies to
which, supposedly, there is no alternative. This includes a restructuring of
the citizenry through immigration, not just in Germany where it might seem
economically or demographically expedient, but also in other European countries
where it definitely isn’t. The result is rapidly rising anti-German sentiment
in the form of anti-European sentiment, not only among political elites but
also, most powerfully, among the electorate.
Perhaps the citizens of Germany are her children but read extracts from this article in the London Review of books
Tomorrow
Wolfgang Streeck
- BUYEurope’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt byMartin Sandbu
Princeton, 336 pp, £19.95, September 2015, ISBN 978 0 691 16830 2
Last year, the refugee crisis offered Merkel
another opportunity to demonstrate just how fast she can change tack. Once
again, media coverage influenced her decision-making, just as it would a few
months later when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne
Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn in her policies.
In July a PR event, part of a government
campaign to encourage cabinet members to meet ordinary citizens and listen to
their ideas, went wrong. One of the young people invited to take part in a
‘dialogue’ with Merkel on the environment, the 14-year-old daughter of
Palestinian asylum seekers, unexpectedly complained in front of the TV cameras
that her family, who had been living in Germany for four years, might be sent
back to the Lebanon at any moment. She asked, in flawless German, why she
wasn’t allowed to stay in Germany ‘to enjoy life like everybody else’. Merkel
said something like, ‘we cannot take in everyone, much as we might want to.’
The girl began to cry. Not knowing what to do, Merkel started patting the
child’s head with a helpless expression on her face. The result was widespread
outrage on social media. A few months later, the authorities told the girl’s
family that they could stay in Germany for at least another year.
What Merkel called ‘showing a friendly face in
an emergency’ was meant to shame those who, during the euro crisis, had enjoyed
the cartoons of Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in Nazi
uniform. By opening the German border while the French and British borders
remained closed, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground occupied
for so long by those accusing the German government of sado-monetarism, or
worse.
Merkel, who in October 2010 claimed that ‘the multikulti approach [had] failed,
absolutely failed,’ this was no longer a problem.
When Merkel declared the German borders open,
there had been no cabinet decision to this effect and no official statement in
the Bundestag. Since the opposition didn’t ask, as Merkel knew they wouldn’t,
nobody knows to this day what sort of order, legal or not, by whom and when,
was given to the police. The Interior Ministry is still refusing requests from
leading figures (including the former president of the constitutional court,
who was preparing a legal opinion on the matter for the Bavarian government)
for access to the ministerial decree that should have been issued to the border
authorities.
There were good reasons for asking questions.
The refugees, more than a million of them, who arrived in Germany in 2015, all
arrived from safe third countries. Under German and European law, they had to
register in the country where they entered the European Union, and then wait to
be assigned a legal residence in a member state. Merkel seems to have decided
that she could safely ignore all this. When anyone complained that this was
both a huge stress test on German society and a giant social engineering project,
Merkel regally announced that if she had to apologise for ‘showing a friendly
face’, ‘then this is not my country’ – an extraordinary statement for a
democratically elected leader to make. In fact, as the Energiewende demonstrated, she has
for some time been governing not like a parliamentary leader but like a
president with emergency powers. For some time, inquiries into the wisdom of
her immigration policy were answered by her entourage – which in this case
included all the Bundestag parties – by claiming that the mere expression of
dissent ‘played into the hands of the right’, a potent rhetorical device in
Germany. Until Cologne, concern over the government’s handling of the refugee
crisis was effectively suppressed.
Merkel did not shy away from Obama-style
nationalist pathos, employing it in her annual summer press conference on 31
August, when she told her compatriots: ‘Germany is a strong country … We did so
many things, we can do that. We can do it, and where something gets in our way,
it has to be overcome.’ For six months she evaded all constitutional checks and
balances, enjoying the praise showered on her by, among others, Time magazine, which made her Person of the Year
2015. She was talked about as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, and even
Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January turned into a Merkelfest when the guest
speaker in the Bundestag, an Austrian writer who survived the Holocaust, told
her audience that ‘this country, which eighty years ago was responsible for the
worst crimes of the century, has today won the applause of the world, thanks to
its open borders.’
What about Europe? And why dwell so long on the refugee crisis when
I’m supposed to be discussing a book on the euro crisis? The answer is that
Merkel’s immigration policy offers an object lesson in what other countries can
expect from Germany acting European. Just as the United States sees the world
as an extended playing field for its domestic political economy, Germany has
come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is
right for Germany is by definition right for all others. There is nothing
particularly immoral about this; indeed Germans think it is supremely moral, as
they identify their control of Europe with a post-nationalism understood as
anti-nationalism, which in turn is understood as the quintessential lesson of
German history. Very much like the US, German elites project what they
collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto their outside world, and are
puzzled that anyone could possibly fail to see things the way they do. Perhaps
the dissenters suffer from cognitive deficits and require education by Schäuble
in the Eurogroup classroom?
One problem with hegemonic self-righteousness
is that it prevents the self-righteous from seeing that what they consider
morally self-evident is informed by self-interest
especially with a postmodern leader like
Merkel who, free from substantive commitments and constitutional constraints,
has perfected the art of staying in power by means of unpredictable changes of
course
Turkey, which was supposed to put an end to
the illegal trafficking of migrants to Greece – on a country, that is, whose
human rights record suggests it may not be particularly careful when dealing
with Syrian or any other refugees. Of course, Turkish co-operation had a price,
and though Merkel had in the past steadfastly opposed the country’s bid for EU
membership, now, having changed tack again and speaking on behalf of Europe as
a whole, she promised Erdoğan expedited negotiations on accession as a reward
for preventing the Syrian refugees she had invited to enter Germany from
entering Greece. When Turkey demanded money too, Merkel chose to see this as a
matter for ‘European solidarity’, just like the funding of the new EU border
protection agency, Frontex, which patrols the Greek and Italian coastlines.
European borders become German borders, and by implication Europe becomes
Germany.
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