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You can tell a lot about a country by spending time on its trains. Or, given the frequency of strikes, weekend ‘planned work on the line’, points failure and overhead lines becoming less overhead, by not spending time on its trains.
If you complete the IT assault course devised by Interrail and buy a rail pass and reservations, Deutsche Bahn is a good case study. And you may conclude Britain’s rail network is not so bad after all. Germans will tell you they manage travel on their train services by having only two expectations: delays or cancellations. That might tell you that Germany is far from booming, with implications for Europe. Though Germany with a GDP of over $4 trillion remains amongst the four to five largest economies in the world, the ‘German economic miracle’ of the 1950s is history. In the first quarter of 2024, German economic growth (GDP) was only 0.3% above its pre-pre-pandemic level – compared with UK, 1.7%, the Eurozone 3.4% and the USA, 8.7%. Though the jolly crowds in Berlin along the Spree on a Saturday night around Friedrichstrasse station show no sign of a decline in the ‘hospitality industry’. But almost half of German GDP comes from exports while the figure for the UK is only 29%. In both economies services are dominant making up 70% of German export revenue and 80% of British export revenue. Germany has characteristic economic problems. After the 2008 global banking crisis, Germany and China found that their economies were complementary. From 2009 China became a major trading partner for Germany - accounting for 40% of Volkswagen’s sales. With its competitive exchange rate, German exports to China rose from £44 billion to a peak of £105 billion in 2021, double that of British, French and Italian exports to China combined. Meanwhile China had progressively become more an economic competitor to Germany than a partner. Today, with China carrying a debt to GDP ratio of 287%, and with growth flagging, economic crisis looms. While investing in China, German business at home is making redundancies in those productive areas where it is outcompeted by China. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel – brought up in a strongly Lutheran East German family - took the decision to accept some half a million Syrian refugees, creating a total of one million asylum seekers and economic migrants admitted that year. This morally laudable but politically risky decision became a contributory factor to the doubling of membership, since its April 2013 founding, of the right-wing populist Party, the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. AfD supports anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-EU policies, and climate change denial. Unlike Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party, it does a poor job of countering accusations of harbouring fascist sympathisers and ideologues. Its leading candidate in the imminent EU elections, the MEP Maximilian Krah, was forced to end his campaign last week after telling an Italian newspaper that the Nazi SS were not all criminals. “I won’t say that [someone] was automatically a criminal because he wore the wrong uniform”, he told the Financial Times. AfD is polling at 17% in forthcoming EU elections and, in 2017, gained a maximum 12.6% of the vote in Federal elections, dropping to 10.3% in 2021 (Reform, to the right of the Conservative Party in the UK, is currently polling at 11%). AfD has significant support in only 5 of Germany’s 16 länder (federal states) all within the former communist East Germany, the DDR: Thuringia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and the eastern side of Berlin. But a complex electoral arrangement gives it 77 out of the 734 seats in the Bundestag (Federal Parliament). Try, as the Bundesrepublik might, and at great cost, after forty years of communism to “level up” the former DDR in a unified Germany post-1990, social tensions and the drabness of the many blocks of flats in the east of the city centre remain. To really feel the abiding legacy of the DDR, visit its sinister, cruel and slightly mad heart: Haus 1, 20 Normannenstrasse, the Stasi Museum, sitting in the Stasi’s original, extensive campus. Its files on 5.6 million people spied on, it was calculated, would stretch 69 miles end to end. In the last Federal elections, on the east side of the city, the old ‘Stasiland’, the AfD won 20.5% of the vote while on the west side the percentage was 8.5%. Yet Angela Merkel had followed up her 2015 decision on immigration with a remarkably successful integration policy. And an aging Germany needed more workers. I was surprised to find a full congregation at an English mass in the St. Thomas Aquinas Centre, Germany’s Roman Catholic HQ in Berlin: predominantly under 40, nearly half of African origin and apparently, if a few conversations were indicative, working in a range of different - some professional - jobs. As Timothy Garton Ash suggests in “Big Germany, What Now?” 23 May 2024 New York of Books, Angela Merkel’s decision with the most serious lasting consequences was her precipitous decommissioning of Germany’s nuclear power stations after the Japanese disaster at Fukushima in 2011. In consequence, Germany became dependent on Russia’s fossil fuels for energy; “by 2020, a staggering 55% of its gas, 34% of its oil and 57% of its hard coal came from Russia”. This did not mean that the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz is trapped into supporting Putin. Germany is second only to the USA in support for Ukraine, some £23 billion in economic and military aid provided, but closely following the US, gradually less reluctant to send President Zelensky the sophisticated and powerful weaponry he seeks. Germany is arguably, and will remain, the most important member of the European Union- though in the light of Putin’s imperialist threat to Europe, Margaret Thatcher’s fears of German dominance of the European Union seem in retrospect particularly misguided. Socialist student peace activist, dubbed a peace Chancellor (Friedenskanzler) in the German press, cautious Social Democrat performing a balancing act nationally between clashing values, Olaf Scholz may prove to be a transitional leader. But like Sir Keir Starmer who looks to be facing even worse economic pressures, Scholz, a former lawyer specialising in labour law, shows a similar lawyer’s caution needed in perilous times. Britain and Germany both share the recent experience of economic crisis. There is a real possibility that Starmer, as a future Prime Minister, and Scholz, if re-elected in next year’s Federal elections, will prove effective allies. Meanwhile, we need to re-appraise Germany, its problems, dilemmas and role in the EU, sympathetically. The old trope that like Mussolini ‘the Germans make the trains run on time’ just isn’t true. But the British and the Germans are kindred spirits who have much in common and need one another more than either nation realises. See TheArticle 27/05/2024
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For months since October 2023 Netanyahu defied the USA. Around the world, large demonstrations protested Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, faring no better. Now the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, the nearest we have to a global judiciary, has intervened.
On 29 December 2023 South Africa filed an “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v Israel)”, bringing a case to the ICJ based on allegations of acts of genocide by Israel in its war against Hamas. "It is important," the submission reads, "to place the acts of genocide in the broader context of Israel's conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, including the serious and ongoing violations of international law associated therewith, including grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity." In the charged atmosphere created by Hamas’ massive human rights violations while attacking Israel, 1,400 mostly civilian deaths and the taking of 224 hostages, followed by Israel killing over 30,000 Palestinians believed also to be disproportionately civilians in the destruction of Gaza, it is hard to overestimate the reverberations of such allegations. But why South Africa? First some historical context. The ICJ was formed at the first session of UN General-Assembly and Security Council in April 1946 when genocide was recognised as a crime in international law. This was a product of the Nuremberg trials and a reaction to the Shoah, the holocaust. In 1948, genocide was carefully defined within the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). Both the horrendous massacres accompanying independence and partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the migration of 14-18 million people, and the expulsions of Arabs accompanying the creation of the State of Israel, the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic), were consequences of abrupt withdrawals of British imperial authority. During the same period, Afrikaner nationalists took power in South Africa. Any story of a steady, linear progress towards stable, co-operative nation states is inherently implausible. After independence of the Portuguese colonies and Zimbabwe in the 1970s and 1980s, apartheid South Africa and the Israel-Palestine conflicts were left unresolved, unfinished business. Negotiations within South Africa, resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accumulated impact of sanctions, brought apartheid to an end in 1994. It was possible to imagine the Oslo Accords (negotiated between 1993-1995) as a similar breakthrough, drawing a line under conflicts between contending – ethnic – nationalisms. A Whig history of the decline of imperialism and settler colonialism leaving nationalism triumphant doesn’t convince. For example, the Kurdish population, somewhere between 30-45 million, greater than three-quarters of the UN’s member states, spread as minorities between Turkey (16%), Iraq, Iran and Syria, achieved no such denouement. Back to the ongoing court drama in the Hague. Hearings at the ICJ (mandated by the UN to litigate between States not to be confused with the International Criminal Court, founded in 1998, to prosecute individuals) are presided over by 15 experienced judges drawn from 15 different countries. Ruling on the December 2023 South African application, the 15 included allies of Israel, the USA, Germany, France, and Australia alongside South Africa’s fellow BRICS countries India, China, Russia and Brazil. Two extra judges were added for this contentious case: South Africa’s Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and the former Chief President of Israel’s Supreme Court, Aharon Barak. The very recently retired President of ICJ who presided over the first hearing, Joan Donoghue, a former foreign policy adviser to President Obama, has explained that the court – almost unanimously - concluded that South Africa had a right to present their claim to the court and the Palestinians had a “plausible right to be protected from genocide’” After weighing the evidence, the ICJ found a risk of “irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide”. Hence several provisional orders made by the court to the Israeli government directed at such protection. Donoghue emphasised that the ICJ had yet to rule on the plausibility of the South African claim that genocide was taking place. A Ugandan, Julia Sebutinde, the current ICJ Vice-President, was alone in sharing some of Israeli Judge Barak’s dissenting opinions. The very day the ICJ, a UN body, delivered its first ruling on South Africa’s application, 26 January, Israel alleged that 12 employees of the UN Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) had participated in the Hamas attacks of 7 October. South Africa made a further court application on 6 March this year in response to the deteriorating conditions in Gaza, stating that the Palestinians were “no longer facing only a risk of famine but that famine was setting in”. On 23 March, the court ruled that further urgent measures were required of South Africa, particularly that the military unblock, and permit immediate distribution, of humanitarian aid “in full cooperation with the United Nations”. The distinctions made by the court are subtle, but none of their judgements suggest that South Africa’s formulation of their case was unreasonable, politically prejudiced, improper or antisemitic. Because of the constraints on journalists, disinformation, and ‘the fog of war’, the clarity of juridical thinking and observation, not of course infallible, is particularly valuable. The court commendably saw the war in Gaza through the lens of law meant to protect human rights. South Africa received no standing ovation from the US Congress. During apartheid, of course, Israel offered close military and intelligence cooperation to the South African regime. This included in the 1970s joint action in Angola. Investigative journalists and the CIA both provided evidence of shared testing of a nuclear weapon in the southern Indian ocean. In return for its support Israel got uranium ‘yellow cake’ from South Africa’s then South-West African colony, now Namibia. Unsurprisingly, there was no love lost between the ANC, today’s South African governing Party, and the Israeli State. But South Africa’s approach to the ICJ seems motivated chiefly by empathy with Palestinians in what their legal submission called the State of Israel’s “75-year-long year apartheid”. Nelson Mandela’s words at a 1997 solidarity event in Pretoria set a distinctive tone: “The temptation in our situation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own. We can easily be enticed to read reconciliation and fairness as meaning parity between justice and injustice. Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face.... But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians...” Mandela tellingly did not describe Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians as ‘apartheid’. Instead, he talked simply about “the recognition that injustice and gross human rights violations were being perpetrated in Palestine”. This is clearly the problematic adopted by the ICJ court and could motivate the ICC to act against individual Israeli leaders. As Mandela’ speech also suggests, the unfinished business of the 1980s is about peoples obtaining freedom for self-determination and statehood. This is what linked Mandela’s South Africa and Palestine in solidarity then, and still does today. See TheArticle 08/05/2024 |
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