BRITAIN & gERMANY: kINDRED SPIRITS IN PERILOUS TIMES

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