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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum
GLD 445.60-10.1%4:00 PM EST
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To: Canuck Dave who wrote (75736)6/27/2011 9:37:53 AM
From: elmatador  Read Replies (1) of 219910
 
Could Germany divorce Europe?

June 26, 2011 6:17 pm by Gideon Rachman 18 38

I get so many pamphlets sent to me by think-tanks that most of them go unread. However, one that I’m really glad to have picked up is a brilliant effort from the European Council on Foreign Relations called “The New German Question“. The ECFR is committed to greater European unity and that belief runs through the pamphlet. But it does not prevent the authors, Mark Leonard and Ulrike Guerot, from asking some really penetrating and difficult questions.

The pamphlet starts by observing that “from Greece to Libya, Germany has been seen as increasingly evasive, absent and unpredictable.” It notes – “To many it appears that an increasingly powerful and independent Federal Republic is renegotiating the two fundamental principles that have guided its foreign policy for decades: European integration and the western alliance.”

The authors see a number of factors behind this shift. German exasperation with the euro-crisis means that “many Germans now want to be saved from Europe” and “the reflexively pro-European discourse among Germany’s elite has disappeared.” Second, there has been a generational change. The current set of German leaders do not have personal memories of the war. And then there is the fact that – “Germany’s economic base has been shifting away from Europe towards the so-called BRICs.”

All of this means that Germany is tempted to “see itself as a viable power in a multipolar world, which in turn leads to the temptation of ‘going global alone’.” In other words, Germany is day-dreaming about divorcing the moth-eaten European Union and face the world on its own.

Of course, none of this is going to happen overnight. But the underlying trends are in place.

As a pro-European think tank, the ECFR then spends a lot of the pamphlet trying to explain how to get out of this unpromising situation. Its main recommendation seems to be that politicians on all sides do a better job of explaining the benefits of Europe.

In all, the ECFR’s analysis is much more compelling than its recommendations. But then that’s a problem I’m familiar with, in my own work.

blogs.ft.com
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