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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (11539)	6/11/1999 7:52:00 AM
From: MNI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Gustave, that's very interesting indeed, but I missed an important point. The UK entered only at the last line: That's the economical/political background you should keep in mind when assessing the power game between the US, Germany, France, the UK, and their puppet satellites (ie Russia, Italy and Spain for France; Eastern and Nordic Europe for Germany). so it cannot be called a conclusive end to the posting. As a minor correction I will counter the assumption that Germany "cannot interfere in the Middle East". Not only France, also Germany took part in the scelerous race for the Iracqian weapons market that pumped up Saddam so strongly, and for long time in the seventies and eighties Arabs were thought to be the best customers of German tech products (most prominently flying or motorised goods for the war"games" market, but also chemical plants, that as was shown later were not always producing "only agricultural fertilizers".) But in some of the deals German companies counteracted state laws, sometimes in full accord with the keepers of those laws, by cooperating with, e.g., French or Italian companies. Which shows that international cooperation was a trump already fifteen years ago. I am not sure whether Germany is really so much strengthened by reunification. The biggest economic-structural problem inside Germany, joblessness, has not been changed since Helmut Kohl begun (!) as a chancellor (1982), and we are on an all time high in this statistics, and even the government doesn't promise anymore there will be change to it by its politics. This is different from France, Britain, and Italy, etc. - and the US. I am sure that Germany's population is not prepared to take a leading role in anything, may that be militaric or economic, or cultural. German's LIKE to be provincial, and that sentence read again should help the outside world understand us better: German's LIKE to be provincial. Many of us would even full-heartedly take a reduction of the average standard of living if that could reduce the need to take responsibility, and most would like to see Germany "politically neutral", whatever that may mean. As I said earlier, for lack of a political culture of taking responsibility in Germany, a dissolution of European Nations inside a stronger EU with a strictly non-German political leadership would be the best long-term solution for Germany. MNI