The excellent second quarter export and growth results reported by Germany have set that country at an increasing, and increasingly dangerous, distance from the other members of the
There is always a correlation between the national outlook of a society and what may be called its national character, formed in part by its history of religious beliefs and practices. Germany is the land of Lutheranism, a religion committed to belief in the radical corruption produced by original sin, in the punishment of evil, and that only faith, and not good works, justifies. Those who waste the bounty of good times through extravagance and the neglect of duty -- as in the case of the Greeks, and supposedly of the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the French -- can expect no pity. The culturally Catholic Latins are more tolerant of sin, more willing to forgive, and they take a positive view of good works that benefit the poor and laggard.
In
In the EU's overall plan for recovery, Germany insists on deficit-reducing measures across the entire euro zone, even though this has a depressive effect on other national economies and stimulates unemployment elsewhere, with particularly dangerous implications for the weaker economies where, as
Should there be a continuing decline in the value of the euro, which touched a recent low against the dollar in June, this would be good for euro zone exports, but without economic growth, it would also cause "the relative weight of [these nations' debt to] continue to grow" as well. This is true not only for national debt but also for commercial loans held by banks "even more reluctant to lend, compounding the downward pressures."
Germany has been the principal material contributor to the construction of the
The present economic crisis has brought out in Germany something that has been feared since the days when the novelist and commentator Francois Mauriac remarked of Germany that he admired it so much that he was glad there were two of them. It is why both
This united Germany has since acted with prudence and generosity, most of all in its reluctant sacrifice of the Deutschmark to the introduction of the common euro currency in 2001. The present crisis has reignited German fears of inflation, a part of the national emotional heritage. It has also seen a novel arrogance of discourse and condescension in dealing with nations of lesser economic virtue (if more palatable histories, as some Greeks bitterly noted earlier this year, called attention to the fact that
Since the creation of the European community and German rearmament within
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(C) 2010 William Pfaff