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Ärende: Germany
===============
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0131/037.html

Current Events 

Germany's Dismal Future 
Paul Johnson, 
01.31.05, 12:00 AM ET 

An object lesson for us all is the present deplorable state of Germany. 
It shows what happens when a society is encouraged by its leaders to 
turn its back on freedom and opt for security at any price. 

A generation ago Germany, thanks to its great postwar leaders Konrad 
Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, had an exemplary economy--one of the world's 
best in quality and performance. It was modeled on America's and put 
entrepreneurial freedom, hard work and innovation before all other 
considerations. The Germans turned their backs on their hideous past of 
violent aggression and became wealthy, proud and self-disciplined global 
citizens. 

Today the German economy is a model--especially for the rapidly 
expanding nations of the Third World, such as China and India--for what 
not to do. Stagnant production, static or falling productivity and 
appalling levels of unemployment are the salient factors. Unemployment 
figures have recently been revised upward to 4.5 million but could be as 
high as 6 million when the  hidden unemployed  are taken into account. 
These figures are close to those of 1932, at the depths of the Great 
Depression and just before Hitler came to power. So many being 
unemployed was one reason Hitler's bid for power was successful. 

Three Reasons for Germany's Decline   

The power wielded by its old-fashioned trade unions. German unions 
insist on short hours, high wages, immense social security benefits and 
conditions of work that make productivity increases virtually 
impossible. Their stranglehold on the economy is akin to that exercised 
by British unions before Margaret Thatcher smashed them in the early 
1980s.   

The input of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels. The EU imposes endless 
rules, whose net effect is to stifle enterprise and squelch innovation. 
The push toward a European superstate has proved an unmitigated disaster 
for Germany, which, despite its relative economic decline, is still the 
biggest net contributor to EU funds. Germany thus ends up financing 
programs such as the Common Agricultural Policy that work against its 
interests. Germany pays the EU piper, while France calls all the tunes. 

Indeed, Germany's subservience to France is one of the most astonishing 
and inexplicable features of today's world. Chancellor Gerhard Schr der 
seems content to play the poodle to President Jacques Chirac in the most 
humiliating and grovelling way, following tamely in courses that 
demonstrably work against Germany both at home and abroad. 

When Germany looked to U.S. leadership between 1950 and the early 1970s, 
it prospered. Since Germany submitted to French direction, the country 
has plunged relentlessly into the pit. Sooner or later the German people 
are going to grasp this salient truth; when they do, the consequences 
for Europe will be dramatic. This moment has been delayed, however, by 
the third factor in the nation's decline.   

Germany's acute sense of failure and unhappiness. This is a collective 
psychological depression that effectively prevents Germany from taking 
action to remedy its ills. The Germans agree they're in a mess, and many 
see the obvious way out. The country needs to make the kinds of 
structural changes in its economy that Prime Minister Thatcher carried 
out in Britian 20 years ago, changes that have completely transformed 
the performance and expectations of the British people. But though most 
Germans know this, they lack the will--and, of course, the leadership--
to carry it out. They stay inert, supine, transfixed by fear and angst, 
paralyzed by the thought of painful adjustments in their safety-first 
society--and thus coast toward a disaster comparable to Hitlerism. 

Germany's demographic structure reinforces all the weaknesses of its 
stagnant society and economy. It has one of the world's lowest 
birthrates, a rapidly aging population and a calamitously expensive 
social security system, all of which combine to project a dark and 
dangerous future. Germany faces not merely a net decline in population--
from 80 million to 60 million--by midcentury, but a lowering of living 
standards and the unrest that will surely follow. 

A New Direction 

Along with reforming itself, Germany should be leading a campaign to 
reform the EU. The object should be to cast off the Francophile control 
executed by Paris and Brussels and give the EU a new direction that 
corresponds to its expanding membership. One change--both symbolic and 
substantive--would be to transfer EU headquarters from Brussels, with 
its 40-year accretions of bureaucratic barnacles, to a city such as 
Hamburg, with its strong entrepreneurial and trading traditions, or 
Aachen, once the capital of Charlemagne's Frankish-German empire and 
from which, in the late 1940s, the original concept of a United Europe 
drew its inspiration. 

Certainly the European capital needs to be closer to the Union's center 
of gravity. But more important, the EU needs a revolution in thinking, 
away from the regulations and controls that are turning the dream of a 
prosperous and peaceful Europe into a nightmare of discontent, 
depression and decline. 

What Germany needs and Europe awaits is a leader who can break the mold 
to give both a fresh start. Too much to ask? If so, the alternative will 
be violence. 

Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author; Lee Kuan Yew, 
minister mentor of Singapore; and Ernesto Zedillo, director, Yale Center 
for the Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico; in addition 
to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. 
To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at 
www.forbes.com/currentevents.

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