Germany

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

Anglo-Saxon divide

Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of both England and Germany. In due course it occurred to him, as a man of wide cultural sympathies, that he ought to be in a position to write an interesting book about Anglo-German relations. But how to structure such a work? Oltermann is too polite to say so, but a great part of the problem is that modern English readers are abysmally ignorant of Germany. This used not to be the case: before 1914, to be educated was to be

Thursday

David Owen

How to remain a nation state

Britain out of Brussels’ clutches by 2020? It can happen, says David Owen, in a piece for the magazine this week. It’s based on a speech to Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Here’s the full version: In all the controversy about the eurozone and Greece it is easy to ignore one simple fact: maintaining a core eurozone is creating an unstoppable momentum towards a United States of Europe. On 7 February 2012 the German Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated very clearly her direction of travel. The eurozone crisis for her is to be the springboard to another Treaty to replace the Lisbon Treaty. She said ‘Step-by-step, European politics is merging with domestic politics.’

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Darling: This is a Greek Versailles Treaty

Alistair Darling’s suggestion that income tax might be devolved (entirely!) to Scotland as part of a new post-referendum “settlement” was, understandably, the headline part of his Scotland on Sunday interview at the weekend. But his views on the Greek crisis were even more candid: His assessment of the Greek crisis is astonishingly frank. “The policy they [European leaders] are pursuing towards Greece is sheer lunacy. Nobody actually believes it will work privately, if you speak to people.” Even if everything worked, he notes that Greece would still have debts worth 120 per cent of its national income. “It will still leave the country so indebted and so crippled that it

Peter Hoskin

Greece saved at last? Nope…

Greece sorta defaulted last night. That’s what you need to remember when reading of Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos’s ‘happiness’ at the €130 billion deal reached by eurozone finance ministers in the early hours. Sure, the country will now be able to pay off its creditors when various loans mature on 20 March. But the concurrent ‘voluntary’ haircut of 53.5 per cent for private bondholders will still be seen as a ‘restricted default’ by credit rating agencies. And it could feasibly get worse if those private bondholders decide not to play along and instead trigger a credit event, either manageable or messy. The question hovering over Greece is now, really,

Saturday

James Forsyth

The green squeeze

Bjorn Lomborg’s article on why Germany is cutting back on its support for solar power is well worth reading and has clear implication for this country’s debate about energy policy. As Lomborg argues: ‘there is a fundamental problem with subsidizing inefficient green technology: it is affordable only if it is done in tiny, tokenistic amounts. Using the government’s generous subsidies, Germans installed 7.5 gigawatts of photovoltaic (PV) capacity last year, more than double what the government had deemed “acceptable.” It is estimated that this increase alone will lead to a $260 hike in the average consumer’s annual power bill.’ At a time when living standards are being squeezed, these increases

Thursday

Faisal Islam

Bailout country | 16 February 2012

With the political wrangling over another Greek bailout continuing today, we thought CoffeeHousers might care to read (or re-read) Faisal Islam’s cover piece for The Spectator from four months ago: In a theatre in central Athens, over a thousand tax inspectors have gathered to shout crossly about the latest cuts to their pay and pensions. Eventually the argument, between the government-affiliated union leader and his members, spills out on to the street. The rank-and-file feel betrayed: they were persuaded to accept the first wave of pay cuts earlier this year, and now they are being asked to take even more. This does not feel to them as if they’re being

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The steady erosion of Greek democracy

The longer this Greek crisis goes on, the clearer the various agendas at play are becoming. As the Greek finance minister said earlier, the actions of the Eurozone’s northern faction — led by Germany — do suggest that it wants Greece out of the euro. As I’ve blogged previously, the Germans believe that with Monti in charge of Italy and a new centre-right government in Spain, the effects of Greece leaving the euro could be contained. But this is a big risk. After all, Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bust because it was believed that it was safe to do so. Certainly, the other eurozone countries are no longer

Monday

James Forsyth

Will Germany let Greece stay in the euro?

The German government is split on the biggest policy question of the day, according to the FT’s German edition. As Open Europe points out, the paper has a senior member of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag saying that finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble ‘supports the bankruptcy of Greece, Merkel wants to strictly avoid it… It goes back and forth, which is not very helpful.’ If true, this is a remarkable story. The British Foreign Office has been convinced since the beginning of the year that the Germans are keen to kick the Greeks out of the euro. Their conversations with the Germans have convinced them that Berlin believes that the

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Greece is still the word ahead of today’s eurosummit

How about this for a claim by Nicolas Sarkozy, made in a TV appearance yesterday? ‘Europe is no longer at the edge of the cliff.’ It’s quite some statement, so let’s hear it again: ‘Europe is no longer at the edge of the cliff.’ Of course, Sarkozy has reasons for saying it beyond mere pre-electoral braggadocio: the rates paid on Italian and Spanish 10-year bonds have generally been falling since the the beginning of the year; the euro has been making some tentative progress against other currencies; and so on. But it still constrasts heavily with much else that is being said around the eurozone. Only last week, Angela Merkel

Friday

Daniel Korski

‘Let everyone live happily…’

Created to remember one of the darkest chapters in mankind’s history, Holocaust Day is for many people an occasion for unadulterated discomfort. Most of my family perished in the Holocaust and those who survived either hid in occupied Poland, pretending to be Catholics, fled to Uzbekistan in the then-USSR or, like Marcel Rayman, fought the Nazis. Today I re-read a letter Marcel sent to his family the night before he was executed by the Nazis for trying to kill the German commander of Paris: Little mother, When you read this letter, I’m sure it will cause you extreme pain, but I will have been dead for a while, and you’ll

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

A taxing kind of spin

The story being briefed out of the year’s first Franco-German Summit is that President Nicolas Sarkozy won the backing of Chancellor Angela Merkel for a tax on financial transactions, a levy that the British government objects to and that Ernst and Young say would leave a €116bn hole in Europe’s public finances. But before the City begins building barricades and the PM puts on his bulldog mask, it is worth taking another look at the news from Berlin. For no sooner had the agreement been announced than the tax was rejected by Chancellor Merkel’s junior coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democrats, who say they will only back a Europe-wide tax

Monday

James Forsyth

The latest act in Europe’s comic opera

If it was not all so serious, the efforts to save the single currency would be worthy of a comic opera: the Germans could compose the score, the Italians could write the libretto, and the French could take care of the stage directions. The latest IMF-related effort is, perhaps, best described by the website ZeroHedge, which is required reading during these troubled times: “Germany will be responsible for €41.5 bn, France at €31.4 billion, and Italy will need to provide €23.5 billion and Spain another €15 billion. To, you know, bailout Italy and Spain” What is becoming increasingly clear, when you take this news combined with the comments of the

Wednesday

Mats Persson

26 versus 1 — really?

Judging from much of the coverage in UK media, you would be forgiven for thinking that Britain is on the fast track to becoming the North Korea of Europe — eccentric and completely isolated from the rest of the world. Indeed, the media narrative over the past couple of days has largely treated the agreement reached at the summit as concrete, supported in full by everyone apart from Britain. Or ‘27-minus’, as Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso put it. The reality, of course, is quite different. Leaving aside whether Cameron could have played his cards better (he could have), as Gideon Rachman pointed out in yesterday’s FT, ‘the picture of

Saturday

Mats Persson

Ten myths about Cameron’s EU veto

The EU veto that Cameron pulled in the early hours of Thursday morning has been widely misunderstood on all sides. Here are the 10 most common myths: 1. Because of Cameron’s veto, Britain lost a seat at the negotiating table. Not true. The UK was never itself going to take part in the Merkozy pact (and potentially be subject to EU sanctions), and therefore not in the monthly, parallel EU meetings that will begin in January, either. Even if he had approved the Treaty changes, Cameron still would not have had a seat at the table. Wider political challenges aside, the veto didn’t change anything structurally in terms of UK

Daniel Korski

What Cameron can do next

What now? That’s the question. This morning it looks not like 17 versus 10, but like 1 versus 26, which is a cold and lonely place for Britain to be. But it is also the right place to be. David Cameron asked for a little and got less. He had to act as he did and will reap the benefit electorally and among his MPs. Labour’s position is not just politically weak, but also unrealistic: it has been clear for weeks it was not possible to run a ‘periphery strategy’ as the 10 states outside the Euro have different incentives to Britain and different long-term aims. And the idea that

Friday

Fraser Nelson

A dozen questions for after the Brussels summit

Cameron will be depicted in tomorrow’s press as either a Tory Boudicca or an Essex Bulldog (© Tristram Hunt), depending on your point of view. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. Cameron did not go in swinging a handbag, although it will suit No10 to make out that he did. But Labour’s caricature of him storming off and wasting the veto certainly doesn’t ring true to me. An EU27 deal was never likely, and EU17 deal always was. Cameron, on their account, just seems to be being blamed for what was going to happen all along. In any case, we are still trying to assemble the pieces of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sarkozy’s Victory

This is, according to the Spitfire & Bullshit brigade, a great triumph for David Cameron and, more generally, for euroscepticism. If so, I’d hate to see what defeat looks like. What, precisely, has the Prime Minister vetoed? It seems to me that the Franco-German european mission remains alive and well and, if viewed in these terms, Britain has been defeated. That is, the price of a short-term tactical success may be a longer-term strategic defeat. Of course, the Prime Minister had to avoid a treaty that would, sure as eggs be eggs, be vetoed by the British people via a referendum. In that sense, he prevailed. But this is a

Daniel Korski

What could Cameron have done differently?

It is hard not to see the results of last night’s European meeting as the first step towards a fundamentally different — and much looser — relationship between Britain and the EU. The UK, which for centuries has fought to keep any one power from dominating the continent, and for decades has sought to prevent a two-speed Europe from emerging, is now going to have to accept both. It also seems that it will have to protect itself from some form of fiscally-shaped missile against the City.   The irony is that the PM did not apparently push for any UK-only protection of the City, but a broader protocol such

Peter Hoskin

The Merkozy Plan fails to convince

A day or so ago, the markets were rising in anticipation of what might be achieved at this Brussels summit. But this morning they’re mostly either unmoved, or — as in the case of borrowing costs in Italy and Spain — shifting in unpropitious directions. No-one, it seems, has been won over by yet another night of political bargaineering in Brussels. And understandably so. None of the measures mooted this morning are particularly concrete; all have a sogginess about them. More cash will be transferred to the European Financial Stability Facility, but it’s still some distance short of the €1 trillion that was, ahem, ‘announced’ at the end of October.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A defining moment

David Cameron’s use of the veto in the early hours of this morning changes the British political landscape. The first thing to stress is that if the euro collapses it will not be because of the British veto. The deal agreed between the 17 eurozone countries and six of those nations who still want to join it does not address the single currency’s fundamental problems.   What is, perhaps, most intriguing about what happened in the early hours of this morning is that Sarkozy and Merkel chose to put Cameron in this position. In truth, Cameron was not asking for that much. But Sarkozy and Merkel were not prepared to