Germany

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Meltdown danger

The situation in Japan is deteriorating further. In the early hours of this morning, the last workers are said to have left the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant as the danger of a nuclear meltdown grew. There have been explosions in three of the plant’s reactors and a fourth one is on fire. Everyone within a 30 kilometre radius has been told to stay indoors, and the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, stationed more than 100 miles away to help earthquake victims, sailed farther away from the stricken plant after detecting unusual levels of radioactivity in the air. The Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, has confirmed that, “substantial amounts of radiation

Saturday

Hywel Williams

Pastures new

On 20 September 1949, five days after his election as Chancellor of the newly created German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer addressed the Bundestag: ‘Much unhappiness and much damage’, he told the deputies, ‘has been caused by denazification . On 20 September 1949, five days after his election as Chancellor of the newly created German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer addressed the Bundestag: ‘Much unhappiness and much damage’, he told the deputies, ‘has been caused by denazification . . . many have atoned for a guilt that was subjectively not heavy.’ The division of Germany’s population into ‘the politically flawless and the politically flawed’ had to disappear and ‘the government of the

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron signs up to muscular liberalism

“State multiculturalism has failed.” Angela Merkel put voice to that sentiment last October. Now it David Cameron’s turn to do the same. In a speech in Munich today, the Prime Minister has taken a rhetorical torch to Islamic extremism. “Frankly,” he says, “we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.” It is, at the very least, a significant political moment. What Cameron is doing here – as explained by Charles Moore and Paul Goodman – is publicly signing up to a philosophy of the world. It is a philosophy that rejects the idea that extremism should simply be contained. Instead,

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Grim parallels with Germany for Nick Clegg?

Germany is one of the few countries that Nick Clegg has been able to look to for tips on how to be a successful Liberal party in coalition with a larger Conservative party. In 2006, Guido Westerwelle even took a delegation of Free Democrats to a Lib Dem frontbench meeting. Coffee House once predicted that, if the AV referendum was won, Clegg could one day become Britain’s Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a permanent powerbroker. The parties are of course different in many ways. The Free Democrats are decidedly more pro-market and pro-business than the Liberal Democrats. They also have a lot more experience of government. Before the last election, the Free Democrats

Friday

Mats Persson

What Cameron should push for in Brussels

As David Cameron stays in Brussels for his third European summit as PM, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the EU’s approach to the eurozone crisis – put up short-term cash and pray – isn’t convincing anyone.   On Wednesday, Moody’s threatened to downgrade Spanish government bonds another notch, citing the fact that, between them, the country’s government and banks have to raise €290bn next year to keep the party going. And, across the eurozone, banks and governments face daunting refinancing targets in 2011, which begs the questions: at what cost? And what happens if they fail to meet them?   Taking into account the countries that themselves have received support

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

A “two stone” solution to the Euro crisis will unbalance the coalition

Whatever the British government wants, moves are now afoot on the Continent to address some of the structural problem with the Euro. They may in the end lead to some form of fiscal federalism. So far they are not supported by Angela Merkel, the key decision-maker, who worries constantly about the court in Karlsruhe, which has set clear limits on further European integration. But they are said to be supported, at least in part, by Finance Minister Wolfgang Shauble. Writing in the Financial Times, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Peer Steinbrück argue that the EU needs “a more radical, targeted effort to end the current uncertainty, and provide stronger support for the

Friday

James Forsyth

What Germany gets out of the euro

The Guardian has an intriguing story tonight. It reports that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a recent EU Summit meeting that Germany might leave the euro if it didn’t get its way on a bail-out mechanism. The threat is academic as Merkel largely got what she wanted. But there’s one other thing worth remembering: however galling bailing out other euro-zone members is, Germany benefits from the euro. If Germany had its own currency, it would be worth far more than the euro is which is kept down by the problems of the PIGS. A Germany that was still using the Deutschmark would not be able to export anywhere near

Saturday

Daniel Korski

A more German Europe?

Timothy Garton Ash asked an important question in the Guardian recenty – is Europe becoming more German? Or, to put it more accurately, does the EU have to become more German to survive? “If the eurozone falls apart, it will be because Germany did not do enough to save it. If the eurozone is saved, it will be thanks to Germany. This is the greatest challenge to German statecraft since the country was peacefully united 20 years ago.” “Yet here is another horn of Germany’s dilemma. For half a century, German politicians have repeated, like a mantra, Thomas Mann’s call for “a European Germany, not a German Europe”. It was in

Wednesday

Matthew Sinclair

The British taxpayer should not be bailing out Ireland

Everyone is talking about the royal wedding today.  It will be a great occasion but the public finances are tight and people are already asking about the cost.  There is a bigger issue for British taxpayers, though.  Our politicians have arranged for them to get hitched to the bride from hell: the ongoing fiscal disaster in the eurozone.   Under current plans it is reported that we could be liable for up to £7 billion in any Irish bailout.  At the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we have just this morning started a petition against British taxpayers’ money being put at risk for a euro-bailout of Ireland; you can sign it here.  

Monday

David Blackburn

Apocalypse soon

Writing in the Irish Times, Morgan Kelly has denigrated the Irish government’s handling of the economy. Comparisons are often counter-factual – Irish politics is not divided along lines of left and right, and the Celtic Tiger was made of tissue paper. But, to English readers – servicing a colossal national debt with their punitive tax bills, facing crumbling house prices, waiting for the moment when mortgages become beyond the reach of all but the cash rich, and encumbered with billions in worthless global bank assets – it is a truly terrifying read. I urge CoffeeHousers’ to read the whole piece, but here is its essence: ‘By next year Ireland will

Sunday

Daniel Korski

What happened to Germany’s European identity?

What has happened to Germany? Policy-makers and analysts have been pondering the question for the last few years. No longer happy to be the pro-European par excellence, Germany has become more assertive, more self-centred – in others words more normal. German scholar Ulrike Guerot has called the new Germany “post-Romantic”, ie more interest-based and less willing to let its history determine its future. Dominic Moisi says Germany has become “a second France.” Part of the reason is the change among the country’s political elite. The post-war generation has left the scene and the new leaders – on the Left and Right – have little time for Helmut Kohl’s cheque-book diplomacy.

Saturday

David Blackburn

Cameron’s euro battle is just beginning

David Cameron sold himself a hospital pass in Europe this week. His failure to secure a budget freeze has revealed that Britain’s clout has been wildly exaggerated. The likely 2.9 percent budget increase is mildly inconvenient for Cameron politically, but it is immaterial in the grand scheme of the next round of budget discussions and the mounting wrangle about the Lisbon treaty. He will have to compromise, as he did this week. He made some ground, finding allies to resist an untrammelled treaty change – the Irish, the Dutch, the Danes, the Czechs and the Poles. The biggest prize will be Sarkozy, whose antipathy towards Merkel is arch – the

Saturday

Alexander Starritt

Land of poets and thinkers

The reason Peter Watson gives for writing this long intellectual history of Germany since 1750 is a convincing one: that British obsession with Nazism has blinded many British people to the achievements of German culture. Watson describes the complaints of German commentators about the emphasis on Nazism even in British schooling, which were borne out by the 2005 report of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and “Hitlerisation” of post-1914 history.’ Watson also discusses the importance of Nazism to America, and his most intriguing point is that interest in the Holocaust is a comparatively recent phenomenon. A study in the 1950s found that the effect

Saturday

Juliet Gardiner

What we did to them . . .

The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. Scrutinising the home front, checking for evidence of low morale, accounting for that of high, measuring the effect of wartime regulations and deprivations, calculating the long-term impact of continuous bombardment and destruction on civilians, in sum, accounting for the implications of the phrase ‘total war’ to describe the second world war, has been an occupation for

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Nick Clegg’s 15% Opportunity

Who would have thought, even a year ago, that the future of the Liberal Democrats would arouse such interest? Perhaps I was too harsh on Nick Clegg’s speech to the party’s conference; certainly Fraser was more impressed by it and the gang at Liberal Vision also seem pleased. Perhaps I was wrong to hope that Clegg would disavow the social democrats in his party in this speech. One should always be wary of criticising politicians simply because they decline to do what you would have them do. Equally, one should not assume that doing what one would want them to do is the path to either political or policy success.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Blow-out in Berlin

D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). Not only was it brilliant, it was also a first novel, and apparently by an American. Holden Caulfield was invoked, and Liam McIlvanney called it ‘the most vital slice of American vernacular since Huck Finn’. It turned out, though, to have been written by a Brit, ‘on the floor of a box-room in Balham’. D. B. C. Pierre is the nom de plume of Peter Finlay, an evolved childhood nickname — ‘Dirty But Clean’, which is evidently his motto as a writer.

Friday

Alex Massie

The Liberaltarian Future?

Liberaltarianism is, in case you haven’t been following this mildly esoteric debate in Washington, the notion that rather than hitch their wagons to conservativism American libertarians and libertarian-minded folk should also explore relations with (US) liberals in order to further the libertarian agenda. This has proven an oddly controversial idea and, generally, has been dismissed as a) a joke, b) a fool’s errand or c) simply impossible. Now Brink Lindsey, who first coined the awkward term “liberaltarian” in a now famous-for-DC essay in the New Republic and his colleague Will Wilkinson* are leaving the libertarian Cato Institute. This has tongues wagging. In some circles anyway. See Tim Carney’s Washington Examiner

Saturday

Margaret Macmillan

The threat of holy war

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a story about German attempts, headed by the unlovely Kaiser Wilhelm and the glamorous and suitably ruthless Hilda von Einem, to stir up a world-wide Muslim holy war against the Allies during the first world war and ultimately build a vast German empire stretching to India itself? Now Sean McMeekin shows that fiction, after all, was not so far from the truth, and he makes the most of what is a very good story. He starts in the late 19th century

Saturday

Michael Henderson

The sound of eternity

The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. That honour is surely shared by the Eroica, in which the composer changed the course of orchestral writing after two prentice works (and what works they were!), and the Seventh. Beethoven’s last symphony, known in the English-speaking world as the ‘Choral’, for its unprecedented use of the human voice, is magnificent but flawed. The meditative slow movement may be the greatest Beethoven ever wrote, but the joy that Beethoven strove for in the finale finds finer musical and dramatic expression in the hymn to liberty that closes Fidelio. If it is not his greatest

Monday

Alex Massie

Karma

Yes, it might well, nay would, have changed the momentum of the game*. No, video technology is not needed (not least because it hasn’t improved any game in which it has been introduced). And anyway, to adapt Wodehouse, what you gain on the roundabouts of 1966 you lose on the swings of 2010. Consider this, then, an open thread to moan about the World Cup:   *I didn’t actually see it since I was playing cricket. Against Langholm. We won. I took, rather astonishingly, two wickets. It should have been three. Or even four. But that would be greedy and massively above and beyond expectations.