The nazis marched today in Frankfurt. But it must have been rather frustrating for them. Their numbers were disappointing, they were relegated to the periphery of the city, and a thick wall of police ensured that they would not offend decent people’s eyes or ears. Continue reading
Hessia’s education minister Karin Wolff has recently drawn attention for proposing that school biology lessons include the biblical creation story. Now she has drawn attention by outing herself as gay. All too many politicians pander to creationists; and some out themselves. But it’s pretty rare, I’d think, that the same politician does both.
Wolff will have needed a bit of courage to come out; but probably not too much. There are some homophobes in Germany, and I suppose Wolff’s conservative Christian Democratic Union is where they’d feel most at home. But even CDU people, for the most part, won’t be much bothered. (It’s public knowledge, for example, that the CDU mayor of Hamburg, Ole von Beust, is gay; the Union wouldn’t dream of sidelining him. His title is misleading, by the way. Because Hamburg is both a city and a federal state, von Beust is no mere mayor but head of a state government.)
By coming out, perhaps Wolff hoped to draw attention away from the creationism flap. The Frankfurter Rundschau, by contrast, suggests she outed herself as a tactic against intra-party opponents — by announcing she is a lesbian, she makes it harder for enemies within the CDU to criticise her without appearing bigots. Well, ‘maybe’ on both counts. But perhaps Wolff simply thought, ‘This is who I am, I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not going to hide any more.’ If that’s the case, good for her.
She still needs her ears boxed over the creationism thing, mind you.
Eurozone Watch has two articles about Germany and Italy that offer support for an optimistic view of the European economy. For a start, Sebastian Dullein argues that a comparison of Germany today and the US after the early 90s recession shows that Germany might be on the brink of a productivity surge. Dullein argues that labour productivity growth at the moment is being depressed by the re-absorption of the long-term unemployed, which also happened in the US in the early 90s. He quotes a figure of 7.6 per cent for productivity change (per employee, rather than per hour worked) in the metalworking industries (in Germany, a term that covers most of the industrial sector), which is positively stellar – after all, the US didn’t pass 2 per cent per-hour until 1998, well into the boom.
He also criticises Wolfgang Munchau for arguing (in essence) that there had been no structural reforms that accounted for productivity growth, and therefore that there was no growth. At this, I think I heard J.K. Galbraith’s ghost chuckle into his martini – it is indeed a fine example of all that is wrong with economics as a discipline that one can argue that we must all reform because there is a crisis, the evidence of that crisis being that one’s reforms have not been adopted.
An alternative argument would be that there was not all that much wrong with German firms in the first place. It is suggested that R&D spending is too low, but Dullein argues that it’s picking up. And anyway, their products can’t be that bad, as the rest of the world wants to buy German exports more than anything else. He also notes that there has been a wave of capital investment since 2002.
This possible German shock is already reverberating interestingly. Italy, for example, is experiencing better economic times, with growth picking up and strong industrial order books – especially on orders from France and Germany for capital goods. The growth is despite an increase in the tax take, with the result that the government is likely to have a chunk of change on hand. The OECD and the EU Commission would rather like to see that used to cut the monster public debt, still running at over 100 per cent of GDP. But the political situation might make that unlikely.
That might be the good news, though. When wasn’t the Italian government up to its eyes in debt? And it’s almost traditional that political turmoil in Italy is accompanied by good economic news. The difficult bit, though, is that Italian inflation is running somewhat slower than German – this implies, of course, an improvement in the terms-of-trade. Probably, Italy has done some internal disinflation, being unable to devalue – but this implies that wages have suffered relatively. The question is how to redistribute the benefit of the German shock without killing the golden goose.
I was recently fiddling with the German Federal Railways’ on-line European timetables, when I noticed something very strange. They have the best cross-European timetable, no doubt about it, but some odd things happen if you’re heading too far east. For example, when I asked it for a route from Paris to Tallinn, everything went a little bit weird..
To kick off, it suggested Nachtzug number 237 to Hamburg, which seemed fair enough. And, I was informed, I could take a limited number of bicycles with me on prior reservation. Things went wrong, though, at the next step. In Hamburg, there was a connection on EuroCity 31 to Copenhagen. You can see where this is going, can’t you – due north, essentially. There, I was to catch an X-2000 Swedish high-speed train to Stockholm and transfer to the docks by bus, before hopping a Silja Line ship to Turku in Finland. Presumably rested after the overnight crossing, I’d catch fast train no. R130 to Pasila/Böle, to meet a night train, D 31 (for some historical reason all the long-distance trains are numbered as German D-Züge) to St. Petersburg.
Arriving in the northern capital at 1.40 am, I’d cross it to the Vitebski station and spend three hours on the platform waiting for the express 649-KH to Tallinn. Riiight. In all, some 63 hours. The only alternative differed in that I’d have to change in Brussels as well.
Somehow, the great clockwork was set up to try and avoid leaving EU territory – it’s the only explanation I could come up with. If, after all, I forced it to route via Minsk it produced a far better result, down to 33 hours and four trains – and no ships! But left to its own devices, though, it did go to Russia. I am fascinated by this application pathology – it’s quite routine for timetable servers to produce absurdly complicated routes in order to save a few minutes somewhere, and in fact it’s an important problem in Internet engineering that the system’s basic rules can easily create inefficiently large numbers of hops unless something is done to enforce a less specific route.
Or is there some sort of assumption that nobody wants to go via Belarus baked into the code?
Though creationism does rear its ugly head from time to time in Europe, it is largely a fringe phenomenon. Unlike in America, even most religious Europeans accept evolution as an obvious fact, viewing the biblical creation stories (yes, there’s more than one) as, at most, poetic metaphor. So it’s easy for us over here to indulge in a superior smile when we observe the antics of those primitive American bible-thumpers.
At least in Germany, we shouldn’t be so quick to smile. Continue reading
Germany has tossed a Holocaust denier into prison, and the American Christianist right is all outraged about it. Or so PZ Myers tells me; it’s telling that I had to learn about this from him, as this hasn’t been a big story here at all.
As you probably know, it is illegal in Germany to deny the Holocaust. Lutheran pastor Johannes Lerle denied it publicly; he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to a year behind bars. So far, so yawn. Germany has its share of reactionaries, but any of them stupid enough to deny the Holocaust publicly are punished; end of story as far as the Germans are concerned.
Not in the USA, though. For some on that side of the Atlantic, Pastor Lerle is a Christian martyr. Continue reading
The dismal weather notwithstanding, the family and I headed out to the Waldstadion this weekend to take in a football match. Now how on earth, you’ll have asked yourself straight away, could we have seen a football match at this time of year? The answer is simply: it wasn’t football, it was ‘football’. Continue reading
Though not a square-root vegetable, at least not a square-root or death vegetable when you get down to it at the Brussels bargaining table.
The Kaczynski twins are providing some sparks in the run-up to this summit, and they are every bit as ham-handed as noted below and by Henry over here. One level of the game is to try to get Poland permanently into the EU big leagues with a prominent display of obstreporousness. This has a long, if not entirely honorable, history within the European institutions. See chair, empty and handbag, Thatcher’s. But what these episodes cost France and the UK in long-term ill will may well have been greater than the headline gains they resulted in. At any rate, the current potato casserole shows that Polish politicians have mastered the EU skills of brinksmanship, populist posturing and feather ruffling. Whether they have mastered the more productive arts is yet to be seen.
On the other hand, there really isn’t much time left to get an unconstitution (my word for the next EU treaty) rolling. Elections to Parliament are in 2009. Almost all of 2008 will be required for ratification. That leaves the second half of 2007 to fix the details. The Portuguese presidency, as worthy as it assuredly will be, won’t have the resources to put behind a treaty push that the German one has. And Merkel’s background has made her an honest broker on Central European issues in a way no other current leader I can think of could match. She’s been good enough at cajoling that Germany’s role as largest contributor has almost never been mentioned. But there’s that, too.
Anyway, as almost always in things EU, compromise at the last possible moment remains the way to bet.
God knows I’ve been snarky about German lefties before. Look, not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi. Lectures are not a form of rape. Osama bin Laden is not on the side of eco-feminism. (The last one is a true story, although Austrian rather than German.) But it’s very true that the modern German police gets the hot shivers for new kit.
Was there any reason at all for this? For non-German readers, during the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, the police seem to have obtained the use of a Bundeswehr Tornado reconnaissance plane, and to have sent it to photograph a camp of protestors. That is creepy, but this is inexcusable: the pass was carried out as if the aircraft was doing its 1980s mission, at 150 metres’ altitude and maximum speed.
Naturally, the Greens point out that aircraft of the same type are in use over Afghanistan, and therefore Germany is Iraq and everyone is a nazi, or something. But it’s impossible to see any justification for this except for a pure indulgence in power. If they really had wanted photographs, they could have had better ones with less drama. But someone felt it necessary to drop a sonic boom over the autonomous chaosists, and the pilots are not born yet who would pass up the chance for some very fast low-level flying with an audience. Neither is the Interior Minister yet born who would pass up the chance to impress the Bild Zeitung with a binge on force.
As so often, Germany and Britain are more alike than anyone would care to admit. Not that the RAF was available to buzz demonstrators on the road to Gleneagles in 2005, but there is little in current government practice to support it. I am reminded, though, of Tim Garton-Ash’s description of a huge police deployment to squash a far-left demo on the day of reunification in Berlin. He referred to Hartley Shawcross’s crack that “we are the masters now”. Well, this is over. If there’s anyone who can’t appeal to that glee of first days, it’s the G8.
The German newspaper whose web site is now marginally better organized reports that Germany will offer a legal means to regularize the residence status of people who have lived in the country for several years without having, shall we say, dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s at the local immigration office. State governments have also agreed to give some preference in civil service hiring to people from immigrant backgrounds. The federal change had been agreed to by the current grand coalition, and the agreement of the states obviously includes those with governments of many different stripes.
This is all to the good. Every step that has been taken away from the late Kohl government’s position that “Germany is not a destination for immigration” has been a step in the right direction. In recent years, the number of German citizens has held steady mainly because of people taking on citizenship, as deaths continue to outpace births. The head-in-the-sand view that there aren’t immigrants in Germany is steadily retreating to the margins, and rightly so. (In practice, according to the newspaper, the new regulation affects about 100,000 people who have been denied asylum over the years.)
One criterion is that the foreigner should not “have come into serious conflict with German laws.” I hope they don’t mean like this or this. On the other hand, Americans and Australians are apparently exempt from the language requirement for getting residence permits for family members. Jawohl, fair dinkum, guys.