PDA

View Full Version : German Hegemony?



Kathianne
12-05-2011, 06:15 AM
I've been reading some similar pieces from Europe, this is the first though I've come across from US. There are areas that may go a little too far, but seems the regular media should be bringing up the concerns that our government seems to be ignoring.

It does seem we keep going down the same roads, perhaps we are in Oz?

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/toward-a-gentler-kinder-german-reich


Toward a Gentler, Kinder German Reich? The Realpolitik behind the European Financial Crisis By Tony Corn (http://smallwarsjournal.com/author/tony-corn)
Journal Article | Nov 29 2011 - 8:32am
With each passing day, European Integration – the longest running political soap opera – is increasingly resembling the infamous “don’t mention the war” episode of Fawlty Towers. In a recent op-ed entitled “Germany has declared war on the eurozone,” the editor-at-large of the respected London Times minced no words about Germany’s grand strategy in the past two years:


“If Clausewitz is right that “war is the continuation of policy by other means”, then Germany is again at war with Europe, at least in the sense that German policy is trying to achieve in Europe the characteristic objectives of war: the redrawing of international boundaries and the subjugation of foreign peoples…. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has consistently claimed that Germany will “do whatever it takes” to save the euro. But what she has actually done is consistently to refuse to take any of the necessary action. She has also prevented European institutions from taking such actions, even when the German veto had no legal or moral justification.”


Not to be outdone, The Economist that same week castigated Angela Merkel’s “pigheaded brinkmanship” and argued that she “cannot continue to threaten feckless economies with exclusion from the euro in one breath and reassure markets by promising the euro’s salvation with the next. Unless she chooses soon, Germany’s chancellor will find that the choice has been made for her.” [1] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/print/11834#_edn1) What’s the fuss really about?


In the past two years, German elites have taken up the Rahm Emanuel doctrine (“never let a serious crisis go to waste”) all the more eagerly that Washington, in the process of rebalancing away from the Greater Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, is less interested than ever in following intra-EU affairs.


For the third time in less than twenty years, Germany is trying to force down the throat of Europe a federal “political union” which, in the eyes of too many European observers, eerily resembles a gentler, kinder Anschluss. While Europeans were able to push back against the first two attempts, the two-year long financial crisis has created within Europe a “German unipolar moment” and provided the kind of leverage that had eluded Germany earlier. With the German Chancellor as a de facto “EU Chancellor,” German elites are leveraging the crisis by playing a game of chicken in order to make their federal vision prevail.


Demographically and economically, Germany is one third larger than either Britain or France. In the past ten years, this predominance has already been reflected in EU institutions, both quantitatively (Germany has the largest representation in the EU parliament) and qualitatively (the European Central Bank is a clone of the Bundesbank). But that’s apparently not good enough for Berlin, who has deliberately let the crisis move from the periphery (Greece and Portugal) to the center (Italy and France) in order to extract the maximum of concessions from the rest of Europe.


Germany’s ideal, if unstated, goal? A constitutionalization of the EU treaties, which would irreversibly institutionalize the current “correlation of forces,” and allow German hegemony in the 27-member European Union to approximate Prussian hegemony in the 27-member Bismarckian Reich. German elites have become so fixated on this goal that they are now talking about changing the German constitution itself in the event the German Constitutional Court decides to get in the way of the New European Order...

revelarts
12-06-2011, 03:46 PM
I've run across some of this here and there too. Germany is a powerful state with lots of central control of it economy and businesses, it's not to be ignored or assumed to have turned into Switzerland. Though economics seems to be the weapon of choice these days.