Letter From Europe: An Odd Couple
The Aspen Institute Berlin
March 2006
Berlin
RECENTLY I HAD THE PLEASURE of hosting Patrick Chamorel of the Hoover Institution for a presentation titled, "What's the Matter With France?" You got the feeling Berliners were showing up for a little relief. As for Patrick, don't get me wrong. He's a proud Frenchman. He once told me he loves wine and would like to become a collector, but as owner of a mere 150 bottles he was hardly to be taken seriously. He wasn't joking.
Chamorel had flown in from Paris to argue with considerable conviction (and gobs of French charm, of course) that while Germany may rank today as the sick man of Europe, France has become the sickest. On learning that a young colleague of mine had just returned to Berlin from a two-week trip to Cuba, Chamorel quipped: What's the difference between France and Cuba? Cuba does not have strikes. La Grande Nation was in fine form.
I thought Germans could be hard on their country. Complaining can get so out of hand here that I started to imagine overly zealous German regulators introducing an anti-complaining law. That's when I discovered a German IT company called "Nutzwerk," which threatens to fire employees caught complaining. No kidding. It has actually written a non-complaining clause into company contracts.
Chamorel is no kvetcher, though. He thinks France can be fixed. Like many in the pro-market crowd, he pins his hopes on Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential elections. But the litany of what ails the country is daunting and our French guest did an admirable job helping Germans realize how good they have it. Like Germany, France has problems with low growth, double-digit unemployment -- including the highest youth unemployment in Europe -- and, as Chamorel put it, a failed social model that nearly everyone in the EU now ridicules. Germany suffers from political gridlock and malaise? Today more than one-third of the French electorate votes for parties of the far left or right. As Chamorel kept reminding the Germans, "our Greens" are a lot crazier than yours.
The roundtable took place in a private upstairs room at the trendy restaurant Linden Life, on the boulevard Unter den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate. At one point, a fellow from the French Embassy hauled out statistics to try to stem the tide of bad news. After all, he said, the French public sector was in some areas far more efficient than the German. Talk about setting the bar low. Afterward the young diplomat unburdened himself. He was just trying to do his job, he confided. Our speaker's assessment had hit the nail on the head. I wonder if Cuban diplomats are doing the same thing.
Germany and France have more than economic stagnation in common. Both face a serious demographic crisis, although in France there are slight signs of a reversal. Both have been frustrated that, at the very moment Paris and Berlin were set to lead the new Europe, the European Union expanded and thus diluted the power of the Franco-German idea. Both Germany and France fret a lot about American hegemony, much in the same way the smaller and medium-size nations in Europe wring their hands about Paris and Berlin.
IN GERMANY TODAY YOU FIND A CLASH of two cultures. Business has done extraordinarily well in adapting to the challenges and pressures of globalization. There is a group here that grasps the importance of speed, flexibility, mobility. These players help explain why Germany is far from being a failure. But then there also remains massive resistance to modern times -- in the trade unions, the universities, in the left-wing media, in both major parties, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the SPD. This helps explain why Germany is a long way from being a smashing success.
France has this clash of cultures, too. But for the French things are worse. The day when Paris could dominate Brussels is over. The French know this and it stings. The French rejection of the European Constitution was a blow not only to Jacques Chirac, but to the French political class as a whole. Then came the recent riots. The French were humiliated. To be sure, everyone knew for years that an explosion was coming. Chirac himself had begun to talk about a kind of "soft terror" in "deprived suburbs" back in the mid-1990s. But when things finally erupted, France was still basking in Schadenfreude over Hurricane Katrina. Le Monde had gloated about a superior social system, deploring an America that spends a fortune on a war in Iraq but cannot care for its own citizens at home. Most of France had piled on.
I thought for a moment that France's own failure might engender a touch of humility. Then I caught a television interview with Dominique de Villepin, who corrected the interviewer who foolishly had asked about "the riots" in France. You see, according to Villepin, these were not "riots." These were incidents of "social upheaval." Riots are more violent, said the French prime minister, and -- you guessed it -- what they have in the United States. I suspect it was at least in part this kind of vanity that prompted Chirac to blurt out in mid-January that France would nuke any terrorist group or country that dared to strike at French interests.
The Chirac comment came the same day in January as Chamorel spoke in Berlin, at the very time Germany was whipping itself into a frenzy over the so-called BND affair. France and Germany have their differences. I really wonder sometimes how both French and German politicians can argue with a straight face that an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy can be possible. The BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, a.k.a. Germany's CIA, was accused of having secretly helped the U.S. in the war against Saddam Hussein.
It is an odd notion, of course, considering the depth of opposition to the war by the previous German government. The allegation caused lots of huffing and puffing in the media and among politicians of all parties. One hyperventilating Green called the idea "monstrous" (remember, the French Greens are crazier than the Germans). Now consider what was at stake. Apparently, two BND agents may have given the U.S. information that enabled Coalition forces to avoid certain targets like schools and hospitals. Pretty dreadful stuff, right? These same two agents may also have helped the U.S. try to take out Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the war, by passing on information about the dictator's location at a dinner in a Baghdad neighborhood. It is hard to imagine the French self-flagellating over such questions.
France and Germany are Europe's odd couple. I suspect the Germans think secretly of the French as cheese-eating Americans, that is, nationalistic, militaristic, and unilateral. Or maybe not so secretly. A German friend tells me she vividly recalls that when France engaged in nuclear testing in the mid-1990s, the media filled with anti-French tirades and T-shirts proliferated in Berlin with mushroom clouds and slogans like "F[---] Chirac" and "Hiro-Chirac." Maybe there's hope for the French after all.
www.aspeninstitute.org
The Aspen Institute Berlin
March 2006
Berlin
RECENTLY I HAD THE PLEASURE of hosting Patrick Chamorel of the Hoover Institution for a presentation titled, "What's the Matter With France?" You got the feeling Berliners were showing up for a little relief. As for Patrick, don't get me wrong. He's a proud Frenchman. He once told me he loves wine and would like to become a collector, but as owner of a mere 150 bottles he was hardly to be taken seriously. He wasn't joking.
Chamorel had flown in from Paris to argue with considerable conviction (and gobs of French charm, of course) that while Germany may rank today as the sick man of Europe, France has become the sickest. On learning that a young colleague of mine had just returned to Berlin from a two-week trip to Cuba, Chamorel quipped: What's the difference between France and Cuba? Cuba does not have strikes. La Grande Nation was in fine form.
I thought Germans could be hard on their country. Complaining can get so out of hand here that I started to imagine overly zealous German regulators introducing an anti-complaining law. That's when I discovered a German IT company called "Nutzwerk," which threatens to fire employees caught complaining. No kidding. It has actually written a non-complaining clause into company contracts.
Chamorel is no kvetcher, though. He thinks France can be fixed. Like many in the pro-market crowd, he pins his hopes on Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential elections. But the litany of what ails the country is daunting and our French guest did an admirable job helping Germans realize how good they have it. Like Germany, France has problems with low growth, double-digit unemployment -- including the highest youth unemployment in Europe -- and, as Chamorel put it, a failed social model that nearly everyone in the EU now ridicules. Germany suffers from political gridlock and malaise? Today more than one-third of the French electorate votes for parties of the far left or right. As Chamorel kept reminding the Germans, "our Greens" are a lot crazier than yours.
The roundtable took place in a private upstairs room at the trendy restaurant Linden Life, on the boulevard Unter den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate. At one point, a fellow from the French Embassy hauled out statistics to try to stem the tide of bad news. After all, he said, the French public sector was in some areas far more efficient than the German. Talk about setting the bar low. Afterward the young diplomat unburdened himself. He was just trying to do his job, he confided. Our speaker's assessment had hit the nail on the head. I wonder if Cuban diplomats are doing the same thing.
Germany and France have more than economic stagnation in common. Both face a serious demographic crisis, although in France there are slight signs of a reversal. Both have been frustrated that, at the very moment Paris and Berlin were set to lead the new Europe, the European Union expanded and thus diluted the power of the Franco-German idea. Both Germany and France fret a lot about American hegemony, much in the same way the smaller and medium-size nations in Europe wring their hands about Paris and Berlin.
IN GERMANY TODAY YOU FIND A CLASH of two cultures. Business has done extraordinarily well in adapting to the challenges and pressures of globalization. There is a group here that grasps the importance of speed, flexibility, mobility. These players help explain why Germany is far from being a failure. But then there also remains massive resistance to modern times -- in the trade unions, the universities, in the left-wing media, in both major parties, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the SPD. This helps explain why Germany is a long way from being a smashing success.
France has this clash of cultures, too. But for the French things are worse. The day when Paris could dominate Brussels is over. The French know this and it stings. The French rejection of the European Constitution was a blow not only to Jacques Chirac, but to the French political class as a whole. Then came the recent riots. The French were humiliated. To be sure, everyone knew for years that an explosion was coming. Chirac himself had begun to talk about a kind of "soft terror" in "deprived suburbs" back in the mid-1990s. But when things finally erupted, France was still basking in Schadenfreude over Hurricane Katrina. Le Monde had gloated about a superior social system, deploring an America that spends a fortune on a war in Iraq but cannot care for its own citizens at home. Most of France had piled on.
I thought for a moment that France's own failure might engender a touch of humility. Then I caught a television interview with Dominique de Villepin, who corrected the interviewer who foolishly had asked about "the riots" in France. You see, according to Villepin, these were not "riots." These were incidents of "social upheaval." Riots are more violent, said the French prime minister, and -- you guessed it -- what they have in the United States. I suspect it was at least in part this kind of vanity that prompted Chirac to blurt out in mid-January that France would nuke any terrorist group or country that dared to strike at French interests.
The Chirac comment came the same day in January as Chamorel spoke in Berlin, at the very time Germany was whipping itself into a frenzy over the so-called BND affair. France and Germany have their differences. I really wonder sometimes how both French and German politicians can argue with a straight face that an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy can be possible. The BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, a.k.a. Germany's CIA, was accused of having secretly helped the U.S. in the war against Saddam Hussein.
It is an odd notion, of course, considering the depth of opposition to the war by the previous German government. The allegation caused lots of huffing and puffing in the media and among politicians of all parties. One hyperventilating Green called the idea "monstrous" (remember, the French Greens are crazier than the Germans). Now consider what was at stake. Apparently, two BND agents may have given the U.S. information that enabled Coalition forces to avoid certain targets like schools and hospitals. Pretty dreadful stuff, right? These same two agents may also have helped the U.S. try to take out Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the war, by passing on information about the dictator's location at a dinner in a Baghdad neighborhood. It is hard to imagine the French self-flagellating over such questions.
France and Germany are Europe's odd couple. I suspect the Germans think secretly of the French as cheese-eating Americans, that is, nationalistic, militaristic, and unilateral. Or maybe not so secretly. A German friend tells me she vividly recalls that when France engaged in nuclear testing in the mid-1990s, the media filled with anti-French tirades and T-shirts proliferated in Berlin with mushroom clouds and slogans like "F[---] Chirac" and "Hiro-Chirac." Maybe there's hope for the French after all.
www.aspeninstitute.org