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“Savior of Europe”? The other side of Angela Merkel

2021-08-08T04:52:25.486Z


What the world did not understand about the German Chancellor. An argument from the US magazine Foreign Policy.


What the world did not understand about the German Chancellor.

An argument from the US magazine Foreign Policy.

  • Angela Merkel's era will end in September 2021.

  • Germany's Chancellor surrounds the narrative of the “Savior of Europe”.

  • But the CDU politician also has another side, as her dealings with Russia and China show, for example.

  • This article is available in German for the first time - it was first published on July 9, 2021 by the magazine "Foreign Policy".

Washington, DC - This summer - the pandemic's stranglehold is slowly easing and Europe reopens to business and pleasure - the Merkel era ends. For her 16 years as Chancellor Angela Merkel has earned admiration and praise in many ways. When she was elected Chancellor in autumn 2005 as the first woman, unemployment was just over 11 percent and Germany was widely regarded as the “sick man of Europe”.

On both sides of the Atlantic, scientific work has attempted to get to the bottom of the causes of the German malaise. One wondered what made the country so difficult to reform. Four electoral terms later, German unemployment is 6 percent (and would be even lower without the pandemic), and nobody questions Germany's political, financial and economic leadership role in the European Union.

In a time characterized by unpredictable, raving rulers like Donald Trump *, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro *, Merkel always stood for rational, unwavering leadership.

In fact, political observers on both sides of the Atlantic liked to refer to her as the new "leader of the free world" in the early years of the Trump presidency.

Merkel has never made friends with this honorary title, although she is undisputedly the de facto head of the EU.

But what kind of leadership has it provided for the European project?

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel: The narrative of the "Savior of Europe"

In many reviews of Merkel's tenure in office, she is presented, full of praise, as the savior of Europe - as a steady and reliable hand that has steered the EU through a series of unprecedented crises. It describes their role over the past decade as follows. When the debt crisis in the eurozone threatened to drag the EU * institutions into the abyss, Merkel negotiated rescue packages for the most severely affected members of the eurozone, supported politically massive injections of liquidity from the European Central Bank * and paved the way for a large number of new ones EU institutions, including a far-reaching banking union.

When Vladimir Putin's * Russia annexed Crimea and intervened militarily in the eastern Ukrainian Donbass region, she kept a cool head and played a leading role in the negotiation of the Minsk agreements. In the refugee crisis in summer 2015, she showed her humanity - and paid a high political price for it - and allowed more than 1 million mostly Syrian refugees to move to Germany.

During the Brexit * negotiations, Merkel ensured that the EU member states formed a united front.

The inviolability and indivisibility of the four foundations of the EU internal market - the free movement of goods, services, capital and people - were sacred to her.

And in spring 2020 it threw its political weight on the scales so that a 750 billion euros pandemic recovery fund would be set up, financed by joint bonds through the European Commission *.

This was a groundbreaking step towards an EU fiscal union and economic government.

Political crises in Europe: Merkel's hesitation and hesitation - "remember"

There is some truth to this narrative, which is flattering for Merkel, but it is only part of the truth.

Merkel's leadership in Europe also has a darker side - both in terms of its decision-making tactics and the guiding principles of its policies.

In the political crises of Europe, Merkel distinguished herself strategically primarily through hesitation and hesitation.

This approach was so typical for Merkel that the young generation in Germany made a verb out of it -

mark

.

Colloquially, it stands for chronic indecision and for silence or inaction about something.

("Merkeln" was initially the favorite when Langenscheidt-Verlag voted for Youth Word of the Year 2015, but in the end the winner was "

Smombie

", an abbreviation from smartphone zombie).

Merkel passed the buck on almost every crisis.

She postponed big decisions until the last moment, and then often only moved just enough so that everything didn't collapse.

In many cases - from the euro crisis to the rule of law crises in Hungary and Poland - their strategic inaction has allowed serious problems to persist and become entrenched.

Hungary, China and Russia: Merkel put German profits above European principles and values

Not only their tactics of "Merkeln" turned out to be problematic. Far more worrying were the core and nature of their policies, which in many cases could simply be described as “mercantilism”: German trade and geo-economic interests systematically took precedence over democratic and human rights values ​​or intra-community solidarity. Pampering the Hungarian ruler Viktor Orban *, who set up the first autocracy in the EU, actively wooing Europe's geostrategic rivals Russia and China ... Merkel has always tended to sell German profits and everything that is useful for Germany through European principles and values.

This was also the case during the eurozone crisis: cynically, the EU's measures saved German bankers at the expense of the Greek and Portuguese people. Even at the moment of her most daring moral leadership, the 2015/16 migration crisis, she ultimately failed to persuade her EU colleagues to adopt a humane common policy. Instead, she resorted to an unsavory deal - "money for refugees" - with Turkey.

And when she turned around in 2020 with regard to Eurobonds against the background of the corona pandemic, she made it abundantly clear that she saw this as a one-off gesture of solidarity due to exceptional circumstances and not as a change of direction towards closer fiscal integration of the EU.

This approach solidifies what could be described as Germany's exorbitant privilege in the euro zone: the country continues to benefit from extremely low interest rates due to its status as a safe haven in the financial markets, and from an undervalued euro that boosts its powerful export sector.

At the same time, Europe's peripheral economies are consistently disadvantaged.

German Chancellor: EU after 16 years of German Chancellorship by Merkel

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, before Merkel took office as Chancellor, the EU saw itself as a “normative” power. EU leaders vigorously promoted the idea that the Union, while not having the attributes of a traditional military superpower, could take global leadership by promoting normative values ​​such as democracy, the rule of law, human rights and social solidarity. After sixteen years of leadership under Merkel, there is not much left of these lofty ambitions. Merkel has urged the EU to appease autocrats instead of advocating democracy and human rights, and to push through austerity measures and painful reforms instead of showing solidarity and encouraging public investment.

In the spring of 2010, when the bond markets realized that Greece's budgetary position had become unsustainable, Merkel famously insisted that the rules of the euro zone should be geared towards the strong rather than the weak and, two years later, solemnly assured them that they would employ systemic solutions such as Eurobonds - a joint assumption of debts and joint liability for them - would not agree "as long as she lives". Merkel and other heads of state and government of the “core” member states were faced with the choice of either bailing out the “peripheral” members such as Greece and Ireland or allowing their insolvency while remaining in the euro zone.

The latter option would have harmed Northern European creditors and once again forced Berlin to bail out German banks - hardly politically justifiable.

The rescue packages were then in effect a kind of money laundering and a political measure to pass the blame on to others.

Core countries like Germany made financial aid available to the countries in the periphery - under tough conditions in the form of budget cuts and structural reforms.

This money was then used to repay German, French and Dutch banks.

Debt crisis in the euro zone: German banks and regulatory authorities shared responsibility

The euro zone debt crisis has been portrayed as the result of wasteful government spending and a lack of competitiveness in Ireland and the Mediterranean countries. And so Merkel contributed to the fact that the German population and a large part of the rest of Northern Europe saw the north as morally superior and the south as a sinner during the euro crisis. Real leadership would have meant identifying and resolving the fundamental structural problems of the euro area - and pointing out that fiscal and banking crises are inevitable in a monetary union in which capital flows freely without adequate joint mechanisms for coordinating budgetary policy, for regulating financial services or for macroeconomic adjustment.

Instead, Merkel's presentation and her proposed solutions missed the point that German banks and regulatory authorities were partly responsible for the crisis due to their excessive lending to the periphery during the boom years. This only fueled the stereotype of the south, popular in the north, with its lazy governments and populations acting lavishly in the style of a “Club Med”.

The consequence of this approach was an abrupt reversal of the economic convergence process between North and South that had started in the mid-1990s. After 2010, the standard of living between core and peripheral countries diverged again. While the economies of the north flourished, their exports were boosted by a weak euro and their budgetary situation eased significantly due to negative bond yields, the countries of the south fell into a deep recession and an entire generation of young people suffered from record-breaking high unemployment. It is hardly surprising that voters in southern Europe wondered whether the European integration project was worthwhile for them. And so they turned to populist and eurosceptic parties who condemned these bailouts.This lack of solidarity and the need to save should fall on the EU's feet in spring 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic - the cruel irony of fate - first hit Italy and Spain, two large EU member states that had been forced the decade before to cut their public health spending the most.

Merkel protected Hungary's Prime Minister Orban for both political and economic reasons

As little as Merkel wanted to show solidarity with the struggling democracies in southern Europe, she was just as willing to allow billions in EU subsidies to flow to the emerging autocracies in the east. Indeed, the so-called leader of the free world had a dirty little secret for the past decade: she was the main political sponsor of Viktor Orban, Europe's leading far-right autocrat in Hungary. Orban could only gradually dismantle Hungarian democracy and replace it with what Freedom House and the V-Dem Institute classify as the EU's first hybrid regime because it was under the political protection of Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Merkel protected Orban for both political and economic reasons.

Although Merkel would never consider working with the far-right AfD at home, she has had no problem in the last decade with allying herself at the EU level with Orban's right-wing, autocratic Fidesz party. Until March of this year, Merkel's CDU and Orbans Fidesz were united in the European People's Party (EPP) - the most powerful of the pan-European "European parties". Orban's followers gave the EPP votes in the European Parliament, supported the election of Merkel's protégé Ursula von der Leyen as President of the European Commission and helped ensure that the EPP remained the dominant force in EU politics.

In return, Merkel shielded him from sanctions by the EU.

Although some more principled member parties had long wanted Orban out of their parliamentary group, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian-Social Union, repeatedly blocked his exclusion.

Even when he was finally thrown outside the door in March after escalating conflicts with other EPP leaders, Merkel never said a bad word about Orban's attacks on democracy.

Good relations with the Orban regime benefited German business interests

But Merkel's alliance with Orban was not only party-political, it was characteristically mercantilistic. Hungary is an important center of low-wage production for German multinational companies. In fact, the German automobile manufacturers are the leading engine of economic growth in Hungary. While Orban is attacking the rule of law and his capitalist clique is blackmailing small and medium-sized companies, his “audicracy” is rolling out the red carpet for German car companies such as Audi, Mercedes and BMW.

Merkel had recognized that good relations with the Orban regime served German economic interests, and therefore used her enormous influence to shield him from criticism from within the EU. Orban, in turn, plays according to autocratic rules and paved the way for other emerging autocrats in the EU, such as B. Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. This is also a country that plays a key role as a production center for German industry. Although there are certainly more factors that contribute to the EU's failure to stand up to the democratic enemies in its midst, much of the guilt can be traced back to the original sin of the Merkel-Orban's alliance.

Not only in the case of her favorite autocrat in the EU, Merkel placed profit above noble principles, but also on a larger scale in dealing with Europe's geostrategic rivals - the undisguised authoritarian regimes of Russia and China. Basically, every Merkel government acted according to the mantra “

change through trade”

- the theory that deepening economic relations would encourage progressive reforms in Moscow and Beijing. But in practice there has been no talk of “change” for a long time.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Merkel's determination to pursue the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline despite strong opposition from the EU and the United States.

Defenders of Merkel's actions against the Putin regime point to the leadership role she played in putting together a sanctions package that has worked remarkably well after the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea.

Merkel, however, counteracts and undermines any effect of these sanctions on Putin and his allies by continuing to support Nord Stream 2, because this project is much more useful to his regime.

Nord Stream 2: Merkel's support for the controversial pipeline caused tension

Nord Stream 2 is intended to deliver gas directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany, thereby bypassing the existing pipeline route that runs through Ukraine and other countries in East Central Europe. The pipeline would allow Russia to stop supplying gas to Ukraine and other countries in the region while continuing to sell gas to Germany and Western Europe. The project increases the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, threatens the security of energy supplies in EU member states such as Poland and undermines the general EU efforts to become more independent of Russia on the energy issue.

So why did Merkel continue to support the completion of Nord Stream 2 * despite opposition from the United States, its allies in East Central Europe, the European Parliament and even domestic critics like the Greens? Because Nord Stream 2 promises a plentiful and inexpensive energy supply for German industry and consumers. Since Merkel's sudden decision to phase out nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, Germany has been even more dependent on oil and natural gas - and Gazprom offers the cheapest source of supply. None of this means that Merkel sympathizes with the worldview of the Russian dictator - that she

understands Putin

is, as some critics have claimed - but it is clearly ready to overlook its repeated and brazen violations of international law and human rights if the result is cheaper energy for German factories and households.

On two fronts - in their response to the 2015 migration crisis and to the most recent corona pandemic - Merkel's leadership was bolder and less driven by mercantilist logic.

But even on these two issues, it leaves a rather mixed legacy with an uncertain outcome.

Foreign Policy

Merkel has shown a similar approach of “profits before morality” in dealing with China and Xi Jinping *. Certainly, she did the bare minimum to show that she was interested in the human rights situation in the country *. She has expressed her concern about Beijing's attack on the democracy movement demonstrators in Hong Kong * and covertly alluded to the Uighur prison camps in Xinjiang * when she called for the resumption of a dialogue on human rights and urged the Chinese government to establish international standards in the field of forced labor to respect. This spring, in light of developments in Xinjiang, her government also backed EU entry bans and the freezing of the assets of a handful of Chinese officials.

But at the same time as Merkel was virtuous in matters of human rights, her government used the rotating EU Council presidency at the end of last year to push through an investment agreement between the EU and China, in which critics saw a great gift to Beijing. The European Parliament has since frozen the ratification of the agreement in the wake of the escalating tensions between the EU and China over Hong Kong and the oppression of the Uyghurs, but Merkel - with a view to the interests of German multinational companies, sees opportunities in the growing Chinese market for themselves - continues to support the agreement.

On two fronts - in their response to the 2015 migration crisis and to the most recent corona pandemic - Merkel's leadership was bolder and less driven by mercantilist logic.

But even on these two issues, it leaves a rather mixed legacy with an uncertain outcome.

Migration crisis of 2015: Angela Merkel's famous "We can do it"

In the summer of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fled the conflicts in the Middle East, crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Greece and from there moved west, Merkel pursued an open-door policy. She overruled the rules of the EU Dublin Regulation, which would have allowed Germany to send all asylum seekers back to the first EU country they had crossed, and instead promised that Syrian refugees who had made it to Germany are likely to stay. Although many Germans feared that the country could be overwhelmed by the influx of refugees, Merkel famously declared:

"We can do it!"

Merkel clearly wanted to avert a humanitarian crisis. She saw that Greece could not cope with the massive influx of refugees, especially after the highly controversial third bailout package had just been passed that summer, and that tensions between the countries the refugees crossed on their trek west were escalating. Although she insisted from the outset on the need for a coordinated response at EU level, in the face of this crisis she single-handedly decided that more than 1 million mostly Syrian refugees were allowed to travel on to Germany, where they were welcomed with open arms.

Her solo effort was compassionate, but it quickly became clear that Merkel could not persuade her counterparts to take a joint approach to the migration crisis. In the spring of 2016, Merkel flew to Ankara to negotiate an agreement that would bring Turkey an additional 3 billion euros and offer other incentives if the country prevented refugees from entering the EU. Similar deals were later concluded with Libya and Morocco, hardly any prime examples of “safe third countries”. Merkel is widely praised for her initial generosity on the refugee issue.

Far fewer people realize that it was quick to give up pushing for a humane common EU migration policy and instead gave the green light to an approach in which the EU essentially pays transit countries to detain refugees - often in deeply inhuman conditions - to prevent them from entering the EU.

Today, the EU is no closer to an agreement on reforms of the asylum rules, including a fairer distribution of refugees among the EU member states, than it was in the summer of 2015, when Merkel already called for it.

It is now a tragic reality that more than 14,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean since then.

Merkel's reaction to the corona pandemic: Chancellor acted courageously - and insisted on a one-off financial injection from the EU

In the spring of 2020, Merkel acted courageously again in view of the rapidly increasing number of deaths from the corona virus in Italy and Spain. Together with French President Emmanuel Macron, she decided to work towards the establishment of a European reconstruction fund, through which EU grants are to be distributed directly to the member states and financed by Eurobonds, so-called "corona bonds", which are issued by the European Commission and for which all member states are jointly liable. She also agreed to suspend EU budget rules, and her government provided a record amount of public support to German companies.

When the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the structural deficits of the German economy - from a chronically underfunded public infrastructure to far-reaching deficits in digitization in education and health care - your government moved away from its obession with the "

black zero

", the was to avoid any budget deficit. Merkel's social democratic finance minister Olaf Scholz received permission to launch the largest economic stimulus program in Europe in order to save the German economy from crashing.

While some analysts welcomed Merkel's turnaround in Eurobonds as the “Hamiltonian moment” that the EU had been waiting for, it is by no means clear whether the size of the fund called “Next Generation EU” will be sufficient to cover the post-pandemic Overcoming challenges, let alone whether it will last. Merkel herself was anxious to present the German voters with the “Next Generation EU” as a one-time injection of funds from the EU, which was only justified in view of the pandemic of the century, which hit some EU member states much harder than others.

In addition, like previous rescue measures by the EU, the new development funds are linked to economic reforms in the recipient countries and are subject to the supervision of the European Commission, which can use a so-called "handbrake" to freeze the funds if a country does not move quickly enough reformed.

This logic continues the toxic dynamic of the “sinners and saints” narrative that proved so damaging to the European project during the Eurozone crisis of 2010 and which, if taken to extremes, could again spark a serious backlash.

The future of fiscal solidarity in the EU will therefore largely depend on who will succeed Merkel in autumn 2021.

Change of leadership in Germany and Europe: Only the Greens would offer a departure from previous politics

Most analysts agree that Merkel would likely have been re-elected had she opted for an unprecedented fifth term.

She remains by far the most popular politician in Germany, mainly because of her consistent economic leadership at home, regardless of the consequences abroad.

Your CDU successor Armin Laschet lacks both charisma and fresh ideas.

He closely follows their mercantilist approach.

While Merkel may not be the savior of Europe that some glorify her as, she may be followed by a leader who can do just that.

Foreign Policy

If you want a real change of leadership in Germany and Europe, one can only hope that the Greens - now under the leadership of 40-year-old Annalena Baerbock - will come to power in the autumn. Should the Greens play a bigger role in the next coalition or Baerbock even become the new Federal Chancellor, a substantial change in policy with regard to Eurobonds - and a move away from mercantilism in general - can definitely be expected. The Greens want to deviate from the strict budgetary course, stand up to the emerging autocrats in Europe, end Nord Stream 2 and take a tougher course against China on the issue of human rights.

Ironically, in retrospect, one day we might find that one of Merkel's greatest legacies to the EU was paving the way for women to become political leaders in Germany.

So that a new leader could emerge who would undo many of their policies.

While Merkel may not be the savior of Europe that some glorify her as, she may be followed by a leader who can do just that.

by Matthias Matthijs and R. Daniel Kelemen

Matthias Matthijs

is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

R. Daniel Kelemen

is Professor of Political Science and Law and holds the Jean Monnet Chair in Europe.

This article was first published in English on July 16, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, a translation is now also available to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.

* Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.

This article will also appear in the print edition of Foreign Policy in summer 2021.

+

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© ForeignPolicy.com

Also read: US senators have threatened the port of Sassnitz with "fatal measures" because of Nord Stream 2 *.

The question arises as to what would happen if others did the same.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2021-08-08

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