[MGSA-L] Fwd: Germany and Greece

[June Samaras]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Pine <rpinecorfu at yahoo.com>
Date: 12 November 2013 05:57
Subject: Germany and Greece


I offer this article to members of the Hellas-Greece discussion group in
the belief that the intentions of Germany in 1942, as expressed in the
following text, find significant echoes in the views of the European core
states today, regarding the economic and political future of smaller,
peripheral states such as Greece and, indeed the whole of the Balkans, and
that this raises issues concerning the status of the smaller states
vis-a-vis the dominant powers in Europe today.
I would welcome comments either through this channel or to my e-mail:
rpinecorfu at yahoo.com.

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*by Richard Pine*
I recently read the transcripts of ten lectures delivered in Berlin by
senior German officials (bankers, academics, most of them economists),
which envisage the transformation of the European economy and, as a result,
of its social structures. Strategies include a massive investment in
infrastructure, sweeping agricultural reform, industrialisation of
south-east Europe, and a rationalisation of fiscal conditions among the
member states.

But this wasn’t yesterday. The year? 1942, when Germany was still
confidently anticipating victory in the second world war. Not only
continental Europe was involved, but also Russia which, at that time, had a
massive food surplus which would be used to supply net importers of
foodstuffs. German military might would prevail and create the conditions
for economic peace and growth.

Britain, of course, would be excoriated and cut adrift, and would have to
pursue its fate in the company of the USA, which, it was argued, had
brought about the economic malaise of the continent, through “estrangement
from the European continent” in the pursuit of imperial interests.

The giveaway is that the entity to be summoned into existence would be
known as the “European economic community” (EEC) – a body which of course
did not actually come into existence until 1957 and is now the EU. The
guiding principle would be a “coalition of the countries of Europe”, “a
community sharing one destiny”, founded on economic integration, and a
“unity of political order”. To create such a unity would be “an act of
European self-determination immune to Europhobic influences” – by which it
meant the British attitude. Germany’s role was “to recreate a natural
situation whereby Europe’s natural focus is the centre of the continent”.

The overall intention was, in the sentimental words of one speaker, to
recreate the trading conditions which flourished in Europe from the
thirteenth to the seventeenth century, in German cities such as Lübeck,
Cologne and Hamburg, which developed control first over the Baltic and
later established trading posts throughout Europe including London and
Paris- known collectively as the Hanseatic
League. The League provided the economic hub of European trading, and the
1942 vision of a new Europe under German control envisaged a modern-day
linking of the chief producers by the creation of an autobahn system for
faster transit of goods and services.

How this unity would also be capable of demonstrating “respect for the
independence of the nations concerned” is difficult to imagine, since those
nations would be bound together by irrefragable economic treaties and their
independence would be subject to “the destruction of these monocultures:
Europe has to be dragged out of its romanticized backwardness”.

The smaller nations, especially those of the east and south, would be
satellite clients of this centrist system. They “must never remain in any
doubt that they are dependent on their neighbours … The spirit of the
individual economies may not be allowed to go against the spirit of
neighbourly co-operation”. In terms of citizenship, we would see “the
subjugation of the individual to the primacy of the economy” which is “the
ultimate goal”: “there will be victims here and there but the end result
will benefit all the peoples of Europe”.

Curiously, the one feature of today’s eurozone, which the German economists
of 1942 did not consider necessary, was the establishment of a single
currency, since the Deutschmark would be the controlling currency to which
all other currencies would be subservient.

As an adolescent in 1960s Britain, I vividly recall the cliché “they may
have lost the war but they have won the peace”.  As Winston Churchill
acknowledged in 1949, at the foundation of the Council of Europe, “a united
Europe cannot live without the help and strength of Germany”, since “we are
engaged in the process of creating a European unit”. A defeated Germany,
divided between east and west, as it was until 1990, could not have exerted
the economic or administrative muscle necessary to develop that strength.
But over sixty years after Churchill spoke, we now see a form of domination
by Germany of the fiscal system which keeps the eurozone afloat. The spirit
of these lectures, delivered by top-ranking academic figures, including the
president of the Reichsbank and the minister for economic affairs, is
widely perceived to be the issue confronting Europe today.

It is not far-fetched to suggest that many persuasive figures in
Germanytoday, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance
minister Wolfgang
Schaüble, though they have entirely different motivations, have a similar
vision of a united Europe, with Germany overseeing and guaranteeing the
fate of the euro.

Recently Jean Asselborn, the Luxembourg foreign minister, warned of the
dangers of a “German hegemony” – a clear indication that, in some quarters
(especially the “smaller” states), direction by Germany of the economic
fate of Europe is seen as a move towards rather more extensive control of
the domestic affairs of member states.

But what is remarkable about these lectures, and the economic vision they
propose, is not so much that the same blueprint seems to exist today, but
that seventy years ago they so accurately predicted key factors in today’s
economic and social scenario, such as the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties,
the British “eurosceptics”, and the near contempt with which the European
centre regards the peripheral newcomers to the EU.

To a hankering after the glories of the Hanseatic League have been added
the diminution or eradication of economic and political sovereignty, while
all the time the EU’s cohesiveness and solidarity are being threatened by
citizens’ apathy, anger and indignation.

*Richard Pine lives and works in Greece*

*The texts of the Berlin lectures can be accessed at:
www.SilentMajority.co.UK/EUroRealist/Germany1942
<http://www.SilentMajority.co.UK/EUroRealist/Germany1942>*



-- 
June Samaras
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : june.samaras at gmail.com
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