Looking backward: a response to Daniel Mittler, Michael Naumann

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Mittler must be kidding: “Germans mostly still have access to high wages...” Access? To use an American advertising phrase: “We make our money in the old-fashioned way. We earn it.” We have “access…to a decent health care system”? Well, so do tens of thousands of European Union members, taking their illnesses across the borders to Germany – among them thousands of British patients from the waiting lists of their ill-equipped and understaffed hospitals.

And yet, Mittler claims, “neo-liberalism” has made “creeping progress” in Germany. To prove it, he points to Wolfsburg – a town created by the Nazis to produce the Volkswagen; its newly-minted name carrying an allusion to the mythical importance the Nazi ideologues gave to wolves...thus, if Volkswagen renamed their railway-station to Golfsburg for publicity’s sake, this is not a signal of capitalism run amok but rather a mild joke – and a relief. To make matters worse: they cannot really rename it and they haven’t. Last time I passed it, it was still “Wolfsburg”.

The fact that Germany’s recycling rate is lower than Austria’s or the Netherlands’ is not a sign of environmental laggardness but rather of hope: the environmental and economic idiocy of our recycling policy is well-known to serious environmentalists. To burn the separated garbage of 80 million Germans has become extremely expensive since in most cases one needs additional fuel or gas-heated boosters – because the high heat-generating glass has been separated from the rest of the trash.

The intended recycling of cars at the behest of the European Union had one special feature. Since more European cars are of German than of any other origin, the main burden of this initiative would have landed on the shoulders of the German car industry, which in 2000 was struggling – whereas France’s car industry was about to make a comeback, unencumbered by such additional costs. Recycling cars will come – yet not at the speed hoped for by the French.

In the case of chemical regulations emanating from Europe, implementing the new regulations on testing chemicals would have taken many decades, even (some people claim) a century. Paring down the bizarre plan makes sense – it has more to do with the hope of making it work than with any anti-environmental policy. German environmentalism has, in any case, reached the absurd level of a totally over-regulated administration. The result is to suffocate its original impulses and create general hostility not only among German industry, but also among the country’s citizens. Daniel Mittler claims that “full-scale exploitation (of the workers) is increasingly common.” The last time I read this was in Friedrich Engels’s tract on Die Lage der Arbeiterklasse in England / The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. One also heard such rubbish from the East German regime until its demise in 1989. The German workers belong to the most privileged in Europe. Their social benefits and unemployment payments still outshine those of the rest of the continent, although it has become clear in the recent years of no or low growth that these benefits have become too costly. The changes brought about by the government of Gerhard Schröder may be painful to some but will certainly enhance the dynamics of the German economy, thus ensuring that the basic framework of our welfare state remains intact and affordable.

As to the problem of asylum-seekers in Germany: this country is host to more foreigners than any other European nation with the possible exception of France. And it is still the only country where you can cross the border by simply uttering: “I seek political asylum.” This practice has been abused in the past. It has not been abandoned, but its abuse is being stopped in a fairly decent way.

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Looking backward: a response to Daniel Mittler, Michael Naumann