Is modern Germany lying to itself?

Germany’s economy has not yet experienced Reaganism or Thatcherism. The discourse of neo-liberalism was never shoved down its people’s throats in the aggressive manner that the Americans and British endured in the 1980s. For the most part, that’s for the better. Germans mostly still have access to high wages, good public infrastructure (especially transport), a decent health care system and, at least on paper, adequate employment and pension rights.

But the eve of the European Social Forum in St. Denis, near Paris, on 12-15 November 2003 is an appropriate time to measure the creeping progress that neo-liberalism has made in Germany. And precisely because of this method of advance, some negative changes have happened without much public outcry. Corporate power, for example, is at least as extreme in Germany as elsewhere in Europe. But fewer people notice. Despite Attac’s successes in public mobilisation in recent years, the anti-corporate globalisation movement in Germany is still weaker than in France and Britain. Wolfsburg, Volkswagen’s base, temporarily renamed its train station “Golfsburg” (in August 2003 for six weeks) in honour of the new Volkswagen Golf. And there wasn’t even a hint of protest anywhere.

The green man of Europe?

Germany does not, as yet, have much visible poverty and relatively little industrial production that is all too obviously awful. Germans also are famous throughout Europe for sorting their rubbish. The result is that many Germans still think of their country as a leader in progressive social policies or environmental protection within the European Union. Sadly, in many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. Even our recycling rates are worse than those of Austria and the Netherlands, for example. Much worse, Germany kowtows to its chemical and car industries in a way that often undermines basic democratic principles.

In 2000, for example, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder abruptly called his environment minister – Jurgen Trittin, a member of the Green party in the coalition government – out of a meeting to withdraw Germany’s support for an EU car-recycling initiative. The reason? Schröder had had a phone call from Volkswagen’s boss, complaining that the EU initiative was too expensive. And what is good for Volkswagen is good for Germany. Or so the chancellor thinks.

More recently, it has been the same story with attempts by the EU to toughen up chemical regulations in Europe. Several thousand chemicals are on the market without any of their health effects (let alone their accumulative impacts) ever having been tested. The EU now wants to make it mandatory that new chemicals entering the market are at least registered. But Germany once again is acting as the mouthpiece for industry. If you visit Brussels as an environmentalist these days, all you get to hear is the latest ploy Germany has found to prevent health protection in Europe.

The end of the social model

Things are not much better in other fields either. Germany is just about to introduce tough unemployment legislation much like those of the British finance minister, Gordon Brown (4.4 million people in Germany are unemployed). In practice, unemployed people will in future have to accept any job that they are offered. Many economists argue convincingly that this will jeopardise one of Germany’s greatest economic advantages: her excellent match between the skills and tasks that employees fulfil. This match is one of the unsung causes of Germany’s high productivity levels. But such economic niceties escape our politicians, when a few euro are to be saved in next year’s budget.

Germany does not have a minimum wage. That did not matter as long as workers remain organised and general pay levels high. Today, full-scale exploitation is increasingly common. Many newly-created jobs are flexible ones with short hours. They remain below an earning threshold. Therefore the workers are excluded from social benefits. If all that was not enough, one million people currently still on unemployment benefit will also soon be recategorised as recipients of “social welfare” – a pitiful minimum that many struggle to live on.

Germany’s asylum policies are another case in point. Germany invented a voucher scheme for asylum-seekers without the levels of protest that a similar proposal in Britain generated. Many Germans are unaware of this.

Germany thinks of itself as at the forefront of progressive policies in Europe. This is a delusion. The existence of a government in power that claims allegiance to the left has allowed creeping Thatcherisation to proceed with too little resistance (indeed, some writers, like Dominik Geppert, think that Thatcherite shock-treatment even provides an attractive economic model for Germany). The continent-wide exchange at the European Social Forum should awaken German and other European activists to Germany’s slide down the league table of European decency.