I n the international clamour that has surrounded the onset of the current economic crisis, Germany has often appeared the still centre. Yet such seeming passivity belies the enormous structural changes that the country has undergone since the fall of the Wall. Polity, economy, culture and society have been subject to acute, often contradictory pressures. It is barely a decade since the federal capital was relocated, miles to the east; less than that since the D-Mark disappeared and Germany assumed its dominant position within the eurozone.
How was this to be done? Oskar Lafontaine, the popular spd chairman installed as Finance Minister, had no doubts: reanimation of the German economy depended on scrapping the deflationary Stability Pact that Bonn had imposed as a price for monetary union, and boosting domestic consumption with counter-cyclical policies along Keynesian lines. After a few months of frustration, he was overboard.
Tax cuts, when they came, were for capital not labour, assisting corporations and banks rather than consumers. Growth did not pick up. When the spd βGreen government faced the voters again in , its economic record was in effect a wash-out. As the coalition went to the polls, it was just under 10 per cent. A scattering of modest social reforms, the most significant a long-overdue liberalization of the rules for naturalization, had done little to offset this failure.
Externally, on the other hand, the coalition enjoyed a less constrained field of operations. Within a year of coming to power, it had committed Germany to the Balkan War, dispatching the Luftwaffe to fly once again over Yugoslavia. Presented as a vital humanitarian mission to prevent another Holocaust on European soil, German participation in Operation Allied Force was greeted with all but unanimous domestic applause: by Centre-Right opinion as robust proof of the recovered national self-confidence of the country as a military power, by Centre-Left as an inspiring example of international conscience and philanthropy.
In the media, the decisive conversion of the Greens to military action was the occasion for particular satisfaction. Two years later, the Bundeswehr had left Europe behind to play its part in the occupation of Afghanistan; a suitable regime for that country was fixed up between interested parties in Bonn, and a German general was soon in command of allied forces in Kabul. This expedition too met with general approval, ifβa remoter ventureβless active enthusiasm among voters. Germany was becoming a normal force for the good, as responsible as any other power in the democratic West.
