Greek Debt Crisis Pits Greeks Against Germans

BERLIN - If the scramble to hold together Europe’s single currency has highlighted one thing, it is that national mind-sets can be more stubborn than the 60-year-old mantra of the Continent’s “ever closer union” once supposed. And no national psyche is more important to the outcome at this moment than Germany’s.

   In insisting that Greece can stay in the euro only if everyone sticks to the rules, Germany has acted almost classically to stereotype. Its fondness for orderly procedure - the foundation of its post-1945 democracy - has prevailed even over its desire to lead 21st century Europe.

   As eurozone finance ministers gather once more in Brussels on Saturday, Germany is by no means the only country with reservations about extending negotiations to keep Greece and its banks afloat. But as Europe’s de facto leader, Germany has been the most visible and influential, its penchant for process standing in sharp contrast to the chaotic sequence of decisions and reversals emanating from Athens.

   Many Greeks have taken Germany’s resistance personally, plastering walls with posters and graffiti denouncing what they see as the rigidity of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. After stepping aside as the Greek finance minister last week, Yanis Varoufakis also took a parting shot, writing in The Guardian that the Germans were out to destroy his country in the name of keeping to the rules.

   Those questioning the Germans’ obsession with rules have only to look at what Berlin calls “the black zero,” meaning a balanced budget. After the 2008 global financial crisis, German lawmakers amended their Constitution to ensure that future governments would not take on excess debt of more than 0.35 percent of gross domestic product.

   What many outsiders view as the rigidity of Ms. Merkel and Mr. Schäuble is widely viewed within the country as the best way to resolve the Greek debt crisis and ensure the stability of the European currency used by 19 nations.

   “There are clear rules, and anybody who doesn’t stick to the rules cannot be an example for others,” Julia Klöckner, a senior member of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said in an interview Thursday.

   Ms. Klöckner reflects the German belief that the economic success of post-World War II West Germany was rooted in obeying rules and that its projection of power in Europe relies on binding public commitment to keeping order.

   “The Germans naturally have a great fixation with rules,” said Josef Janning, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “They often substitute order for politics, because they often do not trust politics. In the last century the Germans were not especially spoiled by politics.” The allusion was to the turbulent 20th century governments in Germany: the Weimar Republic, the Nazis’ Third Reich and the post-1945 communist East.

   Other Europeans, who have very different memories of World War II and its aftermath, often fail to grasp the extent to which this history shapes German decisions on Europe. Conversely, the Germans struggle to understand that their view does not come naturally to their 27 partners in the European Union.

   “Maybe this is our mistake, that we project on to other states and cannot cope with ‘anything goes,’ ” Mr. Janning said. “Consequently, it is very difficult for Germans to understand why it doesn’t work in Greece, why we can’t progress.”

   Anyone who has ever spent time in Germany is struck by the reflexive embrace of rules, the immaculate order of its many small towns and the stereotypical picture of everyone waiting for the green pedestrian crossing light to traverse even the emptiest of roads.

   “The world is better with rules,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute economic research group in Munich and a strong advocate of Greece’s leaving the eurozone. He likened the binding commitment on financial partnership to the very public vows of a marriage.

   Reflecting how contentious support for Greece has been over the past six years, among the sharpest critics this time around have been lawmakers in the chancellor’s conservative bloc who once served in her cabinet. Peter Ramsauer, a member of the Bavarian Christian Social Union who was transport minister from 2009 to 2013, said that while in the government he had expressed his “strongest reservations” internally, but went along with bailouts passed in 2010 and 2012.

   This February, he withheld support for extending Greece’s bailout, he said, “because I saw it all coming - and now it actually turned out even worse.”

   If Europe’s leaders agree this weekend, by their self-imposed deadline of midnight Sunday, to start negotiating a third bailout for Greece, it will require approval from, among others, Germany’s Parliament. That could prove tough. “Trust in the Greek government has been completely frittered away,” Mr. Ramsauer said.

   Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior member of Ms. Merkel’s party who has served in Parliament for more than 20 years, has long believed that Greece is not fit to be in the eurozone, which it joined in 2001 on the basis of what Athens years later admitted were cooked figures.

   “Nothing will change in the next few years,” Mr. Bosbach said. “It can be that in the next days people make statements promising that a new era is now at hand. I have been hearing that for five years.” He said no constituents had told him they thought Greece should get more financial support.

   Even the Social Democrats, center-left partners in Ms. Merkel’s coalition government, are hardening their attitudes, as seen in the tough statements coming from their leader. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has been unusually blunt in his criticism of Greece, brushing off party critics who accuse him of being hardhearted.

   “The real problem of Greece is that for years they have been exploited by their political and economic elites,” he told students in Dresden on Thursday. “The real wrongdoers are those who failed to build up the country.”

   “It’s not a case of bringing Alexis Tsipras to his knees,” Mr. Gabriel said, referring to the Greek prime minister. “But it is certainly not that Europe should be brought to its knees.”

   This weekend may see the opening of yet another chapter in Europe’s long debt crisis. But it seems impossible that it will reconcile very differing German, Greek and other views of the Continent’s future.

   Confronted with attempts to compare the debt relief afforded post-Nazi West Germany in 1953, Germans are quick to recall that they kept strictly to the terms of that generosity and accounted for the money spent. “That’s where the differences lie,” Mr. Ramsauer said. “And that is a fundamental difference.”

Πηγή: nytimes.com