Financial Times
February 13, 2012
The press review from around Europe does not make pleasant reading for the German foreign ministry these days. “Look at this stuff, it’s just unacceptable,” laments one diplomat – pointing to a front-page article from Il Giornale, an Italian newspaper owned by Silvio Berlusconi. The piece links the euro crisis to Auschwitz, warns of German arrogance and says that Germany has turned the single currency into a weapon. The Greek papers are not much better. Any taboos about references to the Nazi occupation of Greece have been dropped long ago.
Across southern Europe, the “ugly German” is back – accused of driving other nations into penury, deposing governments and generally barking orders at all and sundry.
There is also a much more polite form of German-bashing going on at the official level. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s head, Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, and David Cameron, the British prime minister, all made essentially the same point. Germany has to pay up. The argument goes that if the eurozone is to survive – and the world economy is to avoid disaster – Germany has to do much more, and pay much more, to keep the single currency afloat.
These arguments are deeply unfair. They fail to recognise how much Germany has already done for southern Europe. And they make demands for financial commitments that would risk economic and political disaster back in Germany.
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