New York Times
September 25, 2011
Greece is broke and broken. Its budget deficit bulges near 10 percent of gross domestic product, while the Germans choke theirs down to just 1.5 percent.
Ask a typical German why and he’ll say: “They drink and dance during the day. We wait for sunset.” That’s the image. The hard-working, disciplined, punch-the-clock-on-time German stays solvent and sober. In contrast, the Mediterranean neighbor lolls around in fertile fields of lemons and olives.
And yet most Germans go along, if grudgingly, with bailouts. Recent elections show the Social Democrats and Greens picking up votes, even though they are even more euro-friendly than Angela Merkel’s government. Why are Germans willing to reach deep into their pockets for many billions of euros to bail out Zorba the Greek and his lackadaisical neighbors?
The standard answer: to safeguard the German economy. But this is flabby reasoning. Despite the Great Recession, the German economy has been bouncing along at a decent pace with a 7 percent unemployment rate, and it even racks up a trade surplus with China. Sure, adopting the euro in 1999 sliced border-crossing costs for German companies, but European monetary union was never chiefly about money. If money was the biggest concern, Germany would never have surrendered the gilded Deutsche mark, controlled by the austere, trusted Bundesbank, for a euro that might someday be twisted by a rabble of politicians baying for votes from Slovenians.
No, Germany’s real motivation to help Greece is not cash; it’s culture. Germans struggle with a national envy. For over 200 years, they have been searching for a missing part of their soul: passion. They find it in the south and covet the loosey-goosey, sun-filled days of their free-wheeling Mediterranean neighbors.
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