Germany: Europe’s Alpha and
Omega, Beginning and End.
Sunday, March 13th –
Chancellor Angela Merkel faces three regional elections in the German states of
Saxony-Anhalt, Baden-Weurttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate that are being
described, by various observers, commentators and news outlets, as a ‘test of
support’ for the Chancellor’s stance on the refugee crisis.
‘Test’ is one way to describe the
process, I suppose. Whilst frau Merkel might wish it to be otherwise, the
sudden rise of the anti-establishment and populist AfD (Alternative für
Deutschland), which is presenting its regional campaigns as
a national referendum on Germany’s open-door response to the crisis and which
is polling well above the 7.1% of the vote it achieved in the European
elections of 2014, is pulling the narrative away from regional affairs and on
to questions of national policy.
International policy, as well. AfD, which is the
political wing of the Pegida movement in all but name, is but the closest to
home of the myriad of anti-immigration, anti-EU parties that are now in bloom
across Europe, resplendant in colours of both the Left and the Right. Syriza
and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Jobbiks in Hungary, the FPO and the Freedom
Party of Austria, National Front in France, UKIP and roughly half the Tory
cabinet at home – the political allegiances, goals and methods of each may
differ drastically; what they all seem to have in common, and what those that
tend toward anti-immigration sentiments certainly have in common, is their
opposition to Angela Merkel and the policies of the CDU-led coalition
government in Germany.
Angela Merkel is the public face of Germany’s
official response to the migrant (or refugee) crisis. Given the unity of the
opposition to that response across the right and the far-right, anti-Merkelism
seems a fitting and necessary addition to their labels.
There is an essential qualifier to what I am
about to say and I beg that you withhold your judgement until you have seen it:
they are right to be opposed to Merkel and the German response.
This is not to say that any position defined by
xenophobia is correct. This is not to give credence to any argument that is by
its nature anti-migrant. But it is to acknowledge that migration policy should
be open to discussion (and the argument that the encouraging of
mass-immigration is itself an anti-migrant position), and it is to acknowledge
that the imposition of policy without an elected mandate, nationally or
Europe-wide, is anti-democratic. They are right, then, in that this issue sheds
light on the cracks in the foundations of the European Union; cracks that are becoming
fissures as the weight of Germany’s influence continues to grow.
You might, as I do, feel by instinct that we
should help the poor and the desperate and the destitute. You might, as I do,
feel a profound anger at an international community that has shown itself to be
powerless to stop the savagery and the barbarism of the conflict in Syria, to
which we have contributed bombs and planes and very little else. You might
feel, as I do, that the promise by our own government to take in 20,000
refugees over five years is at best a negligible one.
We would, then, share the conviction that these
refugees deserve far better than their lot.
But to take that conviction and hide behind it,
to throw in the faces of those opposed to mass-migration the accusation that
they are unfeeling and uncaring, is to be uncritical. To praise Chancellor
Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders is to give her credit that she does
not deserve, based on the presumption that it is something that it’s not.
That decision, which I suspect was intended
solely (or mostly) to win popular support for the CDU in Germany, represents
the impossibility of unilateral action in the context of a continental
political union. What it amounted to was the creation of a policy in Germany,
for German party-political interests, which has now been imposed upon every
other member state in the European Union, especially those in what has become
known as the Balkans Route, without any form of democratic debate, without
their consent, and without any consideration for their ability to deal with its
consequences.
It shows the arrogance of a continental power,
on whose industry and economy the European Union has been built, deeming either
that its own interests trump all other concerns or that what is in its own
interests must, by definiton, be in everyone else’s interests, too.
This arrogant assumption of power is, in fact,
no assumption at all. Power in both the Eurozone and the European Union has
never been properly codified to rest in any one elected body; it has its own
freedom of movement and, like money, like people, it is drawn to the one place
power is known to coalesce of its own volition: power itself. Germany, by
virtue of the strength of its economy, is the power in Europe. As such,
it has become not only the economic hub but also the political centre of the
continent. Dealings between EU member states, and between the EU and other
nations, happen through Germany with the official apparatus serving as nothing
but a seldom-used fig-leaf.
Greece, which harbours the firsts ports to which
migrants and refugees arrive from Turkey on their way to Germany, provided just
one of a series of examples of Germany’s monopoly on power. When Syriza swept
to electoral victory on the promise of rejecting and then reversing the
economic doctrine imposed upon them by the Troika, it was Germany which led the
counterrevolution. It demanded control of the Greek economy. When it failed, it
demanded the imposition of its own austerity doctrine on the Greek state,
effectively using different words to make the same demand.
The charismatic Yanis Varoufakis, during his
brief stint as Syriza’s finance minister, primarily dealt not with members of
the Eurogroup (comprised of the finance ministers of those countries within the
Eurozone) but with Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister and architect
of the ‘deals‘ imposed upon Greece that Syriza had been committed to reversing.
When Varoufakis attempted to discuss the changes proposed by Syriza, he was met
with a steadfast refusal to compromise. Shauble’s view was, according to
Varoufakis, that “‘I’m not discussing the
programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t
possibly allow an election to change anything.”
Varoufakis was subsequently removed from the
negotiating team, resigning from his post in the Syriza government shortly
afterwards, and Schauble got his way.
Germany is, meanwhile, leading the team negotiating
with Turkey on the issue of migration. The vast majority of boats arriving on
the borders of the now-dead Schengen zone leave port in Turkey for an often
treacherous journey across the Aegean. Given the nature of the Erdogan
government, it would be very difficult to imagine the Turkish negotiating team
doing anything other than exploiting the migration crisis to suit their own
ends: visa-free travel for Turkish citizens within the EU in advance of
fasttracked admission to the Union proper. And, given the nature of the Erdogan
government, it is tempting to ask quite how committed Turkey is to stopping the
boats given that each one serves their political purposes quite nicely.
Any deal struck between Germany and Turkey with
provisions for faster Turkish integration with the EU will be yet another
example of EU policy set and pursued by Germany without even the pretense at
democratic negotiation with its supposed equals.
This is the state of things as they are and
there is no hint of any improvement to come. The migration crisis, the nature
of which warrants an article of its own, is playing into a crisis in Europe; a
political union in which the only demos with any power are the German people.
It is they alone whose votes, under the current system, have any real influence
on European policy. We have our own referendum to focus on, but should we vote
to stay, there will be another referendum soon afterwards; a referendum on the
nature of the European Union under the guise of a German general election.
The domestic debate in Germany, a debate of
domestic policy, is then not domestic at all. Pegida and the AfD, along with
parties like the Greens, represent a continent’s worth of dissatisfaction with
a deaf establishment. And it is a damning indictment of the structure of the
European Union, a provocateur of the extremes to which the disenfranchised will
become suseptible, as well as the complete and final proof of its lack of
anything even resembling a democratic process, that burden of responsibility
now rests almost entirely on the shoulders of German voters.
You may interpret it as you like when I say that
it is a burden we should do our part to alleviate them of.
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