die deutsche erwählung (thread for German elections, ja, bitte)

Are the only countries that will be able to survive in a globalised economy (with the arch liberal China and slightly less so India) the one that have gone through the pain of a Thatcherite reform period? i.e the destruction of the post-war social model.

The postwar social model is unsustainable in that it was partly built around the redistribution of existing wealth. Redistributing existing wealth is not a bad idea, for lots of reasons both economic and moral, and to the extent that it resulted (which to some extent it did) in various kinds of social investment (in education and health care, most obviously), it has paid off. On balance, the Western capitalist democracies have substantially higher average standards of living than we did 60 years ago. Good for us.

But...the existing sources of wealth that were tapped by the postwar social model are not stagnant pools, and they relied of course to a substantial degree on the exploitation of resources (natural and human) elsewhere in the world. That exploitation is ongoing (and has been for centuries) and will be for some time to come, but it's getting squeezed in one place after another. First by the Asian tigers, now by China and India and Central and South America and Eastern Europe and Central and South America, soon by the Middle East, eventually by Africa. All of which should make the good small-l liberal heart beat gladly for the inevitable rising demands for economic recognition, labor rights and self-sufficiency around the globe -- except that it would seem to necessitate an ongoing flattening of growth and standards of living in the previously prosperous zones.

SO...how to avoid that? The stupid right-wing answer is global deregulation, let capital flow free and the markets will produce the rising tide for all boats, etc. The stupid left-wing answer is to lock down whatever gains you have (wages, working week, labor rights, etc.) and defend against all comers. (Hence the "anti-globalization" movement, which probably is doomed by its very name.) The free-market economist will tell you you don't have to choose, that you can "make the pie higher" and grow your way out of the conundrum, but that's not how things work on the ground. The absence of other reasonable-seeming options is, I think, the cause of the ideological gridlock. None of the existing models seem to do what we need them to do, which is partly because in a democracy the existing model needs to be able to do so many things at once. Some kind of synthesis and innovation is surely possible, because it always is, but it's hard to tell right now where it's likely to come from. That's one thing that interests me about these German election results -- they seem to create the possible conditions for cooperative reform. But the political realities might make that impossible.

I was rather heartened by the result of the election, because I wanted Merkel stopped at all costs. Of course, the Schroeder who survives will be a sort of "slow-speed Merkel". What they have in common is economism: the belief that economic growth, employment etc are the key political issues, and that in the face of rapid growth in China European capitalism will have to be less cushy, less challened by social legislation, more fanged.

I disagree with this perspective. Human happiness is not tied up with economic growth or even having a job. Europe and Japan, with their declining birthrates and "stagnating" economies, are in a unique position to pioneer post-industrial lifestyles in which people consume less, have fewer children, and work, in the traditional sense, only occasionally. Joska Fischer's Green Party is the one closest to advocating this sort of Slow Life scenario as a positive option rather than "stagnation". But I can tell you that whole areas of Berlin are already living this way. It needs to be seen as something positive, and not "slacking" or "dreaming" or "stagnating".

Really, then why do you partake in all the pleasures that income provides. Shouldn't you be out subsistence farming?

"lifestyles in which people consume less, have fewer children, and work, in the traditional sense, only occasionally."

This is a nice fantasy. The reason people have fewer children is because they make more money and choose to consume more as a substitute for having and raising children. As income increases birthrate decreases and vice versa.

"The free-market economist will tell you you don't have to choose, that you can "make the pie higher" and grow your way out of the conundrum, but that's not how things work on the ground."

How do things work on "the ground?"

-- Ed (dal...), September 19th, 2005.

it's fair to say the post-war settlement was 'destroyed', perhaps, because of the obvious glee the tories showed in doing it. but labour had set out on that road before maggie got in, because it had to, because it hadn't, couldn't, wouldn't (?) change society enough, find a new model that wasn't capitalism, ie that could withstand global economic fluctuations.

iow, the post-war settlement could only last so long (and given we've had three decades since its abandonment, ie as long as the thing lasted itself, eg 1945-76, 1976-2005, maybe we shd be looking for new kinds of solutions?).

The unemployment rate in Germany is about 12 percent and growth is nowhere to be seen. And despite the welcome gain for the liberal FDP (9.8% +2.4), Germany voted against reforms to change this. This raises the awkward question if there is a certain stage where dependency on the government has gone so far and a change seem so far off that the electorate becomes more interested in defending good terms for unemployment than in creating opportunities for growth and jobs. In that case, sclerosis creates a public demand for even more stagnation. And when that happens, politicians wont heistate to meet that demand.

This is not just a German problem. Western Europe is right now a laboratory experiment where we study how far the welfare/dirigiste state can go. We are the guinea-pigs.

xpost

It seems to me that the relative failure of the two major parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) and the relative success of the FDP and the PDS-Links dudes means that the voters wanted the exact opposite of what they're gonna get: people voted yellow rather than black because they were terrified of a Grand Coalition and figured that enough folks would be voting for Merkel anyway; and the folks who voted for the Party of Demonic Satanism really wanted a second try at a modern social democracy without the inefficient anti-Ossi horrors of Hartz IV, a reform program written by some jerk from Volkswagen AG between sex parties with his colleagues and some Eastern European hookers. And what's going to happen is either a Grand Coalition lead by a Chancellor who's neither Schröder nor Merkel, or a so-called stoplight coalition, which adds the FDP (for whom Hartz IV didn't go far enough) to the SPD and the Greens, who appear to stand for nothing other than keeping Joschka Fischer around as the rapidly expanding hypocritical schoolmarm of a self-hating nation.

I think that Germans saw red/green as a failure, an exercise in two parties abandoning their basic principles in order to bring about reforms that they were from the beginning ill-equipped to bring about and about which a good half them feel guilty as hell (and feelings of guilt are an incredibly important aspect of German post-war politics), and wanted either black/yellow (if you're gonna do Capital-friendly-fuck-you-labor-force reforms properly, hand it to the people who aren't ashamed to do it right) or were hoping against hope for a red-green-red coalition, so that the someone would actually hold Schröder to being the pacifist friend of the working man he's run as in every election since I've lived over here.

I'm glad I don't live in Germany anymore.

I'm really sick of this word "reform" being used to mean "people in the public sector handing power over to the private sector". I'd like to start a movement to reform the word reform, restoring to it the original meaning: passing legislation that stops capitalists sending children down coal mines, etc.

In actual point of fact, the German welfare and tax systems need reforming (in the sense of a corrective overhaul) because of the Baroque complexity that leads to huge waste of money and a fair chunk of injustice -- but the red - green reforms have been at least as crappily put together, at least as insanely complicated as what was already there, and certainly less tenable in a so-called social democracy. The problem with the word "reform" as used by German politicians isn't that it's used as code for "screw the working man" (although it certainly is used that way often enough); the problem is that it's used to mean "let's make the laws and even more insanely incomprehensible so we can be sure we've covered every possible contingency without actually making our actual intensions clear."

That's not actually true. This year Germany's economy is expected to grow by less than 1%. Next year it's expected to grow by 1.5%. Both The Economist and the BBC's website have run articles in the past month saying that Germany's economy is on the mend. Meanwhile the UK economy is heading for the doldrums, partly because of low high street confidence following the 7/7 bombs.

NRQ: Estimated annual UK growth for 2005 is 1.8%. So all that vaunted UK advantage, all that opting out of social legislation, the euro, all that pro-employer stuff, loosening up of regulation in order to stimulate the economy, sweatshop of Europe, long working hours, etc etc and you get, what, point three of a percent better annual growth than Germany? Hurrah Tony!

It would be great if Schroeder went into coaltion with some weird assortment of parties and then said "I coalesce with whom I like!".

This is only great/funny if you are like me and find it chortlesome that after scoffing a currywurst he once said "I eat what I like!".

I like this idea, and in some ways it's already happening, but it doesn't seem sustainable in the short term absent the entrance of substantial new pools of labor. Somebody's got to do the work. Which of course Europe is importing from Africa and the Mideast (and, in the case of Western Europe, from Eastern Europe). But then those new pools of labor create new dynamics and expectations and complications. I think we're a long way off from "post-industrial lifestyles" reaching any kind of global equilibrium, given that a lot of the world is still living pre-industrial lifestyles. It's the getting from here to there that is the challenge.

The anti-Momus said: How do things work on "the ground?"

How things work on the ground is that "making the pie higher" in and of itself doesn't guarantee equitable distribution of pie. The answer to poverty can't be just the creation of more wealth, because flooding existing systems with more wealth is as likely to exacerbate and magnify existing disparities as anything else. Which is what we've seen the U.S. over the last 30 years, e.g. "Growth" however defined is not in itself an answer (and of course growth tends to carry costs and trade-offs too). So the blithe neo-liberal assurance that more pie=more pie for everyone is politically naive if not outright deceitful.

The dilemma that faces Germany and the rest of the West is how to change their self-image, really. No-one can realistically expect Germany to continue being the kind of industrial powerhouse it was from the 1870's through the 1970's when we can buy manufactured goods of increasing quality but cheaper prices from China, Korea, etc... so much the debate about distribution of wealth and social welfare is increasingly beside the point. Germans will either have to lower their expectations or change their economy, and people, whatever they may say, generally hate change, especially when it's imposed upon them. Like the 2000 presidential election here in the U.S., this election is tragically 'democratic'. It shows a nation divided and unsure about its prospects, stuck half-way between fear of losing the past and lacking consensus about which route to take in the future.

(Of course, to be fair, we have yet to try the equally-trendy anarchosyndicalist model, in which--as I understand it-- we all transmogrify into postapocalyptic hobbits.)

Yeah, it feels familiar that way. In the U.S. the uncertainty opened the door to a band of zealots, crooks and crackpots. I'm hoping Germany fares a little better.

I like Momus's reform-of-reform plan. What's it called - The Reformation?