-Caveat Lector- Eurosociololgical Conniptions. flw FROM ROGER BOYES IN BERLIN PROPERTY developers are at work throughout the Brandenburg lake district grafting new housing estates on to run-down villages, putting up hypermarkets, creating a dozen satellite townships in a web around the once and future German capital of Berlin. The political effects of this building boom are well known. Construction companies can only meet their tight deadlines if they run round-the-clock shifts. German workers are too expensive, so the environs of Berlin are being pieced together by cheap Ukrainians, Poles, the British and the Irish. The local youth, with official unemployment rates of 20 or more per cent - and real rates at 30 per cent - are turning on the foreigners. Black Britons in particular have been beaten up, even crippled by these resentful thugs. Vietnamese, shrewd traders who are making fortunes selling cheap cigarettes, have been set on fire. This is no longer the region celebrated by the novelist, Theodor Fontane, or Johann Sebastian Bach: today the Brandenburg concertos resonate to dark chords. All this anger, bottled in over the winter like a potent home brew, is likely to explode next year. The critical questions are whether and when the anger will be directed at the euro, whether the far-right parties will be able to mop up the discontent in the east and channel it, in time perhaps for June's European elections, against the new currency. The National Party of Germany, the Republicans and the German People's Union - which whipped up more than 13 per cent of the vote in Saxony Anhalt last autumn after a mere three-week campaign - are positioning themselves for a euro protest. For the past year their demonstrators have brandished "save the mark" placards along with a more obvious "foreign criminals go home". Partly this is tactical: it is more respectable in German political culture to be patriotically in favour of the mark than to be openly racist. Partly it reflects a genuine division within German society. Popular approval for the euro is creeping up - it has just edged above 50 per cent - but in the east nobody is budging. More than half of east Germans are firmly against the euro, only a third are in favour. The mark was a symbol of unity. It was a promise from the west that it would share its prosperity with the east. The decision to adopt the euro is regarded as western diktat. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, of the Allensbach opinion survey institute, gives a clue as to how disenchantment with the west has taken root. Her latest poll, conducted last September, asks Germans: "Do you believe that west Germans want to help the east?" Only 32 per cent of east Germans held this opinion and 47 per cent firmly disagreed. Eastern Germans are probably right to be wary of the euro. The new common currency will expose the inefficiency of rustbelt industries. Naturally old communist plants have been closed down or remodelled and modernised - but shipyards and heavy industry can still barely survive without heavy subsidies from Bonn and Brussels. It is reasonable to assume that the first, or at least a significant, victim of economic and monetary union will be Germany, saddled with its high labour and welfare costs. East Germans know exactly what is coming: foreign direct investment has been leap-frogging over eastern Germany into western Poland, which is growing visibly richer by the day. Here, then, is the witches' brew. There will be a tension between a Germany perceived by its neighours as being rich - and obliged in a full monetary union to make transfer payments to the impoverished south - and yet perceiving itself as a land of spreading poverty. This is a classic trawling ground for the fishermen of the far Right, comparable to the recruiting atmosphere of the 1930s. And so, at precisely the moment when Europe is supposed to be integrating more closely, the divisions between East and West will become more apparent. Even the proponents of the euro see it as a modernising device - look how it helped to keep budgets under control - and accept that monetary union could become a scapegoat. Necessary reforms of Germany's labour costs will be blamed squarely on EMU institutions rather than on the German Government. The German resistance to the euro is not confined to the east. Nor is it the exclusive catchment area of the far Right. Pensioners remain nervous - though notably less so since the accession of a Social Democratic Government - and so do small businesses. It is precisely the small and medium-sized company, making up the so-called Mittelstand, which is supposed to generate jobs, specially in the east. The trend of big business in "euroland" is already clear: towards mega mergers that end up with job cuts. Yet small business in the east was led to believe that the euro would be as strong as the mark. The new Government preaches a soft euro, the European Central Bank a hard one: the confusion is destroying the trust of the entrepreneurs who, as a result, are having reservations about hiring more workers. The political articulation of euro discontent is a complex calculation. Far-right parties are prone to splinter. Germany's far-right parties failed to get into parliament in the general election in September, and their present unity over the euro is a brittle one. Far-left parties are also against the euro and it is remarkable in the east how many far-right voters have moved for tactical reasons towards supporting the former communist Party of Democratic Socialists. This may become a trend in the euro heartland: voters switching party allegiances, from one extreme to another, on the basis of a burning single issue, whether it be the euro or immigration. Manfred Brunner, Germany's veteran Eurosceptic campaigner has just resigned from the leadership of his party, the Alliance of Free Citizens, because it has been making common cause with the far Right as part of an anti-euro crusade. As German conservatives seek to position themselves and sharpen their opposition to an overregulated European Union, they run this risk: that they will be trotting some way behind the pacesetting of the neo-Nazis. That risk is evident in many continental European cultures. The question is: how does one oppose the euro without appearing to be a fascist sympathiser? Burkhard Schröder, a sharp observer of the far-right scene, sees how the categories of political protest are blurring in the east. "Quite simply, the east is different. Here it is fashionable in the east to be on the Right. In the schools that I visit in the east, I see boys with dreadlocks who claim to be National Socialist because it is cool. Kids who sympathise with the Left choose to keep quiet about it and claim to be right-wing." Irish pressure: Tony Blair last night came under fresh pressure from pro-European MPs to take Britain into the single currency as soon as possible after a survey of 61 Irish companies by Euro Dynamics, a Dublin-based consultancy, showed that 28-45 per cent were considering replacing their British suppliers with others from within "euroland". DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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