On 4 Okt., 04:42, Don Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
Liberals across the pond are so much more
> sensible then they are here.
The comment that England and the US are two nations divided by a
common language is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, Don,
something which can be clearly seen with respect to the use of the
word "liberal." In Europe generally, even most of the conservative
parties would have to regarded as dangerously liberal from a US
conservative point of view.
While many of the European parties which claim the designation
"liberal" for themselves have strong historical roots in an older
19th. and 20th. Century tradition in which the the term refers to to a
bourgeois (using the term as a synonym for "middle class" rather than
in a Marxist context where the word is used to distinguish from
political groups which have their roots among the workers/proletariat)
attitude which stressed the importance of the rights of the individual
against the power of privilege, statist control and/or national-
security/conservative viewpoints, such positions are accepted today by
all major political parties apart from those of the far left and
right, with only some differences of shading and emphasis. (The UK
liberals have an even more complex history, one strain of which goes
back to the "Whig" group which emerged in parliament at the end of the
17th. Century and which was originally the "party" of the upper
aristocracy (the dukes and earls) as opposed to the Tories (ancestors
of today's Conservatives), which was the party of the smaller gentry.)
Most European liberals today can be better defined as those parties
who represent the view that state influence should be minimised in the
economic area and enthusiastically argue in favour of the interests of
business and for a reduction of state involvement in the social area
and in the area of regulation in general.
Most of them retain a patina of their liberal origins in that they
would be in favour of such things as curtailment of the rights of the
state to observe and collect information about its citizens for
whatever reason, the strict seperation of church and state, and sexual
liberation. The leader of the German liberals (and putative future
foreign minister), Guido Westerwelle, for example, is openly
homosexual and is frequently accompanied by his partner at official
functions. That is just not an issue here, something I could not
imagine in the USA.
But the German Free Democrats' (as the liberals officially call
themselves) main thrust is what could better be called neo-liberal - a
stalwart espousal of themes such as deregulation, the primacy of
untrammeled free markets and the rights of employers. They are often
referred to as party of the "better-off" (Besserverdienenden)
although, to be fair to them, they (publicly) don't like this
description. Their history in the past thirty years has been
punctuated by a number of scandals, usually involving groups of
wealthy business people who have been hell-bent on illegally providing
them with covert funding which, when such cases have been made public,
they have always officially explained as being the work of individual
party functionaries about which the general party leadership has never
known. (Anyone wanting to know more about such affairs can google the
names, Otto Graf Lambsdorff and Jürgen W. Möllemann.)
The increase of their vote by a third to 14.6% in the German elections
last week, which will see them as taking place in government, was
largely at the cost of Merkel's Christian Democrats, the larger of the
two partners in the forthcoming coalition. Both the Christian
Democrats and the Social Democrats who made up the Grand Coalition
which governed for the past four years lost votes; the SPD losing
drastically to the Left Party (an alliance of a group which has its
roots in the former East German communists and a disgruntled group of
Social Democrats who left their party five years ago in protest at
what they regarded as Schröder's unsocial reform course). In fact, the
Christian Democrats and the liberals together increased their combined
share of the vote, compared to 2005, by just 3.4%, much of which can
be explained by a fall in voter turn-out from 77.7% to 70.8%. In other
words, more of those likely to vote "left" (SPD, the Left Party and
the Greens) simply stayed at home. But that's the way parliamentary
democracy works and, in this case, the swing was enough to cause a
(partial) change in government (Merkel's CDU will remain in power,
just this time with a different partner).
Francis
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