By Richard Wolff The richest European economy - Germany - imposed massive suffering onto one of the poorest economies in Europe. This was to help defray three huge costs associated with the 2008 global capitalist crash for which Greece, a tiny country, bore minimal responsibility. The first cost was a badly imbalanced eurozone economy leading to 2008. German exports (at carefully managed prices lower than elsewhere in Europe) were financed then by excessive German private bank loans to Greeks and others who purchased those German exports (at the expense of their own countries' producers) while accumulating excess debts. The second cost was the crash itself that brought Greece severe unemployment and economic contraction as revenues from tourism and shipping collapsed. The third cost was the bailout of European (including Greek) private banks and Merkel's maneuver to forcibly convert Greek government debt to private banks into debt owed to the institutions. Denying Greece massive debt relief meant and means heavy austerity.
Alongside the Greeks, many other Europeans now grasp what awaits them too in the "unified Europe" that German leaders are constructing and using. Yet the Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Italian and other poorer (relative to Germany and France) people want a differently unified Europe. With troubling historical echoes, German leaders once again seek to force a particular kind of capitalist unity onto Europe. The weapons this time are economic and political instead of military, but they too provoke resistance. Europe risks severe divisions and disunity with serious ramifications for the world. Echoes of Past German Economic Imperialism In the second half of the 19th century, private capitalists in the smaller states that would later become Germany confronted major problems. Those states' politics and cultures still reflected a feudalism that resented and often undermined capitalists. The latter faced tough competition from other, more advanced capitalists and especially the British who dominated world trade. Germany came late to colonialism and kept encountering obstacles from competing colonial regimes, above all the British. Capitalists in what became Germany were also discovering a new and growing threat from their own employees. The latter articulated an anti-capitalism from below that envisioned and pursued an alternative, socialist future without private capitalists in it. The "solution" fashioned by their leader then, Otto von Bismarck, mobilized government support for the growth of German capitalism. Bismarck allied that policy with selective reinforcements of the remaining Prussian and wider German feudalism to build a strong governing coalition. On that basis he sought to blunt the growing socialist workers' movements by constructing the first modern welfare state apparatus. Finally, he forcefully projected a new German colonialism as a major player within capitalism's global imperialist expansion. Holding together this complex set of policies was the glue of intense German nationalism mobilized by Bismarck's wars to unify the diverse smaller sovereignties into one German nation. Yet those wars had other, contradictory effects, including the Paris Commune, which gave a powerful stimulus to socialism and socialists everywhere. full: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32380-deja-vu-germany-tightens-its-economic-power-over-europe _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
