A concise History of Germany
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’ and ‘ Wessis ’. Opinion polls and sociological research also served to back up informal observations about the prevalence of competitive individualism among westerners, a stronger community orientation and continued commitment to state provision and welfare support in the east. Marriage and friendship patterns often sustained a now invisible social and psychological Wall. Even so, new generations were growing up in both eastern and western regions of Germany who no longer considered their identity in the stereotypes of the late twentieth century, as ‘Ossis’ or ‘Wessis’, but rather saw themselves simply as Germans marked by the regional differences that had characterised this highly diverse country across the centuries. Division was simply growing out with the passage of generations. GERMAN POLITICS IN A CHANGING EUROPE Economic, social and cultural disparities and dislocations had a major impact on the character of German politics in the years after unification. In the early 1990s, there were signs of resurgent rightwing radical nationalism. While in West Germany right-wing parties such as the Republikaner and the DVU ( Deutsche Volksunion ) had already affected the electoral landscape at regional level in the 1980s, the strains associated with unification offered fertile stamping grounds for fomenting incipient and pre-existing racial prejudices in eastern areas. Acts of individual racist violence, as well as coordinated incidents such as the attacks on foreigners in Hoyerswerda and Rostock in eastern Germany, and Solingen and Mölln in western Germany, rose alarmingly in the early 1990s, leading many observers to fear a return to rabid nationalism with the resurrection of some version of a unified nation state. Yet, in contrast to the situation in the 1930s, this grass-roots racism was firmly opposed and dealt with by the government (despite what appeared on occasion to be somewhat tardy responses by members of the local police forces and onlookers), and was vocally opposed by many among the wider German population, such that early fears appeared unfounded. Even the tightly constructed German citizenship laws were revised in the course of the 1990s, making it easier for long-term resident ‘guest workers’ and their descendants to apply for German citizenship. The political landscape was further transformed by the expanded electorate in united Germany. In the eastern Länder, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the discredited SED) scored notable successes in some areas – and particularly in east Berlin – as a party representing the regional interests of disaffected easterners who felt they were being treated as second- class citizens. And once the transitional electoral provision of ‘separate voting pots’ for the areas of former West and East Germany had been abolished, after the 1994 General Election, the FDP found that it too had become something of a rump western regional party, struggling to reach the 5 per cent electoral threshold when diluted by the new electorate in the eastern Länder. Moreover, the CDU ‘unification Chancellor’, Helmut Kohl, whose own political difficulties in the 1980s had been alleviated by the fall of the Wall, came increasingly under critique in the 1990s, once again in relation to somewhat murky scandals concerning party finances. A historic General Election in 1998 produced a new coalition government of the SPD and the Greens, with Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder taking over as Chancellor. Despite mounting domestic difficulties, while the CDU cast around for a successor of comparable political stature to Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schroeder and the ‘Red-Green’ coalition managed to cling on to power in the General Election of 2002. Despite the left-wing credentials of both coalition parties, with commitment for example to the phasing out of nuclear power, Schroeder’s socioeconomic policies were in fact centrist. In a period of faltering growth and rising unemployment, he pursued a neo-liberal ‘Third Way’ agenda that cut welfare benefits and appeared to many on the receiving end to be unduly harsh. In 2005 Schroeder chose to end his second period in government early, by organising the loss of a confidence vote that would allow the calling of elections a year ahead of the four-year schedule. At the same time, the wider European context was rapidly changing. The unification of Germany and the transformation of formerly communist Eastern European states further fuelled the widening and deepening of European integration processes that had already been under way before 1990. The Schengen Area, arising from the 1985 agreement, was implemented in the mid- 1990s, and incorporated into EU law. This rendered international travel between participating states almost unnoticeable, with the dismantling of borders and only occasional re-imposition of controls in connection with specific incidents – terrorism, smuggling, drugs – or at times of tension relating to mass immigration. Of the EU states, the UK and Ireland opted out, while non-EU states within the Schengen Area include Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. In the early 1990s the then president of France, François Mitterrand, was keen to bind the newly unified Germany into the project of a unifying Europe, and envisaged monetary union as a key element in this project. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty formally established the European Union, and agreed the introduction of a new common European currency, the Euro. The phased introduction of the Euro in participating EU states in 1999–2002 marked a desire to bring the economies of participating EU states into line with each other. Criteria were set relating to acceptable levels of budget deficit, debt ratio, interest rates and inflation. Crucially, as it was to turn out, monetary union was not accompanied by fiscal union, and while participating states lost some of their previous domestic financial levers (such as devaluation of national currencies, which no longer existed, or varying interest rates to control levels of borrowing) the question of wider European control when any participating country might experience economic crises was, somewhat optimistically, not adequately addressed at this stage. Some EU states chose to preserve their distance; notably Britain, which, despite the new Eurotunnel literally undermining the few kilometres of water which had historically rendered it such a separate island, still retained its distance on both Schengen and the Euro. The EU itself was not merely deepening but also widening well beyond its original western European core, and this too complicated the implications of closer economic union. Austria, Sweden and Finland joined in 1995; and the EU expanded significantly in 2004 with the entry of a number of Eastern European states – Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – as well as Malta and Cyprus, followed in 2007 by Bulgaria and Romania, and in 2013 by Croatia. Other states were considered as candidates that had not as yet met the criteria for membership. Meanwhile, the 2007 Lisbon Treaty created a single legal entity with a President of the European Council. As the EU grew, so the evident disparities between countries became increasingly significant for the whole. The enlarged group of twenty-eight was internally diverse, with striking dissimilarities in domestic political economies; in particular, there were significant differences in economic structures and strategies between ‘peripheral’ countries – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy – and states such as France and Germany which had different wage structures, levels of technology, and export-led growth strategies. These disparities created something of a north–south divide alongside the east–west divisions rooted in historical political differences. In the 1990s and early twenty-first century Germany and France were at the forefront of moves towards ever-closer European integration, and possibly an incipient federal United States of Europe. In many respects, these moves appeared not dissimilar, though on a different scale and in a different world historical context, to the kinds of developments which had taken place within and between the German states of the early nineteenth century. But the parallels perhaps end with the development of a Customs Union. For while a united foreign policy under Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 brought about the slightly unwilling ‘small German’ unification of the Imperial Germany of 1871, there was far from anything resembling unity with respect to a possible united European foreign policy in the early twenty-first century. In the international crises of the 1990s (the Gulf War, Kosovo), the recently unified Germany was jolted into having to wake up to new international commitments and responsibilities; by the time of the renewed crisis over Iraq a decade later, in 2002–3, the situation was rather different. Schroeder in part succeeded in winning the 2002 election, despite growing economic problems and rising unemployment at home, precisely because he played on the remarkable levels of pacifism among a German population which had learned only too well the historical lessons of two world wars unleashed from German soil. While British Prime Minister Tony Blair was busy resurrecting and strengthening a governmental commitment to the ‘special relationship’, the ‘transatlantic alliance’, with the USA, supported to a degree by Spain, Germany stood by the French refusal in principle to unleash what seemed to many a totally unnecessary war against Iraq. But the wider world was changing, and with it Germany’s sense of place and capacity to exercise power. The spectacular terrorist suicide attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and on Washington on 11 September 2001 (or ‘9/11’ as this came to be called) both inaugurated and symbolised a new era of international uncertainty, characterised by fears of fundamentalist terrorism and military instability. The predictable dangers and threats of the old Cold War in a world divided between two superpowers were replaced by an unstable multi- polar world, with unpredictable flashpoints and new forms of ideological and religious conflict alongside the continuation of long-term patterns of political oppression, inequalities of health and disease, and contrasts between areas of plenty and of famine. THE MERKEL ERA In 2005, with the election of Angela Merkel as Chancellor of a Grand Coalition government, Germany entered an entirely new era. In her own person, Merkel embodied the sheer extent of the changes that had taken place within Germany; and in the years that followed, her responses to the challenges arising from significant economic, social and political transformations across Europe and the wider world radically altered the character and standing of Germany. Angela Merkel was the first German Chancellor to be born after the Second World War; the first female Chancellor of Germany; and the first with a significant East German background. Merkel was born in the West German city of Hamburg in 1954, but within months of her birth her family moved to the GDR where her father, a Lutheran pastor, took on a parish in northern Brandenburg. Socialised entirely under communism, Merkel trained to become a scientist, and earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1986. With the transformation of the political landscape in 1989–90, she entered the political arena, representing a seat in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a northern province of eastern Germany. Through much of the 1990s, Merkel was a close ally of the Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who played a somewhat paternalistic role in fostering the career of ‘his girl’, as he liked to call her. But influenced by her Protestant background, and with strong moral convictions, Merkel was not afraid to challenge Kohl when the scandal broke over CDU financial donations. In 2000, she was elected the first female head of a German party. From then on, she rose to become a dominant force in German and international politics. In 2005, following an election where the CDU/CSU polled only narrowly more than the SPD led by Gerhard Schroeder, Merkel succeeded in gaining the role of Chancellor in a Grand Coalition. By 2009, her popularity had grown and she was able to head a government jointly with the conservatives’ traditional coalition partner, the FDP. By 2013, the popularity of the CDU under Merkel’s leadership was at its height; but its junior partner, the FDP, was less successful, and now failed to clear the 5 per cent hurdle. This meant that in the 2013–17 parliament, Merkel again had to enter a Grand Coalition with the SPD. Yüklə 7,91 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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