January 15, 2007
Eurocrats in fat cat scandal - has British euroscepticsm spread to Germany?
Visiting Berlin last week, the front page headline in Bild Zeitung transported me back to Britain 15 or even 20 years ago. "Crazy salaries," shouted the story from the newsstands, complaining about how Brussels officials earn so much more than their Berlin counterparts and listing their allegedly lavish perks.
It could have been The Sun, during the good old days. The fact is that the British tabloid has concluded that Europe is boring and frankly a lot less threatening that it used to be. The paper hardly ever puts the issue on the front page. So what’s up with the Germans?
The fact is that British euroscepticsm, while undoubtedly rooted in the country’s geography and history, was fanned by a feeling that the British system was under threat. During the 1980s and 1990s there was a sense in the right-leaning media that Brussels was trying to kill the Thatcherite revolution with ideas of "social Europe" and suffocating red tape.
Now Brussels is in the hands of Jose Manuel Barroso’s post-Thatcherite liberals, a lot of the heat and fury has gone out of the Europe debate in Britain (although the revival of the constitutional debate could change all that).
So which countries feel most threatened by Brussels now? France, of course, whose politicians routinely follow the example of British politicians from the 1990s of blaming everything on the EU, from immigration to the euro.
And Germany, whose economic model is under pressure from Brussels, which regards the cloying links between business and the state as impediments to the free market, whether it is the country’s savings banks, car companies or - most recently - energy sector.
This article from the former German president, Roman Herzog, also reminds me of the overheated British debate about power draining away to Brussels, although admittedly there aren’t many in the UK who would resolve the issue by giving more power to the European parliament.
The current political and media climate in France and Germany makes me think that even "good Europeans" can become sceptical when they feel Brussels is no longer on their side. The idea that euroscepticsm is a purely British phenomenon - like mad cow disease or warm beer - is misguided to say the least.
Dear Sir
Does Germany become more eurosceptic because it feels more threatened by the EU? I think it is very interesting but not entirely fair to compare traditional British euroscepticism, or the outright ‘europhobia’ of the British tabloid press with the occasional indignation of Germany’s Bild-Zeitung with fat salaries in Brussels.
The timing of Bild’s attack on “crazy salaries” is certainly a good one, from an editorial viewpoint, but I don’t think the Bild-Zeitung is a reliable barometer for German sentiment about the EU. Nor is the quoted article by Roman Herzog.
Mr. Herzog, as former president of the German federal constitutional court, stands in a tradition of court members and scolars of constitutional law trying to protect the German constitution against encroachments from European law. His musings about the EU’s democratic deficit is something that has consistently been cooked up in German discussions about Europe and is part of Germany’s traditional vision of building a truly federal Europe, which would clearly be acceptable if it were truly democratic and modelled on a federal system, preferably the German one.
In fact, German political elites have always been united by a tacit consent on the necessity of continuing and deepening European Integration and the need to have strong institutions in Brussels with the power to shape and drive joint policy-making, compared to the traditional British view that the EU should provide nothing more than a stable framework for a European free-trade zone. This does not seem to change, even in the more assertive post-cold-war Germany.
It is, thus, unthinkable, that these same elites would in their majority agree to hold a referendum about thus European constitution, and, thus, do their bit to overcome the EU’s democratic deficit. They know that to do that would be suicidal, open the Pandora’s box of direct democracy and fan xenophobic stereotyping and frustration with the political establishment. According to a recent opinion poll 81% of Germans think a referendum on the EU constitution would be a good idea. So, I am sure does Bild-Zeitung. What an opportunity to turn on the heat!
Claus Schultze
Posted by: Claus Schultze | January 17th, 2007 at 12:07 pm | Report this commentVienna, Austria