German chancellor Angela Merkel is usually a model of diplomatic politeness when she talks in public about Germany’s allies. Not last Tuesday, however.
Towards the end of a speech in Berlin, she criticised the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and to a lesser extent the European Central Bank for responding to the global economic crisis with an unorthodox and irresponsible splurge of money creation. Unless the central banks reversed these policies, she warned, the western world would find itself in the same kind of mess 10 years from now that it’s in today.
Well, she may be right, or she may not. But what struck me most about this speech wasn’t her predictions of doom. It was the carefully differentiated language that she used in speaking of the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB. Hastily written news stories and commentaries have assumed that she made more or less the same criticisms of each central bank. Not so.
In the ECB’s case, she said: “Even the European Central Bank has bowed to some extent to international pressure with the purchase of covered bonds.” In other words, “international pressure” – from what country or countries, she omits to say - is to blame for the ECB’s alleged recklessness. ECB policymakers get a rap on the knuckles for bowing to this mysterious pressure. But fundamentally, Merkel seems to be saying, it’s not the ECB’s fault. It is the fault of foreigners who are putting pressure on the ECB.
In the Fed’s case, Merkel’s language was much stronger - and in the case of the Bank of England, it positively dripped with sarcasm and contempt. Here’s what she said: “I view with great scepticism, for example, the extent of the Fed’s powers, and the way that the Bank of England has also worked out its own little line in Europe.”
Don’t you love that word “little”? It is a word that is disrespectful and totally superfluous to Merkel’s argument, and yet the German chancellor has chosen to include it. In fact, the tone of her language is so dismissive of the Bank of England that one has to wonder what was bugging her and her speechwriters when they drafted this sentence.
Almost 20 years after reunification, it is a commonplace to say that Germany has become a normal European country. Merkel’s speech proves it once and for all.
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