I take it that everyone has seen the insulting picture on the cover of the February 22 edition of Focus, a lightweight German news magazine? Under the headline ”Swindlers in the euro family”, it shows the Venus de Milo statue, a monument of ancient Greek civilisation, sticking up a middle finger at Germany. In this way the magazine’s editors convey, as offensively as possible, the idea that debt-ridden Greece is robbing Germany blind by forcing it to come to Greece’s financial rescue.
The Greek response has been predictably furious. The Greek consumers’ federation has called for a boycott of German goods, commenting that Greeks were creating timeless works of art like the Venus de Milo at a time when Germans were “eating bananas in the trees”.
Non-Europeans watching from a distance might conclude that, with such crude nationalistic slurs flying from one corner of the continent to the other, Europe’s hopes of building a flourishing economic union and living in perpetual harmony with each other are not likely to get very far. Well, yes, it is all very unseemly. And one shouldn’t forget that there is a particular edge to Greek-German frictions, caused largely by the appalling brutality of the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Greece.
But some perspective is needed. German magazines have few peers in Europe when it comes to putting shocking images on their covers. I recall a 1995 edition of Der Spiegel which showed Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s pre-eminent literary critic, tearing up a copy of “Ein Weites Feld” (Too Far Afield), Günter Grass’s latest novel. The picture caused outrage because it reminded Germans of the wanton destruction under Hitler of books deemed politically impure. But in the end, just like the Venus de Milo picture, the image was simply intended to stimulate higher sales of the magazine, nothing else.
At least in Germany the insults tend to come from the media and ordinary citizens rather than from the political classes. Not so in the UK or Italy. Back in 1990 Nicholas Ridley, a UK government minister under Margaret Thatcher, had to resign after he termed European monetary union “a German racket designed to take over Europe”. Thirteen years later, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi likened Martin Schulz, a German socialist in the European Parliament, to a concentration camp guard. Following faithfully in his boss’s footsteps, Stefano Stefani, an Italian deputy tourism minister, then derided German tourists as “arrogant, stereotyped blonds with a hyper-nationalist pride”.
All this never caused more than a blip in diplomatic relations. Too much was as stake for Europe, then as now, for policymakers to let the hysteria get out of control. But if we are to be relatively relaxed about populist exchanges of abuse, we should also be under no illusions: the rich tapestry of European life will always be stained with some ugly blotches.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on 