What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  Dominique de Villepin: Prime Minister, 2005–present. Debonair Villepin, a diplomat and poet, was once said to be able to seduce with his words. Few jumped in bed with him when he introduced his youth labor law, which was ultimately deleted from the law books. Along with rumors of scandals that keep popping up like mushrooms in a moist cowfield, that law spelled doomsday for his presidential plans.

  Ségolène Royal (aka the Princess): President, Poitou-Charentes; previous parliamentarian. With most of the competition besmirched in scandals, personable Royal stands a chance of representing Socialists in the 2007 presidential run-off and could be France’s first woman president. One problem: her common-law husband, François Hollande, who heads France’s Socialist Party, is also a contender.

  MAD JEAN-MARIE LE PEN

  Given his doughy face, glass eye, and tightly drawn snake of a mouth, seventy-nine-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen, who grew rich selling recordings of Nazi marching tunes and calls the Holocaust “a detail of history,” hasn’t soared in popularity from looks alone. Le Pen, the obscure leader of the National Front, which he started in 1972, is now the běte noire of French politics. His success is due to his contagious rage, much of it concerning Algerians, whom he says milk welfare and are the cause of France’s unemployment and crime—an idea endorsed by neo-Nazis who flock to his rallies. His speeches are so rabid that violence often breaks out. In 1995, a group of skinheads left his rally and promptly killed a Moroccan, pushing him over a bridge; one of his campaigners murdered a black youth—a move that Le Pen defended. Le Pen himself is no pacifist. He temporarily lost his European Parliament in 1998, after assaulting a female Socialist, and he lost his eye in a brawl with a Communist. Now Le Pen, who likens himself to Joan of Arc, official patron saint of his party, is protected by his own 300-strong paramilitary force, at least some of whom are neo-Nazis.26

  Marine Le Pen: Nicknamed “The Clone,” she’s taking over for Pops.

  Bertrand Delanoë: Mayor of Paris, 2001–present. At his request, the right bank of the River Seine is covered in over 2,000 tons of sand and planted with palm trees in summer, and millions enjoy outdoor concerts. On Valentine’s Day, he beckons the city’s residents to gather in front of the Hôtel de Ville for a collective reenactment of Robert Doisneau’s famous photo “The Kiss.” In 2002, he threw an all-night party for Parisians, with art shows, concerts, and bashes all over town, but paid for it with more than a hangover: a French Algerian stabbed him in the midst of the merrymaking at City Hall; Delanoë quickly recovered. Parisians adore their first liberal mayor in 130 years, except for one thing. He wants them to stoop so low as to pick up their dogs’ doo; dog owners barked loud protests.

  In canine-friendly Paris, the pavements are covered in some sixteen tons of dog dirt every day.

  Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders): Founded by French physicians in 1971, this independent emergency relief agency is the world’s largest, swooping in to give free medical care during emergencies, disasters, and epidemics, and entering war zones that few others dare touch. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 and is now headquartered in Brussels.

  News you can understand: Le Monde Diplomatique is decidedly left, but you can find articles here that nobody else will touch. Some articles free: www.Mondediplo.com

  2. GERMANY

  (Deutschland)

  Reinventing Herself

  FAST FACTS

  Country: Federal Republic of Germany; Bundesrepublik Deutschland

  Capital: Berlin

  Government: Federal republic

  Independence: 1871 formation of united Germany (Second German Reich); 1990 East and West reunified

  Population: 82,423,000 (2006 estimate)

  Head of State: President Horst Köhler (2004)

  Head of Government: Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005)

  Elections: President elected by Federal Convention (parliament and state delegates) for five-year term; chancellor elected by absolute majority in parliament for four-year term

  Name of Parliament: Federal Assembly; Bundestag

  Ethnicity: 91.5% German; 2.4% Turkish; 6.1% Serb, Croat, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian

  Religion: 34% Protestant; 34% Roman Catholic; 3.7% Muslim; 28.3% other or none

  Language: German

  Literacy: 99% (1997 estimate)

  Famous Exports: Cinderella, the Easter bunny, Faustian dilemmas

  Economic Big Boy: DaimlerChrysler (Mercedes-Benz, etc.); 2004 total sales: $192.75 billion1

  Per Capita GDP: $29,800 (2005 estimate)

  Unemployment: 9.1% (January 2006 Eurostat figure)

  EU Status: Founding member (EEC member since 1957)

  Currency: Euro

  Quick Tour

  The majestic land pushed against the Alps is awash with spectacular cities and tiny wine towns, folded with steep hills and deep forests, and home to numerous spas with water believed to have great restorative powers, which come in handy after days of museum-hopping and nights of oompah-pahing in beer halls.

  Each region of Germany has her own special beers, all made according to particular legal requirements called Reinheitsgebot. Regulations call for purity; water, hops, yeast and malt are the only acceptable ingredients.

  From artist haven Berlin and bustling banking center Frankfurt to the somber cathedrals of Cologne and the castled-crowned cliffs along the “fairy-tale route” where the Brothers Grimm collected their tales, Germany’s calling the masses. Surging in popularity, she was the world’s ninth most visited country in 2004, when over 20 million visitors dropped in. Locals speculate that tourists often love Deutschland because they have such low expectations when they arrive.

  That Germany—as of 2006 the world’s largest exporter and the major cog in the industrial economic motor of Europe—has a festive and glamorous side is indeed news to much of the world. After all, world famous Germans appear deep, dark, and gloomy. The land of brooding thinkers including Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche may be the heaviest country on the planet, and there’s little question that any other country has rearranged the world more. Gutenberg revolutionized communications when he turned a wine press into a printing press in 1455, and reformer Martin Luther shattered sixteenth-century Catholic Europe by nailing his ninety-five theses to a church door. Johannes Kepler rearranged our view of the universe, proving that planets circle the sun, and Karl Marx, with his utopian delusion that mankind could selflessly toil together as one, planted ideas for a societal makeover, never knowing that his nineteenth-century dreams would cleave the twentieth-century world. Albert Einstein and Max Planck decoded the keys to the universe, and Rudolf Peierles and Otto Frisch worked with Einstein’s equations to produce the world’s first atomic bomb, supervised by Robert Oppenheimer, a German American. And no single person has triggered a more extensive restructuring of the globe than Hitler did when he launched his war—the single event that most defines the twentieth century, with effects still shaping the planet today. Among those effects: Germany has been sitting in the corner ever since.

  Schwarzwald: One of Germany’s tucked-away treasures

  WORLD WAR II: EXPENSIVE IN EVERY WAY

  When someone mentions Germany, perhaps Mercedes-Benz, Boris Becker, and Becks beer come to mind. But three other things often still associated with Germany are Hitler, concentration camps, and the violent rise of the Aryan nation. The ugliest chapter in human history closed six decades ago, but the loss of life, the devastation, and the Nazis’ genocidal atrocities were so painful that Europe is still feeling the psychological effects. Of all of Europe’s military showdowns, World War II most rattled the long-running assumption that humankind is basically good. With 60 million dead and Europe in ruins, the destruction that resulted from Hitler’s attempt to take over the planet was so vast that it required trillions of dollars and decades of labor to fix Europe back up; the emotional scars still remain. What is often overlooked, however, is that Germany suffered too—and not only because not all Germans supported
Hitler or shared his maniacal plan. Most of Germany was flattened during the last months of the war; when the Allied forces tried out new weapons that sucked off roofs and torched entire cities, residents suffocated and charred in giant fireballs that dropped from the sky. Twelve million Germans were shoved out of Eastern European lands in forced repatriations after the war; 2 million died in violent reprisals along the way. Germany lost a quarter of her original territory when Allies redrew the map, and the remaining land was politically divided, with a third of Germany becoming a Soviet satellite for the next forty-five years. Germany paid out billions in war reparations, and sixty years later Germany is still paying—for Holocaust victims, for slave labor, for damages, and for looted riches and art. But perhaps the heaviest debt is the guilt that still weighs upon Germans, most of whom were born after the war.

  Germany paid over $69 billion to victims of the Second World War, including to families of the six million Jews killed in concentration camps and others subjected to forced labor. Germany also repaid $1.1 billion to the United States for $1.3 billion of Marshall Plan aid and donated $75 million to Harvard University to start the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a foundation promoting better understanding between Europe and the U.S.2

  The unrivaled population giant of Western Europe, especially since 1990’s surprise reunification of her East and West, Deutschland is the financial locomotive of the European Union—she shovels in more dues than anyone else and helps keep Europe chugging along. There’s a reason why modern Germany found herself in the Ms. Moneybags role, besides the fact that she has a bigger economy than any other EU player—$2.7 trillion at the 2005 official exchange rate—making Germany’s the third largest economy in the world after the U.S. and Japan. The underlying dynamic shaping German-European relations since the war is the unspoken rule that if Germany wants an active role on the Continent, she has to pay up, shut up, and play by the rules, which are dictated mostly by the U.S. and France.

  GERMANY AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE U.S. AND FRANCE

  The United States was the dominant force in the rebuilding of West Germany. For decades after the war, hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly military personnel, lived in West Germany, overseeing the birth of the new nation. U.S. funding helped reconstruct it, and the U.S. guided the hands writing the new constitution. Americans influenced decisions from industry to energy and stamped American values onto the German republic, which the U.S. controversially brought into NATO. But the country that guided Germany back into Europe was France. French leaders approached Germans in 1950 with a plan to pool coal and steel resources. As with the U.S. their plan to bring Germany back into the loop wasn’t entirely altruistic. The motives were threefold. First, if France and Germany shared the resources needed for war, they would be less likely to go to war again. Second, France realized that with Germany on her team she would have more power in international dealings. And third, France was about to go bankrupt from payments to farmers; German funds could be used to bail out French agriculture.3

  Guilt-ridden by the events of the Second World War and shocked by the loss of East Germany to the Soviet bloc in 1945, West Germans became workaholics, plunging into their jobs with zeal, turning the country into a workhorse, and transforming the economy into Europe’s most productive. The German Economic Miracle made their country one of the world’s wealthiest, but the economy began sputtering in the 1990s. The reason: the sudden reunification with East Germany made Germany’s population shoot up by 16 million overnight. By 2003, over $770 billion had been sunk into gluing the two halves together—and East Germany is still lagging behind.

  West German states toss about $70 billion to Eastern states every year—a bone of contention for West Germans.4

  SO HAPPY TOGETHER?

  Fifteen years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but East and West still don’t fully function as one, and resentment hangs in the air. Wessies (as West Germans are nicknamed in Germany) are still paid about 25 percent more than Ossies (East Germans), and Ossies have a much higher unemployment rate (around 18 percent). Living is cheaper in the East, but many young Ossies head west. The government moved the capital east from Bonn to its previous home in Berlin, but that was mostly symbolic. Ossies say that since reunification their culture has been swallowed up by the West’s. Their dreams about the happiness of reunification have rather faded as eastern cities become dilapidated and factories close up. Wessies are annoyed by how the reunification drains the economy, which was charging full steam ahead until the East and West got back together.

  The economy, which Germans talk about obsessively, appeared to be leading Germans into yet another of their collective funks, when two things considerably brightened the scene: First, Germany landed the 2006 World Cup soccer tournament—and the country went goofy “footballing” the place up, including installing soccer balls atop buildings and billboards; the world’s biggest soccer ball exhibit traveled around the country. Second, after an embarrassingly long tussle, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel finally got Gerhard Schröder to leave the chancellor’s seat and offer it to her. Thus far, much to everyone’s amazement, Chancellor Merkel is proving to be not only Germany’s most popular leader in ages, but a dynamic force on the world scene.

  ANGELA MERKEL: LETTING THE CLOUDS DISAPPEAR

  A physicist by training and chemist by profession, Angela Merkel leapt into politics in 1989, shortly before the wall came crashing down. Her success is remarkable: after first landing a job as a government spokeswoman in the newly democratic East Germany, when Germany reunified, she was quickly plucked to be part of Chancellor Kohl’s cabinet, as minister of women and youth. When the Christian Democrats took a nosedive in 1998, after a major scandal (see “Helmut Kohl,” page 56), she tidied up the mess as head of the party. In her first stab at running for the chancellorship, she gained the chair—a historic moment marking the first time a woman and an East German took the top leadership role. Once rather dowdy, she got a makeover and promptly captivated leaders worldwide. She bluntly told President Bush that Guantánamo was an outrage (though she did support the Iraq invasion), and she demanded that Condoleezza Rice take action on CIA “special renditions”—or kidnapping terror suspects. She’s calmed ruffled feathers at the EU, hammering together a budget, and has helped unite her country in spirit; after her first hundred days, she had the highest approval rating of any chancellor since 1949.

  Nobody is missing Chancellor Schröder, who promised to cut taxes but instead raised them, and who just could not fit the key in the economic ignition. Most Germans supported his opposition to the war in Iraq; what’s bringing them down is that Schröder was apparently two-faced about that as well. The media reports that Germany was helping the U.S. in Iraq, with agents providing information about targets. The chilly gusts once blowing in from Washington have definitely warmed, the economy is slowly picking up, and unemployment is slowly going down. Germans, for the moment, appear to be nearly in a good mood.

  COMRADE CHIC

  Once shoved under the rug, East German culture is now in vogue. There’s a veritable “Ostalgie” trend in Germany—a nostalgia for the East reflected in everything from propagandistic art and posters to Communist-era music and sweets. At Ostalgie clubs, partygoers sport “People’s Army” jackets, Soviet badges, and Young Communist uniforms. Goodbye Lenin!, a 2003 film by Wolfgang Becker, also spurred the nostalgia movement. The plot: an elderly East German woman falls into a coma in the late 1980s; when she recovers, Germany has been reunified, but her son, shielding her from shock, re-creates life as it was before his mother (and East Germany) fell.

  For all the optimism of the moment, Germany has yet to confront her own frail self-esteem—a tightly wound, sensitive issue. Decades of war guilt have created a society that feels uneasy, even in the best of times. Any expression of satisfaction (outside of sports) sets off alarm bells and fears of rekindled nationalistic pride. When former president Johannes Rau recently chided Germans, sayin
g they should not be proud to be German, it sounded far too harsh; when leaders opine that today’s Germans shouldn’t feel guilty, their comments seem insensitive to all the suffering that German military exploits caused. Germany has apologized, Germany has paid—but everyone knows that the death, destruction, and pain can never be erased with money or words. Then again, nearly sixty years after Hitler’s death, maybe it’s time for the world to forgive Germany, starting with Germany forgiving herself—while knowing full well that nobody will ever forget.

  History Review

  For most of history, Germany wasn’t Germany; she was hundreds of fiefdoms, kingdoms, and principalities headed by German-speaking nobles, kings and knights, all under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire. Supposed to heed the authority of the emperor, many gave little more than a tip of the hat, and the territories had their own laws and levied their own taxes, making travel across them a deeply confusing affair. Just as puzzling were the boundaries, which were always snaking in new directions as knights won new towns; at times German fiefdoms extended east into today’s Baltic States and Poland, north into today’s Denmark, south into today’s Switzerland, and west into today’s France.