The Great Crisis
Angela Merkel's Battle for Europe
The College of Europe in picturesque Bruges could be called a centre for idealism. Those who believe in Europe and the spirit that unites the continent come here to study. The new College building on Verversdijk looks like an enormous oxygen pump, a concrete cube reminiscent of a honeycomb with a glazed pitched roof, constantly supplying the European organism with fresh air. The spirit of the Union breathes more easily here than anywhere else, and it was here that Angela Merkel wanted to offer a few words of wisdom to young Europeans who were just starting out on their way. Or perhaps she simply wanted to cheer herself up.
It was on Tuesday 2nd November 2010. A few days earlier, EU heads of government had decided that the hastily assembled safety net for member states in economic difficulty had to be dismantled and reconstructed. Something permanent was needed. In order to do this, European treaties had to be altered – a nightmare to anyone who remembered the tedious process of drawing them up, and the resistance that was encountered in national referendums. But something had to be done: Europe was in a pitiful state. For about a year the financial crisis had been ravaging all the European countries, and their budgets were in turmoil as a result of bailing out the banks. The problem was particularly acute in Greece, and in November Ireland and then Portugal would ask for help from the EU. Germany and France were at odds over the way out of this impasse, and in any case it was difficult to understand the nature of the disease, for which there was no tried-and-tested cure and which seemed to be fatal.
That morning Angela Merkel had received something through the post. A small package had arrived: the Chancellery noticed it, and security immediately withdrew it from circulation. It was a parcel bomb, sent from Greece and addressed to the Chancellor. Such things rarely happen, and when they do the public doesn't usually hear about them. Angela Merkel a target of Greek extremists? After the first few heated months of the crisis, that would be no great surprise. But the Chancellor's mind was focused on another message that day. The public was due to hear an anecdote about Albert Einstein, and Merkel told it to the best of her ability at the beginning of her speech in Bruges. The Chancellor had gone to Belgium to inaugurate the College's 61st academic year. Every new intake of students was given the name of a patron, and this year the patron was that master of theoretical physics, Albert Einstein, a choice that particularly pleased Angela Merkel, who had herself studied physics.
Merkel asked the students to think back to the late nineteenth century. She reminded them of Marie Curie, of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Then she said that even a great scientist like Einstein had always had difficulty understanding “another great world, the world of quantum mechanics – even though many of the significant aspects of the two fields are closely connected”. The students probably smiled to themselves: that was why they had chosen to study social sciences rather than physics, sensing that they would never grasp its connection to quantum mechanics. Merkel knew something about the subject, but she was trying to make a different point: the case of Einstein, she said, showed how difficult it is to move away from a familiar concept of the world and accept a new one, acquired through scientific findings. “It demonstrates our limitations – the limitations of our own understanding and of a given period in time.”
Merkel is not prepared to accept limitations to her understanding. She wants to understand, to test her limitations, in the Eurozone crisis as in everything else. This event had confronted her with her own limitations, so on 2nd November Merkel was playing for time. Time is always helpful when you sense that you have gone as far as you can. And as she was speaking at the College of Europe, Merkel expressed her confidence that at some point the barriers would come down, destroyed by “great minds”. “If you think, act and explore in that new space, everything suddenly seems simple, you can't understand why it was a closed book to earlier generations.”
That was Merkel the natural scientist speaking, wanting to get to the point where she could solve the problem she faced by way of “scientific findings”. She hoped to enter a new space, where matters could be seen clearly and simply. The crisis didn't feel like that yet. It was – as she said on another occasion – like being in a dark room, so dark that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, and having to grope your way forward. One false step and you would never find the way out.
The Way to Europe
At the beginning of her political career, Angela Merkel's path towards Europe was cautious: she felt her way forward. In the last days of the GDR, as spokeswoman for the de Maizière government, she discovered how brutal the workings of the European Economic Community can be. When the West German Deutschmark was introduced into the former East Germany at an exchange rate of 2:1, not all the money in the West could save the ramshackle agriculture of the ailing former state. Overnight, goods became unsellable, farmers burnt their crops in the fields; it was as if an entire sector had been cast aside. An avalanche of foodstuffs from the West came pouring through the East, all of them products of a highly subsidized market. At the time, subsidies were one of the specialities of the European Economic Community.
Merkel was not born a child of the European Union. At almost every opportunity she stressed that for thirty-five years she had seen Europe from the outside. Like many Central Europeans, her view of the West was shaped by English-speaking countries. This might have been the influence of her mother, who taught English, as well as the fascination that America held for her. The classic European influence on south-west German CDU politicians such as Helmut Kohl and Wolfgang Schäuble was denied to her. They were students of Adenauer, who saw German-French reconciliation as the basis of European unity. Helmut Kohl was forever talking about how, as students, they had torn down the barriers on the border between the Palatinate and Lorraine. From the top of the town of Gengenbach at home in Baden-Württemberg, Wolfgang Schäuble can see all the way to France. Angela Merkel is a stranger to this barrier-obsessed mindset. She has learnt the European repertory partly from long conversations with colleagues who had to explain this kind of West German conditioning to her.
France struck her as a particularly foreign European country. She had learnt French for a short time at school in the GDR, but her teacher married a Canadian, applied for an exit visa and didn't come back. Merkel didn't visit France or explore the country until the first few years after German reunification. She travelled in Provence, and through Kohl got to know Joseph Rovan, the French journalist and historian of German-Jewish descent who was one of the founding fathers of Franco-German reconciliation. She made friends with the political scientist Henri Ménudier, who showed her and her partner Joachim Sauer round Normandy. As a young Minister for Women and Youth, she had her first experiences of the arrogance that can be shown by an énarque, a graduate of the elite French university, the École Nationale d'Administration. Her counterpart in the French Cabinet was one such graduate, and he made his lack of interest in the German minister quite plain by letting his staff talk to her while he read files. So Merkel too studied files, and got her own civil servants to do the talking.
As Environment Minister, she lived through the heyday of the informal ministerial study groups who went to the most beautiful places on the Continent for a few days – an unimaginable luxury today. An Irish colleague took a group of them to the pubs of Dublin to hear banjo music, and the next day they ate lobster by the sea. In the Camargue the ministers rode horses, while in Spain they drank sherry from large casks – all in the cause of European folklore.
Nonetheless, when Merkel first went to Brussels for a Council meeting as the German head of government, she was seen as a blank canvas – although as Chairman of the CDU she had been instrumental in appointing the Portuguese conservative Barroso to the post of President of the Commission. Apart from that she had a reputation as an Anglophile with little experience in European politics. This reputation underwent something of a change at about 3 a.m. on the morning of
20th December 2005. In her first overnight summit Merkel negotiated the new EU budget (or the financial forecast as it is known in EU terminology) up to the year 2013. She was the most prepared among all the government leaders present, spoke to everyone individually, and was the only one absolutely determined to broker a deal. In the end the Merkel method prevailed over the methods of Blair, Chirac and Kaczyński: she walled her opponents in with facts, demolished one argument after another with better arguments, thus forcing everyone to come to an agreement – there were no loopholes left. She earned great respect that night.
Her second coup came two years later, when Germany had both the presidency of the Council and that of the G8. By that time Merkel was recognized as a stateswoman: she had given Germany more of a presence on the world stage, and had shown in the Middle East that she could hold her own in the most difficult diplomatic chess games. But the presidency of the Council was a harder task. Europe was going nowhere. The Constitutional Treaty, signed by government leaders in a solemn ceremony in front of a kitsch colonnaded backdrop in Rome in 2004, was a resounding failure. Vetoed by the citizens of France and the Netherlands, it had no legal standing, so something new was needed, and quickly. The EU, which had just been enlarged by ten states from Central and Eastern Europe, was incapable of action. All hopes were pinned on Merkel, who took over the presidency of the Council on 1st January 2007.
In the months leading up to this, the Chancellor's office had been hard at work. Merkel's Europe team – Thomas de Maizière, then head of the Chancellery, her personal private secretary Beate Baumann, her spokesman Uli Wilhelm, Uwe Corsepius, then head of the European Department, and her foreign-policy adviser Christoph Heusgen – had produced a comprehensive analysis of the problems with the Treaty, a draft of the constitutional document and, most importantly, of the main players involved. Merkel enjoyed discovering where her colleagues on the European Council stood in terms of domestic politics. She drew up a programme for the six months of negotiations, although she was well aware that a solution might not be found before the end of the German presidency. Such issues are not usually resolved until the last moment.
When Merkel began work in January, she followed a detailed schedule of whom she had to visit, work with and when. One of her advisers said later that the Chancellor laid out the problem like the plot of a novel “with seventeen subplots that had to be gradually worked out”. Working things out is Merkel's idea of a political process. She identifies a theme, locates it in her world of ideas, divides it into sub-problems, and then solves them. So a list was made of the key countries and personalities involved in the constitutional question, a matrix showing the most important political actors and advisers. Merkel wanted to know what it would mean if Adviser X to the French President reacted negatively on a given subject, and whether going over it with the help of an adviser from a third country would work. The programme envisaged individual discussions, and then meetings of small groups of people at weekend conferences at Schloss Meseberg, the German government's guest residence. She went from room to room like the manager of a youth hostel, and as the date of the summit in Brussels approached she was the only one who knew exactly how much pain each European leader could take.
But she hadn't reckoned with the resistance of the Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, who – along with his Prime Minister, his twin brother Jarosław, in the background – kept making fresh demands about the different number of votes allocated to individual countries. Poland wanted the voting weight for majority decisions to be fixed by means of a “square-root formula”, at which the other heads of government rolled their eyes in annoyance. Lech Kaczyński kept leaving the room to get instructions from his brother in Warsaw. The Poles claimed that the negotiations were a matter of life and death – making everyone else groan at such a melodramatic statement. Merkel was kept busy moderating, steering conversations towards the result that she had planned. And when Poland still refused to vote in favour, she pointedly walked out of that round of the negotiations. She wasn't taking much of a risk – she knew she could rely on the others. Even before the outcome – later to be known as the Lisbon Treaty – was settled, Die Zeit was praising Merkel's negotiating skills: “The Chancellor has grasped the mechanics of post-modern politics and with it the nature of Europe, for in the EU progress can only be made by means of ongoing dialogue.” Merkel and the nature of Europe – two things that had never been seen as a single entity – had suddenly come together.
Merkel had to work hard for her idea of Europe. As so often it depended on reason: it was a rational construct. And as so often Merkel communicated the result of her intellectual efforts in speeches, preferably to a parliament, sometimes at a celebratory event. Twice in her European coronation year of 2007 she conveyed it to the EU in writing. Once she timed the speech to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. The calendar meant that the occasion would come within the German presidency of the EU, so Merkel organized a celebration in Berlin in March 2007. On that occasion, too, she repeated her leitmotiv of the power of freedom. “If we pin our hopes on the power of freedom, then we are pinning them on humanity. Humanity is at the centre,” she added. “Stagnation means retreat. Building up confidence takes decades, but hopes can be dashed overnight” – as would happen a few years later.
In Berlin, the political world was still in order. Merkel was the new star in the firmament of foreign policy. The media hailed her as the most influential woman in the world. She had wrested an ambitious promise on climate change from EU leaders, and shortly afterwards from the US President as well. And now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the EU, she produced a theme that was to appear again and again in her speeches, to the approval or disapproval of the continent. “We are fortunate to be citizens of a united European Union.” This is a highly charged statement: it has something inevitable and almost fateful about it, as if a higher power were forcing Europe to unite. Not only that, she was playing with the double meaning of the word Glück in German – which can mean good fortune or something that happens by chance – and Merkel knew that this would make an impression. The Chancellor's office had chosen the phrase in an allusion to the rights enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Glück).
Her other speech from that period conveying a statement of principle didn't attract so much attention. Merkel delivered it on 17th January 2007 in Strasbourg, a dull winter day that seemed to be a harbinger of misfortune. The rain was lashing down, the wind howled, the weather forecast spoke of the kind of storm that comes once a century: the terrible area of low pressure known in Europe as Kyrill was on its way. It would reach Germany the next day, bringing death and destruction. Perhaps that was why no one paid much attention to the Chancellor when she told the European Parliament what she was expecting.
It is usual for the incumbent head of government to visit the Strasbourg seat of the European Parliament at the beginning of their EU presidency – a tiresome duty for most heads of government. The Parliament is the weakest link in the European power structure. Nicolas Sarkozy showed his lack of respect for it by having – albeit slight – alterations made to the hall used for plenary sessions. The officiating President of the Council usually sits on a chair in the main auditorium before being summoned to the speaker's lectern. Like all the other seats in the plenary hall, this chair is numbered: it is Number 2. No French President could be expected to settle for that. In Sarkozy's opinion, the President of France doesn't take second place to anyone. So he had the 2 removed before he came to the hall.
In Angela Merkel's world, seat numbers are of no significance. For her, parliaments have greater relevance, and the Bundestag has always been at the centre of her democratic blueprint. She also felt a duty to the European Parliament when she was preparing to make her European declaration of faith in Strasbourg. It was a powerful speech, undoubtedly the most important that she gave on the EU before the crisi
s. The Chancellery had devoted a great deal of time to it. Several weeks before the presidency began there had been discussions on the fundamental message that it would send. Merkel assembled her inner circle and two external advisers over dinner in the small Chancellor's suite on the eighth floor of the Chancellery. Those who had the most to say were Wilhelm and Corsepius, the adviser on Europe: how could they really grip European hearts and minds? There had to be a message going beyond the usual “bread and butter”, as those in her office refer to the constant stream of talk in the political programme. So the discussion centred on classic themes: diversity, respect, war and peace – until someone mentioned tolerance. They still speak of the “tolerance speech” in the Chancellor's office today, as if everyone should know which one they are talking about. Merkel tried to find an answer to the question about the meaning of Europe, the very heart of the matter. What holds Europe together? What is the use of it? How can one actually feel Europe?
Her answer was a triad of values: diversity, freedom, tolerance. “The creator of Europe made it small and even divided it into tiny pieces, so our hearts would delight not in size but in diversity,” she said, quoting the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Yet in Merkel's view, pleasure in diversity is not enough, because diversity has an important requirement without which it cannot exist. Merkel spins the thread further: diversity will not last long if it doesn't go hand in hand with freedom. “Freedom in all its forms: freedom to express your opinions publicly, freedom to believe or not believe, freedom to trade and do business, the artist's freedom to shape his work according to his own ideas.”
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