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Countries experience malaise, as Jimmy Carter once put it of the United States (not to his advantage in public opinion), and Germany is quite clearly in that state now. No less a figure than Helmut Schmidt, the former Social Democratic chancellor, said in a recent interview with the weekly Die Zeit, "There is almost no area where Germany stands out with its achievements."
Mr. Schmidt was accused of undue pessimism by Horst Köhler, the departing president of the International Monetary Fund, who is almost certainly going to be elected president of Germany in elections in May. But Mr. Köhler himself, speaking in the same interview, seemed hardly more optimistic. "German culture, German poets and music are always present," he said. "However, when you talk about the future, about future technology and future knowledge, nobody thinks of Germany first."
That is probably true, though it is also probably true that few think of France or China or even Britain in that vein either. Yet those countries do not seem to be in quite the despairing mood that Germany is in. Is the difference perhaps, as some have been saying, Germans just enjoy complaining? Or does it run deeper?
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Yet the mood, clearly, is bad. The left-of-center coalition government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has about the lowest poll results of any recent chancellor. If a new election were held now, the opposition conservatives would be swept into power in a landslide. If that does happen in 2006 when elections will be held — and many political experts believe that it will — Germany could potentially be following the pattern of the United States after the Carter malaise and Britain in the depressing years before Margaret Thatcher in opting for a conservative revolution.
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Among the shocks: the reunification of the two halves of the country, which was enormously expensive for the West but has not created an economically viable eastern half; the realization that the country just cannot afford the social-welfare spending that has been among its greatest achievements; and, perhaps most lastingly, the fear that with the imminent enlargement of the European Union, a lot of far cheaper countries to the East — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states — are going to draw industries and jobs away from Germany.
In other words, Germans are gloomy because there is a general realization that the formulas that have worked so well for this country in the decades after World War II are not working anymore, and nobody knows exactly what to do. It is in that mood of semiparalysis that a conservative revolution seems possible.
Of course, it is far too early to see if that will happen, and, if it does, it will happen despite a palpable public aversion to Thatcherite reforms. But among experts especially, there is a growing feeling that Germany needs some strong medicine if it is to overcome its difficulties, and strong medicine in Germany would mean something genuinely historic for Europe: a dismantling of the elaborate welfare state in the Continent's biggest and economically most powerful country that would surely reverberate in the other welfare states of Europe.
"Germans have awakened from their dreams of the eternal welfare state," Mr. Sinn said, explaining the gloomy national mood, and giving it an objective basis. "They've been confronted with reality, and that is never nice."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/international/europe/24LETT.html?8hpib
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