LETTER FROM EUROPE: An Odd Couple
Gedmin, Jeffrey
LETTER FROM EUROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN An Odd Couple i tl Berlin ECENTLY I HAD THE PLEASURE of hosting Patrick Chamorel of the Hoover Institution for a presentation titled, "What's the Matter...
...Or maybe not so secretly...
...Le Monde had gloated about a superior social system, deploring an America that spends a fortune on a war in Iraq but cannot care for its own citizens at home...
...France has this clash of cultures, too...
...The day when Paris could dominate Brussels is over...
...information that enabled Coalition forces to avoid certain targets like schools and hospitals...
...Cuba does not have strikes...
...I wonder if Cuban diplomats are doing the same thing...
...The roundtable took place in a private upstairs room at the trendy restaurant Linden Life, on the boulevard Unter den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate...
...I suspect the Germans think secretly of the French as cheese-eating Americans, that is, nationalistic, militaristic, and unilateral...
...Chamorel had flown in from Paris to argue with considerable conviction (and gobs of French charm, of course) that while Germany may rank today as the sick man of Europe, France has become the sickest...
...I t has actually written a non-complaining clause into company contracts...
...Today more than one-third of the French electorate votes for parties of the far left or right...
...Our speaker's assessment had hit the nail on the head...
...He thinks France can be fixed...
...France and Germany are Europe's odd couple...
...Chirac himself had begun to talk about a kind of"soft terror" in "deprived suburbs" back in the mid-1990s...
...The French rejection of the European Constitution was a blow not only to Jacques Chirac, but to the French political class as a whole...
...Pretty dreadful stuff, right...
...TN GERMANY TODAY YOU FIND A CLASH of two cul| t u r e s . Business has done extraordinarily well in _IL adapting to the challenges and pressures of globalization...
...The BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, a.k.a...
...Complaining can get so out of hand here that I started to imagine overly zealous German regulators introducing an anti-complaining law...
...Germany and France have more than economic stagnation in common...
...He was just trying to do his job, he confided...
...He's a proud Frenchman...
...These were incidents of "social upheaval...
...Maybe there's hope for the French after all...
...Both face a serious demographic crisis, although in France there are slight signs of a reversal...
...After all, he said, the French public sector was in some areas far more efficient than the German...
...LETTER FROM EUROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN An Odd Couple i tl Berlin ECENTLY I HAD THE PLEASURE of hosting Patrick Chamorel of the Hoover Institution for a presentation titled, "What's the Matter With France...
...Most of France had piled on...
...The French know this and it stings...
...As Chamorel kept reminding the Germans, "our Greens" are a lot crazier than yours...
...But then there also remains massive resistance to modern times--in the trade unions, the universities, in the left-wing media, in both major parties, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the SPD...
...But the litany of what ails the countryis daunting and our French guest did an admirable job helping Germans realize how good they have it...
...The French were humiliated...
...There is a group here that grasps the importance of speed, flexibility, mobility...
...These same two agents may also have helped the U.S...
...Chamorel is no kveteher, though...
...France and Germany have their differences...
...I really wonder sometimes how both French and German pdliticians can argue with a straight face that an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy can be possible...
...It is hard to imagine the French selfflagellating over such questions...
...The allegation caused lots of huffing and puffing in the media and among politicians of Lo Monde had gloated about a superior social system, depJoring an America that spends a fortune on a war in Iraq but cannot care for its own citizens at home...
...Like Germany, France has problems with low growth, double-digit unemployment--ineluding the highest youth unemployment in Eur o p e - a n d , as Chamorel put it, a failed social model that nearly everyone in the EU now ridicules...
...But when things finally erupted, France was still basking in Schadenfreude over Hurricane Katrina...
...Germany's CIA, was accused of having secretly helped the U.S...
...Then came the recent riots...
...The Chirac comment came the same day in January as Chamorel spoke in Berlin, at the very time Germany was whipping itself into a frenzy over the so-called BND affair...
...No kidding...
...This helps explain why Germany is a long way from being a smashing success...
...But for the French things are worse...
...That's when I discovered a German IT company called "Nutzwerk," which threatens to fire employees caught complaining...
...I thought Germans could be hard on their country...
...Talk about setting the bar low...
...I suspect it was at least in part this kind of vanity that prompted Chirac to blurt out in mid-January that France would nuke any terrorist group or country that dared to strike at French interests...
...MARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55...
...You see, according to Villepin, these were not "riots...
...Riots are more violent, said the French prime minister, and--you guessed it--what they have in the United States...
...Now consider what was at stake...
...On learning that a young colleague of mine had just returned to Berlin from a two-week trip to Cuba, Chamorel quipped: What's the difference between France and Cuba...
...I thought for a moment that France's own failure might engender a touch of humility...
...It is an odd notion, of course, considering the depth of opposition to the war by the previous German government...
...As for Patrick, don't get me wrong...
...Germany suffers from political gridlock and malaise...
...La Grande Nation was in fine form...
...Like many in the pro-market crowd, he pins his hopes on Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential elections...
...He once told me he loves wine and would like to become a collector, but as owner of a mere 150 bottles he was hardly to be taken seriously...
...At one point, a fellow from the French Embassy hauled out statistics to try to stem the tide of bad news...
...Then I caught a television interviewwith Dominique de Villepin, who corrected the interviewer who foolishly had asked about "the riots" in France...
...Both have been frustrated that, at 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 JEFFREY G ED Mt N the very moment Paris and Berlin were set to lead the new Europe, the European Union expanded and thus diluted the power of the Franco-German idea...
...One hyperventilating Green called the idea "monstrous" (remember, the French Greens are crazier than the Germans...
...try to take out Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the war, by passing on information about the dictator's location at a dinner in a Baghdad neighborhood...
...Both Germany and France fret a lot about American hegemony, much in the same way the smaller and medium-size nations in Europe wring their hands about Paris and Berlin...
...all parties...
...You got the feeling Berliners were showing up for a little relief...
...Afterward the young diplomat unburdened himself...
...A German friend tells me she vividly recalls that when France engaged in nuclear testing in the mid-1990s, the media filled with anti-French tirades and T-shirts proliferated in Berlin with mushroom clouds and slogans like "F[---] Chirac" and "Hiro-Chirac...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin...
...in the war against Saddam Hussein...
...Apparently, two BND agents may have given the U.S...
...These players help explain why Germany is far from being a failure...
...He wasn't joking...
...To be sure, everyone knew for years that an explosion was coming...
Vol. 39 • March 2006 • No. 2
