Going bananas
Rodden, John
GOING BANANAS A STORY OF FORBIDDEN FRUIT Who would have ever thought the biggest trade issue in last year's European Community (EC) negotiations in Brussels would be regulations about...
...In Ulm, the Suedwest Presse summed up the reaction of the German Volk: "Germany is always being condemned....How often other EC states manage to blind the Luxembourg Court with their national interests....[But] we Germans will have to get used to the idea that we don't have any special status in united Europe...
...Stickers in shop windows and car windshields urged, in Gothic script, that patriotic Germans "Esst deutsche Bananen...
...But Germany, which lost all its colonies after World War I, complains that Germans prefer larger, bright yellow, Latin American "Dollar Bananas"-so named because of their size and rich color-to the more expensive, smaller, paler "Eurobananas" from EC overseas territories and former colonies...
...How deep had the banana slipped into the German psyche...
...In short, the banana split is likely to deepen...
...Let me explain...
...What's going on here...
...By 1992, East Germans were consuming nearly twice as many bananas per year as West Germans...
...The German outcry against both decisions was loud...
...Ever since hunger overtook war-torn, occupied Germany in the mid-19408, when even basic foodstuffs were unobtainable, bananas have symbolized luxury to both West and East Germans...
...angrily attacked Chancellor Kohl for interfering in the East German elections...
...GOING BANANAS A STORY OF FORBIDDEN FRUIT Who would have ever thought the biggest trade issue in last year's European Community (EC) negotiations in Brussels would be regulations about bananas...
...And some of the dire predictions have borne fruit: The new tariff boosted banana prices 63 percent in 1994 and cut demand by more than 25 percent, resulting in a loss of several thousand jobs in fruit-importing businesses...
...It all seemed a sign of better days to come...
...Older West Germans still recall with pride the dramatic speech of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in July 1957, when he brandished a banana at the Bundestag podium and hailed the fruit as "paradisiacal manna...
...their absence came to symbolize communism's failure to provide simple pleasures taken for granted in the West...
...For the early postwar generation, many of whom as children knew of bananas only through the reminiscences of their elders, the fruit still evokes memories of humiliation, deprivation, and even famine...
...East Germans, in turn, resented West German "banana politics...
...Germans, who consume twice as many bananas as do citizens of any other EC nation (and more than 45 percent of total EC consumption), insisted on continuance of the special, duty-free treatment for German banana imports established in the 1958 Treaty of Rome protocol and contrary to the general guidelines of the 1990 Treaty of Rome...
...In Germany, bananas are an impossibly overdeter-mined symbol, signifying justice, national self-determination, cultural pride, deprivation, prosperity, Communist tyranny, capitalist luxury, unity, and economic and even sexual freedom...
...we even trivialize them-we speak of playing second banana, being driven bananas, banana republics, and on and on...
...We Americans take bananas for granted...
...They publicly attacked France and Spain, whose banana-growing former island colonies have been the chief beneficiaries of the newest rulings...
...FAJOHN RODDEN...
...German officials also warned that the new tariff would not only send banana prices skyrocketing and reduce German banana imports, but destroy the economies of several Latin American banana-exporting nations...
...But the banana passion soon turned ugly and began to divide, not unite, Germans...
...Germany's EC spokesman warned that the ruling would "open the floodgates to protectionism...
...After the war, bananas were simply absent from East German life-except as a special treat, courtesy of Castro's Cuba, at Christmas time (a holiday never officially recognized in the atheistic GDR...
...Even through the 1980s, bananas were virtually unavailable to ordinary GDR citizens...
...Indeed, before the Wall fell, visiting West Germans often brought a feast of bright, ripe bananas to their East German relatives as a house gift...
...Bananas were regarded as a Western delicacy...
...Kohl had vowed that he would get the EC banana-import regulations liberalized...
...Bananas...
...For Germans, the banana has become the symbol of the EC's hypocritical refusal to act on its free-trade rhetoric...
...In Munich, the respected Sueddeutsche Zeitung editorialized: "In Germany, a storm of indignation is brewing against the Brussels Commission...
...But bananas are no joking matter to Germans...
...Indeed the Eastern lust for bananas soon symbolized more than just economic liberty...
...The CDU had attracted crowds in the East by handing out free bananas...
...After months of wrangling, the EC ruled in the fall of 1994 that, beginning in January 1995, all imported bananas must be "free of abnormal curvature" and at least 14 cm (5 1/2 inches) in length and 27 mm (1.1 inches) in diameter-unless they come from several former European island colonies...
...Jubilant East Germans sported bumper stickers featuring two bananas forming the letter "D" for Deutschland...
...Adenauer had just returned in triumph from a four-day filibuster in Rome, having finally gotten "Protocol Number 10"- which guaranteed West Germans tariff-free bananas in unlimited quantities-written into the founding Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC), predecessor of the present-day EC...
...Why are the Germans getting bent out of shape over banana symmetries, sizes, and quotas...
...Parents delightedly weaned their infants on "Banana Salad" baby food, the Gerbers of West Germany...
...But whatever the odds, Bonn has vowed to continue the fight against Eurobananas and for Dollar Bananas...
...This was at the same time as the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg rejected the bid of Germany, Europe's biggest consumer of bananas, to overturn the EC regulation that gives preference to bananas grown in EC member countries (especially Spain and Greece) and former EC colonies...
...The story in East Germany was very different, and consequently the timing of last fall's European Court ruling came at a particularly cruel moment...
...The new EC import regulations aim to help banana growers in European tropical islands (e.g., France's Martinique and Guadeloupe, Spain's Canary Islands) and in former European colonies...
...During 1990-93, the single major policy issue concerning tariffs in the EC involved reunified Germany's obsession with bananas...
...castigating Western consumerism, the ambassador attributed the CDU victory to "two months of banana policy...
...Germany, you see, imports most of its bananas from non-EC countries, especially Latin America...
...When the Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989, the banana became for Easterners an unofficial symbol of German unity and liberty...
...Eat German bananas...
...The EC "banana split," as journalists quickly tagged the controversy, exposed the sharp political tensions underlying the move toward a single, borderless European market...
...What are we to make of the so-called EC "banana split...
...After the March 1990 elections in East Germany, the last Communist ambassador to the U.S...
...Well, Der Stern reported that, according to a survey of East German sex shop sales in 1990, a banana shaped vibrator and a banana-flavored condom known as the "Wild Banana" led all other brands...
...Protesting everything from the EC ban on bent bananas to the neomercantilism of France and Spain, German trade officials pressed their case...
...It turns out that banana politics bears deeply on the issue of German identity, reflecting Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany...
...Moreover, with German banana imports from Latin America down 50 percent in the latter half of 1993,170,000 jobs in Latin America vanished...
...The decision was a strong blow to Chancellor Helmut Kohl during last October's German election campaign, from which his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), emerged with a scant ten-seat majority...
...Since 1989, Chancellor Kohl has turned bananas into a test case for European unity and for his conservative, free-market doctrines...
...This began to change in West Germany with the Wirtschaftwunder [economic miracle] of the late 1950s and '60s...
...West Germans soon began referring to their naive countrymen in the Wild East as "Bananen...
...And so, when the EC voted in February 1993 to impose quotas and a high tariff on non-EC-grown bananas, indignant Germans protested...
...For much of the rest of Europe, the banana Shootout with Germany represents a necessary attempt to prevent reunified Germany from throwing its weight around and gaining a "special status" based on its economic superiority...
...As a disgruntled German EC representative groused: "Why should Germans enthuse about the EC, when we see what the Community is doing to our bananas...
...The German press gave vent to the popular outrage...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 6
