"EL PRESIDENTE "NICOLÁS SAKOZY" HABLA CON LA CANCILLER ALEMANA "ÁNGELA MERKEL" SOBRE LA DEUDA DE GRECIA".
"French and German, Ties Fray
Over Debt Crisis in Greece".
"President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mrs. Merkel stood up for German interests, gaining praise at home".
"13.04.2010."There has been a tectonic shift in the way Germany acts in Europe", said Urike Guérot, a senior research fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Germans, she says, are "talking of behaving ‘normally" now, like the others, and that means nationally".
"The European Union is facing a serious crisis over financing and its currency, the euro. But France and Germany also have important disagreements on policy toward Russia, China and Iran, making a coherent European foreign policy increasingly difficult to discern on an array of critical issues".
"The French and the Germans, with different domestic constituencies and different attitudes toward economic policy, have a different view of how Europe and the euro zone, the 16 nations that have adopted the euro as their currency, should be managed".
"Germany, long the financier of the European Union, has made it clear that it will no longer pay for the mistakes and frauds of others".
"France has put a much stronger emphasis on European, unity and pride, trying to avoid involving multilateral institutions like the "International Monetary Fund" in the future of the euro, a prominent symbol of Europe’s challenge to the supremacy of the United States".
"Germany is no longer, as a matter of course or of principle, the motor, heart and savior of Europe", said "Constanze Stelzenmüller", a senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. "This isn’t the Europe we signed up for. It’s much larger, much poorer, and we have to take care of our own".
"Germany always acted in its interests, Ms. Guérot said, but those were perceived as sublimated within the European Union and NATO, the two postwar multilateral institutions that both protected the new democratic Germany and kept its ambitions in check"·
"Now Germany is turning more obviously to Russia, for energy and commercial interests, she said, making its European and American partners uneasy".
"We sublimated hegemony", said Ms. Guérot, a German who is working on a paper called "Germany Unbound". "But we’re dropping the sublimation now" She laughed, then said: "Of course, this doesn’t sound nice to others".
"Before a European Union summit meeting in Brussels last month on the Greek crisis, President "Nicolás Sarkozy" of France was reportedly in a rage, unable to push Mrs. Merkel toward a more explicit promise of help for Greece".
"Mr. Sarkozy yelled at the European Union, president "Herman Van Rompuy", whom he summoned to Paris, European Union officials said. He threatened to boycott the summit meeting, while muttering that the Germans “haven’t changed,” according to French officials".
"Mrs. Merkel, for her part, remained calm as Mr. Sarkozy cooled down, but she stood by her position, that German taxpayers should not suffer for Greek mismanagement and laxity or set a precedent for future rescues of other weaker Mediterranean countries like Portugal, Spain and even Italy".
"Her stand, which included a role for the International Monetary Fund, created resentment in the rest of the euro zone, accustomed to German sacrifice for larger European political and economic goals".
"With a neo-liberal coalition partner, the Free Democrats, and with important elections coming next month in North Rhine-Westphalia, which could cost her ruling coalition control of the upper house in Berlin, Mrs. Merkel stood up for German interests and was hailed afterward at home".
"She also cited constitutional restraints against Germany bailing out other countries, concerns that France took as something of a pretext".
"Criticism of German economic policy "expresses a French malaise toward the growing gap between the two economies, and more generally toward this new Germany without which nothing is possible anymore in Europe, and which seems less and less likely to compromise if not in its national interests", "Jacques-Pierre Gougeon", a Germany specialist at the French Institute for International and Strategic Relations, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde".
"At the heart of the dispute is the euro. The French see it as the currency of a new, united Europe; the Germans see it as the direct descendant of the mark, and the "European Central Bank" as retaining the DNA of the Bundesbank, whose main task was to keep inflation down".
"The French favor a kind of European economic government, with easier rules on deficits; the Germans have no intention of giving up economic sovereignty to anyone, let alone to the French".
"In the Greek crisis, for example, Germany has insisted that any aid to Greece come as a last resort, and in the loan package arranged on Sunday it insisted that Greece pay a significant penalty in interest rates".
"This was well within Mrs. Merkel’s guidelines and does not represent a subsidy to Greece, said "Thomas Kkau" of the European Council on Foreign Relations".
"The German taxpayer is much more likely to make money from this deal than to lose it, and the agreement is within the framework of what she agreed upon in successive Brussels summits", he added".
"Germany also reacted angrily and defensively to a modest French suggestion by Finance Minister Christine Lagarde that the German export model had to change in the interests of other, less competitive euro zone countries, and that Germans should spend more buying the goods of their less fortunate neighbors".
"Germans, who have already undergone a wrenching structural reform and paid a huge bill to integrate the former eastern Germany, say they feel that "they’re paying a significant personal price", Mr. Klau said. "Poverty has increased considerably in Germany, and is now a social reality. And it makes Germany more inward-looking than the old West Germany, and a more defensive country".
"Part of the change is generational, with Mrs. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, representing those born after World War II, with only anecdotal knowledge of Nazi Germany. The members of Parliament are even younger, many of them teenagers or younger when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989".
So the German leadership paradigm from Konrad Adenauer through "Helmut Kohl", roughly 1949 to 1989, when Germany was a crucial junior partner both for NATO and European integration, is gone. "When Germany steps out of the film, it changes", Ms. Guérot said.
"Despite symbolic efforts to bring Mr. Sarkozy and Mrs. Merkel together — unveiling joint projects at the Arc de Triomphe last February or a recent stunt of having Ms. Lagarde sit in on a German cabinet meeting, "With the French we have more that divides us than unites us", Ms. Guérot said".
"Germans feel they have paid both their reparations and their dues, "and many times over", said Ms. Stelzenmüller, especially in an uncertain time of globalization and financial crisis".
"People want to be normal, in the sense that other people don’t come to us first and say, "You have to pay.’ And it doesn’t have much to do with political orientation. All of us are huddling with our backs against the storm".
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