l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Dr. Hanson：欧盟最后一刻的决定背后，是清清楚楚的德国的新欧洲秩序：如果你想过
德国人那样的生活，那就必须象德国人一样工作和节省。或者接受，或者离开
Germany’s dominance was won by national character, not arms or handouts.
The rise of a German Europe began in 1914, failed twice, and has now ended
in the victory of German power almost a century later. The Europe that
Kaiser Wilhelm lost in 1918, and that Adolf Hitler destroyed in 1945, has at
last been won by Chancellor Angela Merkel without firing a shot.
Or so it seems from European newspapers, which now refer bitterly to a “
Fourth Reich” and arrogant new Nazi “Gauleiters” who dictate terms to
their European subordinates. Popular cartoons depict Germans with stiff-arm
salutes and swastikas, establishing new rules of behavior for supposedly
inferior peoples.
Millions of terrified Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Portuguese, and other
Europeans are pouring their savings into German banks at the rate of $15
billion a month. A thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the euro-rich Merkel now
determines whether European countries will limp ahead with new German-backed
loans or default and see their standard of living regress to that of a half
-century ago.
A worried neighbor, France, as so often in the past, in schizophrenic
fashion alternately lashes out at Britain for abandoning it and fawns on
Germany to appease it. The worries in 1989 of British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand over German
unification — that neither a new European Union nor an old NATO could quite
rein in German power — have proved true.
How did the grand dream of a “new Europe” end just 20 years later in a
German protectorate — especially given the not-so-subtle aim of the
European Union to diffuse German ambitions through a continent-wide
superstate?
Not by arms. Britain fights in wars all over the globe, from Libya to Iraq.
France has the bomb. But Germany mostly stays within its borders — without
a nuke, a single aircraft carrier, or a military base abroad.
Not by handouts. Germany poured almost $2 trillion of its own money into
rebuilding an East Germany ruined by Communism — without help from others.
To drive through southern Europe is to see new freeways, bridges, rail lines
, stadiums, and airports financed by German banks or subsidized by the
German government.
Not by population size. Somehow, 120 million Greeks, Italians, Spaniards,
and Portuguese are begging some 80 million Germans to bail them out.
And not because of good fortune. Just 65 years ago, Berlin was flattened,
Hamburg incinerated, and Munich a shell — in ways even Athens, Madrid,
Lisbon, and Rome were not.
In truth, German character — so admired and feared in some 500 years of
European literature and history — led to the present Germanization of
Europe. These days we recoil at terms like “national character” that seem
tainted by the nightmares of the past. But no politically correct exegesis
offers better reasons why Detroit, booming in 1945, today looks as if it
were bombed, and a bombed-out Berlin of 1945 now is booming.
Germans on average worked harder and smarter than their European neighbors
— investing rather than consuming, saving rather than spending, and going
to bed when others to the south were going to dinner. Recipients of their
largesse bitterly complain that German banks lent them money to permit them
to buy German products in a sort of modern-day commercial serfdom. True
enough, but that still begs the question why Berlin, and not Rome or Madrid,
was able to pull off such lucrative mercantilism.
Where does all this lead? Right now to some great unknowns that terrify most
of Europe. Will German industriousness and talent eventually translate into
military dominance and cultural chauvinism — as it has in the past? How,
exactly, can an unraveling EU, or a NATO now “led from behind” by a
disengaged United States, persuade Germany not to translate its overwhelming
economic clout into political and military advantage?
Can poor European adolescents really obey their rich German parents? Berlin
in essence has now scolded southern Europeans that if they still expect
sophisticated medical care, high-tech appurtenances, and plentiful consumer
goods — the adornments of a rich American and northern-European lifestyle
— then they have to start behaving in the manner of Germans, who produce
such things and subsidize them for others.
In other words, an Athenian may still have his ultra-modern airport and
subway, a Spaniard may still get a hip replacement, and a Roman may still
enjoy his new Mercedes. But not if they still insist on daily siestas,
dinner at 9 p.m., retirement in their early 50s, cheating on taxes, and a de
facto 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. workday.
Behind all the EU’s eleventh-hour gobbledygook, Germany’s new European
order is clear: If you wish to live like a German, then you must work and
save like a German. Take it or leave it.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End
of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom. © 2011 Tribune Media Services
, Inc. | c**********d
发帖数: 2428 | 2 Let's see how quickly this economic model fail... |
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