AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Photo Illustration by Bloomberg
By Brendan Greeley (Corrects third paragraph to clarify Europe’s treaty requirements for state bailouts and Schäffler’s voting record among Free Democrats.)“Germans, we don’t look to see what’s in our own national interest,” says Frank Schäffler. “We’re drunk with Europe.” Schäffler, a member of the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of Parliament, is speaking on the phone from his home district of Bünde. In two sentences he highlights the bedrock assumptions of postwar German politics: Greater European integration is always and necessarily a good thing, and Germany has no interests of its own. “As a good German,” Schäffler explains, “one has to be a good European.”
The debt crisis in Europe has become a crisis of German identity. The rising likelihood of a Greek default has left the Continent’s most powerful nation with an unpalatable choice: back away from its insistence on responsibility and monetary stability and agree to help purchase Greece’s sovereign debt; or hold fast and risk the collapse of the euro. To a considerable degree, the future of Europe’s banking system, its monetary union, the fate of the global economy, and Barack Obama’s Presidency now rest on how Germans decide to act. And to understand why Germans are struggling with the role they’re being asked to play in the 21st century, you need to understand that they are still very much attempting to atone for the 20th.
Schäffler is a member of the Free Democrats, a small party of what Americans would call libertarians, serving as the junior coalition partners to Angela Merkel’s much larger and more conservative Christian Democrats. In the summer of 2010, the leaders of the euro zone countries put together the European Financial Stability Facility, which can issue up to €440 billion ($600 billion) worth of bonds to tide over countries having trouble staying liquid. More than a quarter of this capacity came from Germany. The euro zone countries lent their credit to the facility, too, which is what bothers Schäffler. Europe’s legal foundations rest on multistate treaties, and the most recent treaty, awkwardly, contains what has come to be known as the “no bailout clause”: No member state should be liable for the fiscal decisions of another. Any new bailout plan, then, requires a new treaty and a new round of ratifications. When the temporary facility went to the Bundestag for a vote, Schäffler, along with only one other member of his party, voted no. For direct bilateral aid to Greece, he voted no as well, completely alone among the Free Democrats. “Within the party,” he says, “they told me ‘that’s not what you do.’ ”
Barely a year later, Greece is even closer to default, and Merkel is sending back a new treaty amendment that would replace the temporary “facility” with a permanent “mechanism”—a blueprint, in other words, for future bailouts. The party leadership of the Free Democrats has signaled a yes vote, but Schäffler has drafted a pledge demanding that all party members agree on whether they in fact want to vote as instructed. The measure is likely to collect enough signatures to force his party to take an internal vote.
Even though Schäffler’s gambit has little chance of actually stopping German participation in future euro zone bailouts—Merkel can find enough votes among opposition parties to get the mechanism approved—the mere prospect of a referendum within a single party has given Schäffler a curious kind of leverage. In Berlin and each of Germany’s states, the leaders of his party have been forced to take positions both on his pledge (reluctant acceptance) and the bailout mechanism (reluctant support). Film crews now trail Schäffler to town halls merely because he’s not doing what he’s supposed to. “What’s un-German,” says Schäffler, who looks like a 15-year-old with grey hair, “is not just that you say ‘no,’ but that you attempt to find a majority for your position.”
View the original article here
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar