La Germany is about to turn. The era of KanzlerinAngela Merkel. It's objective. And if the polls confirm the polls, the Social Democratic Party, led by Olaf Scholz, will once again lead the government. After 16 years.
The correct account is another: in the last 41 years the SPD has only had the Chancellorship in eight. In other words, his victory is a rare event. Already in itself, therefore, epochal.
Will it also be so in content and philosophy? Not only inside, but above all outside, and especially towards the European Union, which has been Germanized according to the principles represented by the ideology of ordoliberalism.
The latter is a deer of economic thought, steeped in moralism. A completely different matter from the moral matrix, understood as behavioral ethics (Adam Smith), of economic science, which studies man in the sphere of the social organization of production, income and the demand for goods and services.
The outcome of these elections will be decisive, as was the one that brought Gerhard Schröder to power in 1998. Who, re-elected in 2002, filed the Germany of guilt for the two world wars and the holocaust. And he decreed its Europeanism as a free choice, and not as a duty out of a desire to redeem that fault. Speaking, for the first time, of the non-irreversibility of the pro-European choice.
The question of the relationship between the fourth largest economy in the world, with a GDP double that of Italy, and the European Union inspires the latest book by Giangiacomo (Gianni) Nardozzi, the most difficult: A new Germany for Europe? The German economy and soul (Brioschi Editore, pp. 160, 16,00 euros).
It is the most difficult because Nardozzi, an economist who has long studied the peculiarities of the German model, above all in the links between finance and industry, enters the minefield of the psychology of an entire people. Not that of individuals, already well plowed (not only in the last few decades: after all, Smith was also a behaviorist, not to mention John M. Keynes). And, as all scholars know, bringing the solution of economic questions to another sphere ends up appearing as a circumvention.
Chapeau for courage! And for the cultural-historical explanation of that psychology. Nardozzi, in fact, leads the German psyche (rather than the spirit) to the attraction-diffidence towards the Latin peoples, to the paranoia of fear of the outside world, to the romantic claim of nineteenth-century unification (a sort of Italian Risorgimento, well represented by the words of the national anthem) and, also, to the geographical location ("this middle ground between East and West, North and South").
If, in fact, history is the teacher of life, geography is the mother of history. Well, she's a great teacher.
The conformation of the territory creates the conditions for development. Where there are plains and water, civilizations developed earlier and more luxuriantly. AND the natural borders, marked by physical barriers such as mountain ranges and seas, have produced cohesion, safeguarding the distinctive features of a people from external infiltrations. Not to mention invasions.
Among the distinctive features first of all there is the language and, therefore, the representation of the world (Stat rosa pristina nomina, nomina nuova tenemus). Therefore, the development of a common culture. Although the same linguistic unification sees the prevalence of one vernacular over another (Dante and Manzoni teach).
È as if places had their own consciousness and fashioned women and men in their own image and likeness. Through landscape, climate, protection or otherwise from foreign hordes. A vision which, after all, Giacomo Becattini, the great minstrel of the Italian industrial districts, would have liked, who in this sense, but with a different matrix, titled the last work of his life (The awareness of places. The territory as a choral subject, Donzelli, 2015).
An open territory induces fear of devastation and violence by armies emerging from the forests of which German soil is still rich today. How can we forget the Thirty Years War? Or the Napoleonic ones?
On the other hand, if there are no natural borders that are not permeable, national identity must be based on ideal and artificial values. The myth of the Germanic spirit it was "built" in order to unite peoples of very distant and different territories under its banner, also due to historical events experienced. Yes, united by the tongue, which however was not a sufficiently powerful coagulant.
Nardozzi delves into the German unconscious to understand the tortuosity of the way of reasoning in economics, no less than in foreign policy, especially towards our European partners. A way of reasoning that looks to the trees rather than the forest. Who ignores the systemic effects and the boomerangs of measures and rules adopted and imposed on others (thanks to his overwhelming bargaining power), inspired by the micro logic of a good family man, not based on the overall and macro result (where the whole is superior and quite different from the sum of the parts).
For example, the power of the Bundesbank, almost a «state within a state», has its roots in the need for stability, in this case monetary stability, for reassurance and certainty of the German people, which assigns a totemic value to price stability. That power was strong enough, before the arrival of the euro, to affect currency policy and foreign policy.
On the other hand, as Harold James teaches, two cultures coexist in conflict in the euro. The first, of Germany and its satellite countries, favors rules, responsibility, solvency and austerity. The second, predominant in the Latin countries, hinges on discretion, solidarity, liquidity and stimulus to demand.
With Schröder, Germany rediscovers certainties within itself, in its own superiority. In Europe he says the intergovernmental method, where the strongest wins, in defiance of the community spirit. More than an integration between equals, it becomes an imposition of rules, with exceptions (as in the work of Bertold Brecht, if the juxtaposition is permitted).
Exceptions for countries deemed reliable (Northern European) or irreplaceable (French-German architrave). Rules for the Mediterraneans. To be applied so rigidly (sovereign debt crisis), as to cause a new deep recession, with permanent damage to the socio-economic fabric and political stability of “unruly” countries. But also by self-inflicting considerable losses (collapse of exports to PIIGS).
A masterpiece of application of the binomial rule-exception was that economic-financial monster called bail-in, that is, banks can and must fail, making the bill not only pay by shareholders, but also by bondholders and even account holders with deposits over a certain amount. Forgetting the famous scene in the movie Mary Poppins which tells how the race to withdraw money from a bank is unleashed.
The writer discussed, in January 2016, the systemic effects of bail-in with Wolfgang Schäuble's chief economic adviser. Who admitted, candidly, that it had been a political decision. Taken to feed the banks to public opinion, which had to find a scapegoat after the financial crisis of 2008-09.
Even more astounding was that adviser's observation in the face of data showing that Germany's net assets to the rest of the world were 20% less than the value of savings accumulated through the current surplus: I've always thought that we invest our savings badly.
Incidentally, too Italy has entered the ranks of ant countries that finance the cicada countries. Another German myth falling. But for the Germans, cicadas are not only insane in economic management, but also dissolute in daily life. Sinfully. The papal and corrupt Rome opposed by Martin Luther.
The exception, regarding the bail-in, consisted in having defended the German banks, allowing them to recover most of the loans given to Greece before announcing in late 2010 the heavy terms of its debt restructuring. And previously by allocating huge funds to support those same banks during the 2008 financial crisis because they bought large amounts of securities subprime high-yield, high-risk US companies, in order to detach generous dividends from their majority shareholders; Laender whose income had been reduced by austerity.
On the other hand, the European construction can only all member countries contributestarting with the majors. And not for a matter of rhetorical parity, but for a genuine sharing of objectives and for overcoming, in view of a higher common goal, the cultural fences of each.
Therefore, if it is right to ask Germany to change, this change also depends on the equally definitive Europeanization of France and Italy. For the France it is a question of definitively abandoning De Gaulle's grandeur in foreign policy. Italy, on the other hand, is called to respect the commitments undertaken with the PNRR.
Is in progress an experiment that will mark world history. The terms of the homework/European aid exchange have been reversed. If we are able to do our part, we will not only gain internal well-being, but we will make a leap forward in European evolution, clearing the Transfer Union, Eurobonds and the single budgetary policy.
To the trio Draghi-Macron-Scholz the inspired role in the vision and determined in the action belongs to that formed by Adenauer-De Gasperi-Schuman. Hic Rhodus, hic… skip Italy!
