The politics of envy and the three A's

That's anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism and in Germany it's going strong, says Wolfgang Munchau. He points to the current election campaign in Westphalia in which the chairman of Gerhard Shroder's Social Democratic Party compared foreign investments to locusts and published a list of said locusts which consisted of Jewish-American names.

A former Christian Democrat minister once predicted that Germans would lose interest in democracy if their economy malfunctioned and if wages and living standards were falling. This is an exaggeration, and probably quite untrue. But it is true that Germans differ from the British in reacting to a period of economic decline. While in the 1970s and early 1980s the British largely blamed themselves for their poor economic performance, the Germans tend to blame the free-market system, and especially the bits they understand least — most of all the dreaded Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

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It is also characteristic that Germans are still using the word ‘capitalism’, as Karl Marx did, rather than ‘free market’ or the ‘market economy’. Among intellectuals the market economy was never fully accepted. Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher, has been urging the creation of a federal European state with a European army, not as a good in its own right but as a counterweight to US capitalism and imperialism.

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The absence of a proper market economy means that most people and politicians have no gut-level understanding of how a market economy works. Most Germans do not negotiate their wages. They are paid according to fixed-rate tariffs set in negotiations between trade unions and employers’ associations. Most people have little exposure to the financial market and its products. Among wealthy nations, Germany has one of the lowest ownership rates of private homes, shares, mutual funds and credit cards. What makes Germany even more distinct is the universal belief that the primary responsibility of companies is not to make profits but to fulfil a moral duty to their employees and their communities.