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Israel Threatens 'Severe Consequences' for Nations Who Recognize Palestine
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Foreign policy needs consensus. So the EU can not force Germany to do anything in terms of foreign policy.
Germany depends on the votes of Spain and Ireland at the EU for a lot of things that Germany finds important.
If a measure at the EU level has enough consensus and Germany vetoes it, they'll see other members be a lot more likelly to use veto power on things that mostly matter for Germany.
Since Germany are in the curious position of being the EU member that benefits the most from the Free Market (they're the biggest exporter and their biggest market by far is the rest of the EU) and the Euro (their currency now is a lot weaker and hence they're more competitive because it's a currency union with far weaker countries, than it was back in the deutsche mark times), they can't even threathen to leave the EU as that would a bit like threatenning almost everybody else with a good time whilst they shot themselves on both feet.
Still, the most likely outcome is going to be nothing at all getting done at EU level, either way, if only because that's always the most likely outcome.
If only Germany would not be willing to recognice Palestine, then this might happen, but that is not the case. France and Italy the two next most powerfull countries do not recognice Palestine either.
Germany is usually fairly happy with the current state of the EU. The things Germany wants to change are usually also supported by Spain and that means blackmail is harder. The only exaption to that is finance. However Spain is not going to let billions go to waste to have Palestine recogniced. That is just more of a symbol, rather then massivly important.
Also Germany leaving the EU would cause some massive problems in other EU countries as well. They would hardly be cheering for it.
It's unclear were exactly France is on this, though I agree that Italy under the current far-right government is unlikelly to recognize Palestine.
I'm mostly thinking about the Financial stuff: none of the so called PIIGS forgot how they and their populations were sacrificed to save German banks and a "Let's fuck Germany" posture wouldn't at all be a hard sell in those countries plus I very much doubt that generally not doing what's good for Germany would be bad for those countries since they're almost opposite to Germany in the forms by which their economies can benefit from the Euro - they would actually grow more in an Euro without Germany.
I'm also not so sure that a German exit would end up being bad for the rest of the EU, especially for the less export oriented and more peripheral countries like Spain - certainly an Euro minus Germany would actually be better for everybody else but Germany (as Germany pushes up the value of the Euro, making other Euro nations less competitive and partly explaining their anemic growth and lack of funds to restructure their Economies, which is the other big reason for their anemic growth) though granted it depends on how important are exports to Germany in each economy, though on non-Euro EU matters you might be right. In summary and as I said before, almost nobody else but Germany benefits from Germany's Euro membership and the kind of nations that would be least affected by a Deutschexit are the ones who have no borders with Germany, a group that includes Spain, Ireland and Norway (though the latter is not an EU member and hence has no vote or veto so doesn't really apply for the scenario we are discussing).
Spain has grown faster then Germany for most of the last decade(besides 2020). Out of PIIGS Portugal and Ireland also have done pretty well. Greece got hit hard and Italys economy has problems since the 90s(aka not a EU/Euro problem).
Also Norway is not an EU member.
The figure is quite different if you look at the growth in nominal per-capita terms rather than in percentage of initial value as any shitty-shit growth in a poor nation looks a lot more in percentage terms.
Further, I'm living in Portugal and I can tell you that at least in quality of life terms the country has been going backwards for at least a decade, even if mathematically, thanks to a housing bubble and understating housing inflation, the GDP figures produced show "Growth" which is actually just housing inflation that has not been discounted from the Nominal GDP.
The only one of the PIIGS anywhere near catching up to Germany is the Republic Of Ireland and even those have fishy numbers because of how many international companies declare the revenue of their entire EU operations in Ireland because of just how much Ireland facilitates tax evasion - a lot of the money being "made in Ireland" is neither "made in Ireland" nor does it even pass by Ireland and it being counted as Irish GDP is just an accounting artifact.
But yeah, Norway is not an EU member, as I myself pointed out in the very post you replied to.
Please don't tell me you're blaming the Portuguese housing bubble on Germany. There's, like, laws and regulations you can enact to stop the fuckery.
Portugal is were it is because of a lot more reasons than the housing bubble, though I agree with you that the only element of Germany's blame for housing bubbles in the Eurozone in general (so, not just in Portugal) was way back in 2009/10 when they pushed ultra-low interest rates as the "solution" for the consequences of the 2008 Crash because it was what was better for the likes of Deutsche Bank and the Landesbanken which were overexposed to subprime and soverign debt.
(I actually have a recent comment were I list the IMHO various reasons for the housing bubbles in Europe one by one and that one is just one of them and most definitelly include in that list local problems like refusal to regulate AirBnBs and even the incentivising of foreign investment in the local realestate market)
Those "temporary" ultra-low interest rates lasted for over a decade and pushed up mortgages, both via the pathway of making the same monthly mortgage payment allow for a much larger mortgage (which together with other problems in the housing market innevitably pushed house prices up to the point were people were paying the same montly payments as before with much larger interest rates) and via the pathway of causing a "race up the yield ladder" which moved a lot of money from things like Treasuries (which even ended up with negative yields) into things like realestate and stocks, increasing Demand in those things and thus pushing prices up.
Further, and again to help the likes of Deutsche Bank, Germany also pushed for continued light-touch-regulation on Financial Institutions and unconditional rescue of affect banks with no requirement for reform (most notably no requirement to divest from and close the investment banking operations of retail banks), which in turn led to the progressive swamping of housed markets in places where most people were owner-occupiers with much more wealthy realestate investors, further pushing up prices.
This is without even going into the stuff which is not housing related and were Germany also put pressure to do all the wrong things for peripheral economies, such as the imposition of Austerity in countries like Greece and Portugal, something which even Christine Lagarde, former head of the IMF and president of the ECB later admitted was the wrong thing to do.
Let's not excuse the German politicians whose prime priority was the interest of Deutsche Bank, just as we shouldn't excuse the past and current incompetent moron politicians in places like my homeland.
Correct on a per capita bases Portugal has been growing much much faster then Germany. The simple truth it that Germany is not benefiting from austerity either. What should happen is that the German government massively increases spending. This would turn Germany from a net exporter, to a net importer. That allows the PIIGS to export products to Germany paying down the debt, but it also stimulates the economy. Germany profits from the increased spending as well.
The simple truth is that German life expectancy is declining since a couple of years(being below Spain, Italy and Portugal btw). Median wealth of Italy, Spain and Portugal is higher then that of Germany, which is only slightly higher then that of Greece. Real wages in Germany have gone up by 3.8% over the last decade(not annually but the entire decade).
The only ones who really profit from this austerity are the super rich. Other then that it is as bad a policy for Germany as it is for Italy, Portugal, Spain or Greece.
The life expectancy is falling all over Europe (welcome to Neoliberalism were only the life expectancy of the rich goes up and deregulation cause all sorts of problem for people who can't afford prime products and living in their own mansion outside of the polution of cities).
As I said, in absolute money terms Portugal isn't actually growing all that much because it's coming from a much lower base: 2.3% on a country with an average anual wage of €20k a year even if perfectly distributed (which that growth is definitelly not since Portugal is pretty bad in terms of income inequality) are a great whooping extra €430 a year (notice that I'm mixing nominal salaries with real GDP growth, which is an approximation and why I didn't mention salary growth losses due to inflation), which would at best see Portugal catch up with the €45k average anual wage in Germany, if the last did not grow at all and in the absence of further economic crashes (I explain this last point further below), by the end of the century.
The only reason why Portuguese growth in money terms still exceeded that of Germany in 2023 is because that year the German economy actually shrank, otherwise a 2% GDP growth in Portugal is in absolute terms the same amount as a less than 1% GDP growth in Germany, because the German GDP per-capita is more than twice that of Portugal, so Portugal wil never catch up to Germany unless it has more than twice the German growth in percentage terms.
Since Portugal's Economy is heavilly dependent on volatile industries like Tourism and hence prone to deep dives whenever there is a Crash which wipe out a significant proportion of previous growth, it's highly unlikelly that the country can sustain a growth of more than twice the German on in percentage terms for the next 60 years.
I do agree that Germany itself has to change what it is doing, even just for Germany's sake.
Personally I think that the choices of Mutti back in the post 2008 Crash were not the ones best for Germany and Germans, but the ones best for a certain section of the German Elites, namelly financeers and large Asset owners (i.e. the very rich). It just so happens that given the influence of Germany (and that Germany wasn't the only country choosing to save the Asset owners on the backs of the rest) her choices hurt a lot more than just the Germans, with some people - namelly the Greek - being very purposefully sacrificed even more than the common German person all for the good of Deutsche Bank and large german investors.
That myth again. The Euro is a much harder currency than the DM ever was. Most of the trouble states had with the Euro was not due to Germany but them not being accustomed to having a hard currency in the first place, being used to relying on monetary fuckery to steer the economy.
As to recognising Palestine: Not a EU prerogative, simple as that. And I highly doubt states would pressure Germany over this, it'd be a lot of political capital spent on practically zero impact -- up to negative impact as Germany has a much better chance convincing Israel to recognise Palestine with its current stance, and there's simply no country with deeper diplomatic ties to Israel than Germany. If anyone can convince them, it's Germany.