Nothing does your head in more as a Londoner than living in a small town in Germany. It was in the late 1980s that I found myself as a foreign correspondent living in Bonn, the "capital village", as it was known before reunification.
My first culture shock came as I crossed the border from Belgium. When I presented my credit card for payment at a service station the attendant looked at me blankly, and asked: "What would I want with that?" I gradually got used to elderly folk peering through net curtains to see what I might be up to. The neighbourhood committee would leave notes on my car windscreen addressed to the "Dear Respected Neighbour", asking me ever so politely to clean my car as it was bringing down the reputation of the street. And the shops … spindly corner shops that were never open when office folk needed them.
This was the time when in Britain, everyone was aspiring to be Gordon Gekko, or so the myth went. Work hard, play hard, chop and change jobs and enjoy the high-octane lifestyle. How I envied my friends back home. I was convinced that, for all its Thatcherite ugliness and excess, there was something about the UK's gritty liveliness that would leave the stolid Germans behind. The economists tended to agree. Flexible labour markets and low unit labour costs were the future. Deregulation was essential. Financial services presented the path to paradise.
So what has changed? Everything and nothing. Not only did (West) Germany absorb the economically decrepit East in the 1990s, with far less inequity and far greater success than any other country could have achieved, but it has withstood the vagaries of the financial cycle with greater ease than the rest of Europe.
It has done so by changing practices gradually, such as pension reform and labour market reform … and a limited loosening of shopping hours. But it has not altered the postwar settlement that produced the first Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. The German model is based on long-term planning and investment, not the get-rich-quick City culture that has been the norm in Britain and the US. Read on and comment » | John Kampfner | Tuesday, October 25, 2011
