I definitely feel some eugenicist/colonialist vibes from calling any country the “sick man of Europe”.
now I’m curious how that term got coined in the first place
Reportedly first to use it in politics was no other than the scumbag extraordinaire Nicholas I, for Ottoman Turkey, during his talks with scumbag almost as big as him, Klemens von Metternich, in 1833.
I didn’t realize the trope was that old.
It was used to justify “Agenda 2010” Neoliberal reforms in Germany in the early 2000s. Now we have the biggest Low paying sector in Europe. And our former Chancellor prides himself on that.
Makes sense that they dusted it off now given that the likely plan going forward is to do austerity.
What is this “Agenda 2010”? What did it entail?
Basically the SPD and the Greens, ostensibly the two leftist parties of the German political mainstream, under Gerhard Schröder decided to do a Tony Blair and start dismantling German social democracy in favor of neoliberal market reforms and huge cuts to the social safety net. The right wing parties couldn’t have done it, the public pushback would have been too great, so it had to be the social democrats who would put the final nail in the coffin of the post-war concessions to the working class, like Labor in Britain made sure Thatcher’s policies would not be reversed but instead become the permanent status quo and go even further.
On the one hand they were following the example of what the Anglo countries did under Clinton and Blair, and this is a pattern that you will observe if you pay attention to Germany is that as a society they are infatuated with everything American and are always trying to emulate whatever the current political, social or cultural movement is in the zeitgeist over in the US. But also, by that point this had become necessary for the capitalist class in Germany to do because the loot they managed to extract out of dismantling East Germany’s industrial base after the reunification had run dry.
People often forget that East German people had a similar experience to the rest of the former socialist bloc in the 90s, which is that the rug was suddenly pulled out from under them, they lost their jobs, they lost their social assurances, and West German capital with the help of the German state took over everything. But at some point there was nothing left to steal that the socialist system and the East German people had built up over 45 years, and similarly the tap of wealth from the plunder of Russia in the 1990s was also starting to slowly close in the early 2000s (which is when the German ruling class’s hate for Putin started and why Germany played a central role right alongside the US in both the 2004 and the 2014 orchestrated color revolutions in Ukraine).
Thank you. As an aside, isn’t Schröder now treated as a “Russian puppet”, because he’s on some oil company’s board of directors?
Yeah. It’s ridiculous, and you can clearly see that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Schröder but nowadays anyone who dares to even remotely suggest that the Russians may have legitimate concerns or that maybe going full on into a warmongering russophobic frenzy is not a great idea is labeled a Russian puppet. This applies to all sides of the political spectrum, from the Linke to the AfD.
Anyway people shouldn’t feel too bad about Germany and what has happened to us. We had it coming. I mean the malicious role that reunified Germany has played in the post 1990 world is often overlooked in favor of the US, Britain and France, but in fact Germany was a key player for example in the destruction of Yugoslavia. They were one of the first to recognize the independence of former Yugoslav republics that broke away, they were some of the most aggressive in pushing war propaganda against the Serbs, and afterwards they constantly held out promises to Serbia of EU membership and such if only they delivered their former leaders to the farcical kangaroo courts of “international justice” that had already decided the accused were guilty before they even began and outright refused to accept evidence to the contrary yet still somehow failed to prove the ridiculous accusations made against Serbia.
