by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note: Recently, VDH led a group on a tour of the Rhine and wrote these thoughts.<\/p>\n Rhine Watching<\/strong><\/p>\n Kehl, Germany \u2014 I\u2019ve been making my way downstream the Rhine from Switzerland on the way to Amsterdam, leading a military history tour while observing and talking and listening to Germans and Swiss. I\u2019ve come to a conclusion that those who speak German are sort of like red-staters (socialists though they may be) who view the rest of a failing Europe, or indeed the world at large, the way those in Texas look at California or a Wisconsin governor envisions the Illinois legislature.<\/p>\n For now, Germany\u2019s war guilt, Switzerland\u2019s past neutrality, fears of what might follow from an EU meltdown, and apprehensions that the successful and wealthy should not rub in their accomplishments given the wages of envy from the less successful all seem to subdue the Germanic speakers. On the topic of the southern Mediterranean con, they shrug and sometimes curse their debtors, but are more confused than enraged, as if they were lucky after all centuries ago not to have been absorbed right away by the bunch below the old Rhine and Danube.<\/p>\n Note that I say \u201cfor now,\u201d for human nature is, well, human nature. But as Greece goes, and Spain, Italy, and Portugal totter, and as a rich French socialist from his Mediterranean villa lectures on \u201cfairness,\u201d and as Obama worries that Europe won\u2019t print and borrow enough before November, there will follow an escalating weariness, followed by pique, followed by . . . who knows what next?<\/p>\n The Psyche of Germany<\/strong><\/p>\n In other words, it is as illogical as it is common for the wayward debtor to blame the thrifty creditor for his dilemma. The Germans now are in the impossible situation of being told they did something wrong by doing things mostly right. They retire too late and caused others to retire too early; they saved too much money so others had to borrow too much; they built too many things that others wanted; they acted too much like parents and so made others too much like children.<\/p>\n Right now the continent\u2019s psychological problem is not that southern Europeans cannot pay the northerners back, but that they are often arguing that they should not have to pay them, as if those who lent are more to blame than those who borrowed. The Germans rightly know that if they were just to write off the debt, such magnanimity would only lead to the same disaster in another five years, as the southern Mediterraneans cited such largess as proof that the Germans were guilty all along of mercantilism and therefore finally evened up with their moral betters. For Germans, this serial blackmail is, of course, an impossible situation. Would you wish to be lectured by your poorer brother-in-law on why he should not have to pay your $1,000 loan back, as he critiqued your oh-so-conventional workaholic habits?<\/p>\n Again, it would be as if Californians would lecture Texans about why they must give the Golden State $16 billion to solve our current budget shortfall. And then to add insult to injury, we would offer a critique of exactly what is wrong with the Texan go-get-\u2018em mentality and what is right with the California laid-back lifestyle that spawned one-third of all the nation\u2019s welfare recipients, with the highest paid teachers in America\u2019s near-bottom-rated schools. How long would Texas take that? The answer is about as long as Germany will take that.<\/p>\n Waking up History<\/strong><\/p>\n As we float downstream and discuss the Roman border forts on the Rhine, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, and the postwar era, you can see why there arose a NATO, an EU, and a nuclear Britain and France, but not a nuclear Germany. These were all sorts of creative ways to channel German dynamism away from natural expressions of political \u2014 and military \u2014 influence. Two Germanys, the Cold War, German war guilt, an activist US \u2014 all that both by design and by fate worked for nearly seventy years and gave us a prosperous pre-2007 stable Europe. But the noble lies of the EU \u2014 that technocrats could reinvent human nature and ensure a continental equality of result, as culture bowed to edicts from Brussels \u2014 destroyed the pretenses of the post-Cold War world. The scab is now off, the wound is still raw.<\/p>\n What would be the salvation of Europe? Praise, rather than damnation, for Germany; requests for German advice coupled with thanks for bailouts and promises of reform. In other words, impossible admissions from proud broke peoples that the way they are living is not sustained by the way they are working and organizing their society. How tragic that when the Germans finally learned to channel their talents and energies into pure production and enriched themselves and those around them, it still earned them in the end suspicion and envy, and yes, growing dislike \u2014 disarmed, pacifist, and multilateral as they try to be.<\/p>\n Reader, you tell me what follows.<\/p>\n Culture is everything. That is a politically incorrect thought that can get you in trouble as much as we suspect it is true.<\/p>\n In other words, government, economics, and social policy are critical, but themselves are driven by the minute-to-minute culture of everyday people. Germans pick up trash; in Athens, Greeks toss it. Germans do not honk; Italians do not not honk. In Libya or Egypt the pedestrian is a target; in Switzerland he is considered perhaps your father or grandmother. A bathroom in Germany is where someone else uses it after you; in Greece or Mexico, it is where you pass on the distaste of using the facility to the sucker who follows you.<\/p>\n I watch fender benders a lot. In northern Europe, addresses and information are exchanged; south of Milan, shouts and empty threats of mayhem follow. When I check out of a German hotel, I know the bill reflects what I bought or used; when I check out of a Greek hotel, I dread all the nonexistent charges to appear, and a \u201c50\/50 split the difference\u201d settlement to be offered. Germans like to talk in the abstract and theoretical; with Greeks it is always \u201ceg\u00f4\u201d in the therapeutic mode. I rent a car in Athens and expect charges for \u201cdents\u201d to appear; in Germany, there are such charges only if there are actual dents. Add all that up \u2014 and millions more of such discrepancies repeated millions of times over each hour \u2014 and you have one country that creates vast wealth and another that cons to land vast wealth it did not create.<\/p>\n Ah, you say, silly Hanson, Germanic order leads to the symmetrical barracks at Dachau, while \u201cis\u00f4s avrio<\/em>\u201d Greece leads to live and let live. Perhaps, but if true, that paradox is yet an additional reason to work with rather than caricature and shake down Germany.<\/p>\n A final thought as I take in the inexplicable last seventy years along the Rhine. Where is America in all this? Ours was a noble experiment that would take the European legacy, Western civilization, and British law and implant it all in a frontier without the baggage of aristocratic hierarchy, stratified social classes, racial homogeneity, and pernicious doctrinaire ideologies. Instead, we would let the individual loose within the larger contours of the European heritage of government, law, economics, and human freedom.<\/p>\n It worked, and spectacularly so. Without an America there would today be no French Alsace, no German miracle (only a Hitlerian nightmare or a Soviet ghetto). In fact, over the last forty years America worked so well that our academic utopians glimpsed radical equality for all, and then \u2014 human nature being human nature, and individual difference being individual difference \u2014 did not quite achieve it, Great Society and all. The result was that in their failure they cursed the sins of man as if they were uniquely American \u2014 as racist, colonialist, imperialist, homophobic, sexist \u2014 even as they wallowed in the material prosperity that comes with free market economics, the rule of law, and political transparency.<\/p>\n So here we are in the age of Obama, as we talk about looking to Asia, redirecting to South America, wanting our own Arab Spring, praising the New Africa \u2014 all the while taking for granted the very European traditions that enrich us in our daily lives, which in the abstract we deprecate.<\/p>\n This week I am walking in German cities along the Rhine that were nearly leveled in 1945. Not long ago I visited Detroit, which was booming in 1945. The latter now looks like its own homegrown B-24s bombed it yesterday, the former as if they had been untouched in the war that Germans started. Ponder those interchanged fates, and why and how these respective American and German cities got to where they were in 1945, and then again to where they are now.<\/p>\n And that answer really is all ye need to know.<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Editor\u2019s note: Recently, VDH led a group on a tour of the Rhine and wrote these thoughts. Rhine Watching<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[194,99],"tags":[176,1014,115,1058,1023,1015,1050,107,1028,1019,1047,315,1056,58,1068],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-bG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":728,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/culture-still-matters\/","url_meta":{"origin":724,"position":0},"title":"Culture Still Matters","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Last week I led a military-history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe\u2019s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to people\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civilization"","block_context":{"text":"Civilization","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civilization\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":731,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-limits-of-german-patience\/","url_meta":{"origin":724,"position":1},"title":"The Limits of German Patience","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Cologne, Germany I\u2019m still in Germany, and keep noticing a predictable, but continually interesting, pattern in talking to Germans of all walks of life \u2014 tourists, hoteliers, guides, drivers, casual bystanders, or students. When Greece comes up (or rather is brought up by Americans),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Germany"","block_context":{"text":"Germany","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/germany\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":706,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dont-let-america-imitate-a-burning-eu\/","url_meta":{"origin":724,"position":2},"title":"Don’t Let America Imitate a Burning EU","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Traveling through Europe can obscure the looming crisis threatening the continent. Visiting the medieval villages of Alsace, the castles on the Rhine, or the magnificent cathedrals in Basel or Cologne, it\u2019s easy to forget that Europe is on the brink of disaster. But these\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Economy"","block_context":{"text":"Economy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/economy-europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":922,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/europe-in-the-rearview-mirror\/","url_meta":{"origin":724,"position":3},"title":"Europe in the Rearview Mirror","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Dream and the Nightmare The European Union was always a paradox. Its existence was predicated entirely on the notion of German guilt, translating into massive cash transfers east and south. Just as Versailles was supposed to have restrained Germany, then a divided, postwar\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The EU"","block_context":{"text":"The EU","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/the-eu\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":820,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-nato-still-matters\/","url_meta":{"origin":724,"position":4},"title":"Why NATO Still Matters","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas Germany\u2019s financial dominance may be worrisome, but is it a threat to European peace? The first Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the sober and judicious British Lord Ismay, famously remarked that the purpose of the controversial new postwar alliance would be \u201cto\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NATO"","block_context":{"text":"NATO","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/geopolitics\/nato\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1587,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/history-returns-to-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":724,"position":5},"title":"History Returns to Europe","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Vienna\u00a0\u2014 Walk the beautiful streets in Munich, Strasbourg, and Vienna, and you can see why Europeans thought in the last decades that they had reached the end of history. There is not a soldier to be seen. Sidewalk cafes are jammed midweek with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2010"","block_context":{"text":"June 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/june-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":725,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions\/725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}