[52] News from Absurdistan - Why Germany Does Not Care

There seem to be a few chaps in Britain who object to their country being swallowed up by the European bureaucracy.

As I have repeatedly pointed out in this blog, the Germans could not care less.

They like a powerful government. Given that the EU elites obviously trump the German government (and other governments in Europe), they must be a powerful government, thus concludes the German soul, and, therefore, a good thing to have.

Hauptsache, wir werden regiert ("Main thing, we are being ruled"). Kaiser, Führer, Volkssouverän, europäischer Superstaat - the stronger, the better.

The below article concludes naively:

"Coming only days after agreement on the new EU treaty, which further undermines national sovereignty, one would have thought that there would have been a sharp political reaction in Germany towards this display of EU power [overturning the "Volkswagen Law", see below. I.G.T.U.], over-ruling long-held economic practices at the heart of their regional governments, to say nothing of the implications for other member states.

Maybe that reaction is yet to come but, for the moment – in the light of the muted reports – this looks decidedly like one of those occasions when the dog didn't bark."

As for the wider population, Germans subscribe to such rudimentary and blurred concepts of politics, they would not notice such niceties. And to the politically active the matter is of minor concern: they have their lobbying teams in place at the new Imperial courts in Brussels and elsewhere.

Also, regarding the alleged concern of Germans for federalist structures (see the below quote), it is more useful to work on the assumption that there are no exceptions to German subservience to government - Germans tend to follow the most assertive authority. They have never been acquainted with the idea that authority is to be restrained by law, instead they believe that authority is to be expressed by law. In other words: they keep growing up - generation by generation - conceiving that law derives from governmental authority (see especially my conclusion and the quote inserted at the end of this post).

In 1933, the Germans were told to believe in the collective culpability of the Jews and played along. In 1945, the Germans were told to believe in the collective culpability of the non-Jewish part of the German population, and played along.

Germans are always politically correct, and political correctness is defined by the strongest in the political arena.

For more, see my posts

[43] News from Absurdistan - EU Wagging the Dog, Brits Perplexed
[42] News from Absurdistan - British Death Wish(es)

EU Referendum has this story:

A total of 610 posts on Google News tell the story of the ECJ yesterday overturning what is now being called the "Volkswagen Law" – thus preventing German Länder from holding blocking shares in local businesses, preventing them being taken over.

However, almost all of the reports take a business perspective, with much speculation as to whether the ruling will now allow Porsche AG to take control of Volkswagen, Europe's biggest car maker.

However, when we first picked up this story in July 2004, what came over was how intensely political it was, to the extent that we wrote:

The VW firm is part-owned by the Land (Region) of Lower Saxony, of which Schröder was once president, who also sat on the VW board. And it is this type of financial arrangement – replicated in other Länder with other major firms – which underpins the autonomy of the German regional governments.

The commission, therefore, is challenging the core political structure of Germany, where regional loyalty is much stronger than is any feeling towards the federal government. This is almost a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

All we get from the current reports, though, is that the ECJ decision is expected to have "wider ramifications" across Europe, where many governments have tried to protect companies they see as vital to their economies from takeovers, particularly foreign ones.

Yet, this ruling does indeed strike at the heart of the economic sovereignty of member states, and for that reason had been hotly contested by the Länder which had been defying the EU commission for years until it lost patience and took Lower Saxony to court on what was clearly a test case.

Coming only days after agreement on the new EU treaty, which further undermines national sovereignty, one would have thought that there would have been a sharp political reaction in Germany towards this display of EU power, over-ruling long-held economic practices at the heart of their regional governments, to say nothing of the implications for other member states.

Maybe that reaction is yet to come but, for the moment – in the light of the muted reports – this looks decidedly like one of those occasions when the dog didn't bark.

The idea of constitutional restraints on government is utterly alien to German thinking. Hence, Germans are not that excited about fundamental constitutional issues. He, who does not understand the rule of law ("Rechtsstaat") does not understand the significance of a constitution. This is the reason why Germans are intellectually incapable of grasping the worries that nationals of countries with a strong constitutional record feel in the face of plans to supplant their constitutional structures by a constitution of the EU.

This being so, Germans do not even suspect that their country has been the spearhead of the destruction of the Rechtsstaat, i.e. the rule of law, and have remained completely unperturbed by its absence to this day. Rechtsstaat is just a word to Germans, made additionally malleable in the "Grundgesetz" (a document hoping to be something like the German constitution) by prefixing it with the the elastic term sozial ("social"). Germans think that they live in a Rechtsstaat, simply because the term is frequently used in conversation. And they are immensely proud of it, even though something like a Rechtsstaat does not exist in Germany.

Here is a glimpse into why there is no such thing as the rule of law in Germany, and, therefore, not much interest in constitutional matters:

"It was [beginning in the second half of the 19th century, I.G.T.U.]...here [in Germany, I.G.T.U.]that the ideal of the rule of law was first deprived of real content.

The substantive conception of the Rechtsstaat, which required that the rules of law possess definite properties, was displaced by a purely formal concept which required merely that all action of the state be authorized by the legislature.

In short, a "law" was that which merely stated that whatever a certain authority did should be legal. The problem thus became one of mere legality.

By the turn of the century it had become accepted doctrine that the "individualist" ideal of the substantive Rechtsstaat was a thing of the past, "vanquished by the creative powers of national and social ideas."

Or, as an authority on administrative law described the situation shortly before the outbreak of the first World War: "We have returned to the principles of the police state [!] to such an extent that we again recognize the idea of a Kulturstaat [the best contemporary equivalent would be "a state in conformity with political correctness", I.G.T.U.]. The only difference is in the means. On the basis of laws the modern state permits itself everything, much more than the police state did. Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century, the term Rechtsstaat was given a new meaning. We understand by it a state whose whole activity takes place on the basis of laws and in legal form. On the purpose of the state and the limits of its competence the term Rechtsstaat in its present-day meaning says nothing."

(F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chapter 16, The Decline of the Law, p.237, Chicago 1978)