No prize for guessing why any commemoration of this 10-year milestone is lacking so far in the press – everywhere I look, really. For 2012 promises to be a difficult year for European national finances, and therefore for the euro; to many, an exit from the Eurozone of one or several states is likely, and from that possibly even the common currency’s “collapse” (although I think that, no matter what, there will be a rump core of states – Germany, Netherlands, Finland, etc. – still using it for quite a while).

But enough of this depressing talk! We have all read and heard quite enough of it, at least before the onset of the holiday season (when the bureaucrats and bank officials in charge left their desks for a while).* Let’s rather follow the Luxembourg lead and consider the euro from a different perspective:

http://t.co/eNBpc2Z7 Dix ans de l’euro Pas vraiment de mixité dans les porte-monnaie http://t.co/b3mtHfyx

December 27, 2011 12:40 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

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That perspective is “integration,” always a hot European topic: to what degree are the various European peoples mixing with each other and getting along while they do so? Except that here, in this essential piece from the French-language Luxembourg paper L’essentiel (no byline), the subject is rather the degree to which all the various eurocoins are mixing with each other in people’s pockets. The lede:

Ten years after the arrival of the euro, the coins which sport a national symbol on one face are not yet totally mixed in European wallets.

Piffle, you say? Actually, I find the question interesting, if only from a personal perspective. Given my general location in the Netherlands, about as far from a national border as one can be in this small country, it’s no surprise that Dutch pieces bearing a spiffy, stylized silhouette of Her Majesty Queen Beatrix dominated from the start, although German ones (with that ol’ imperial eagle) were on the scene immediately, with the French and Belgian not far behind. For a long time even the rather more artistic and varied Italian coins were a rarity, to be laid aside as soon as they were encountered – as were the Irish pieces, and certainly the Luxembourg ones (which, if understandably rare in those early days and beyond, basically also do little more than copy the formats used on Dutch eurocoins). None of that is true anymore now in 2011, in the euro’s twilight, not even for Luxembourg coins; rather, I occasionally examine my change in the hope of spotting something from Slovakia, say, or Estonia, but so far in vain. (Although the chosen design for every coin-denomination of the latter is simply its geographical shape, which suggests lack of suitable cultural icons and/or imagination and/or time Estonian designers had to work with before the official coin-design was due for submission. In fact, no other Eurozone country resorts to the creative expedient using its geography for the design!)

But back to the L’essential article: Turns out that, in fact and in its first words after the lede, “There are no official statistics determining the degree of numismatic mingling within the 17 countries of the Zone and the three micro-states tied to it, Monaco, San Marino, and the Vatican.” What, no story then? Of course not: these days it’s a simple thing for any newspaper to dial up an “expert” on almost anything at short notice and, sure enough, here we have two of them, one each for the biggest EU economies, natch:

• Germany: Prof. Dietrich Stoyan, retired from the University of Freiberg, states that only 40% of the coinage in German pockets is made up of pieces with something other than German markings. According to his calculations, the level this is supposed to be is 67% – rather far away, thus, and he doesn’t expect this to come about until sometime around 2030 (hah!). Guess what? The second most-common coin in German pockets, again according to the professor, is not the French, but the Spanish! Why? Because so many Germans go on vacation there!
  
• France: Here we depend upon a certain Prof. Claude Grasland of the University of Paris 7 and France [sic] Guérin-Pace, a female researcher at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (French abbreviation: Ined). “Foreign” eurocoins make up only 33% of the metal found in French pockets. Second-most? It’s a tie between German and Spain – because, you see, it’s well-known how France functions as the “land of passage” between N and S Europe. And what about those more-obscure pieces, i.e. from Monaco, San Mareno, the Vatican. Oh, you’ll never encounter these, say the researchers: People divert them to their private collections as soon as they see them! Sounds right to me.

*BTW if you do want to stay serious and keep your attention on the Eurozone’s troubles, then I offer you the following instead, from the same Luxembourg newspaper L’essentiel, featuring Luxembourg Premier Jean-Claude Juncker lambasting those countries that were “lax” with their budgets as responsible for the entire crisis, but at the same time expressing confidence that the common currency is not in any real danger:

http://t.co/eNBpc2Z7 Crise de la dette Juncker critique les pays trop laxistes http://t.co/ncuSa5Bc

December 27, 2011 12:40 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

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So far, so dubious, then. But there is also an interesting mention at the beginning of the piece of how German sporting-goods company Adidas has stated a willingness to go back to accepting local (i.e. pre-euro) currency, if need be.

                          

Now Patrick Saint-Paul of the French newspaper Le Figaro, possibly acting out of some sense of Mediterranean solidarity, offers a riposte that the Greeks can use: Germans go to sleep on the job! Or at least they soon might do so: the article discusses a recent proposal by a high official of the DGB (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, one of the country’s biggest unions) that all German workers should have the right to a “siesta” on the job, i.e. a period in the early afternoon to just go take a nap.

Of course, the suggestion is being offered not as a concession to labor but rather as a clever way to enable them to be even more productive. “A siesta reduces the risk of heart-attack and allows one to resume work full of energy,” states Annelie Buntenbach of the DGB’s governing board. Then there’s this from the inevitable expert-professor, this time one specializing in “psychological biology”: “A rest at noon permits one to make up for a period of weak productivity and occurs just at the point where chances of an accident are at their highest.”

Anyway, Saint-Paul goes on to mention that, although everyone thinks Germans work harder than Greeks, that isn’t necessarily true: OECD statistics purport to show that the former work only 1,390 hours per year and the latter 2,119. But that might just be a difference without any true distinction.

                          

Most likely you’re not going to answer, and I understand that. (But for those of you with a burning desire to share, there’s always our Facebook fanpage for commentary and discussion – stick that info right on our wall!) With all respect, I’m not even really interested. But many of those among you who are German citizens will soon have to answer such questions in the upcoming Volkszählung or census.

That’s the taz’s Rolf Lautenschläger who rings the bell loudly to remind his fellow citizens of their upcoming data-provision duties in his editorial We are glassy.

But check out his first sentence (it’s also in the tweet): “There’s a census – and no one is interested.” What – Germans are refusing to obey and fill in the forms? That’s rather hard to believe, especially when you consider that this is the first census in the Federal Republic since 1987, meaning among other things that the whole added territory and inhabitants of the former East Germany have still not yet been properly tabulated! (What’s more, not everyone has to participate in this year’s census, unlike e.g. American practice – it’s property-owners and residents of community-owned property only.)

In fact, there were apparently protests and non-cooperation even against that 1987 census, according to Lautenschläger, but that’s reasonable if you stop a bit and think about it. It’s that infamous bit of German history, of say about 70 years ago – not to mention a feature of everyday East German life called the Stasi – that can understandably raise people’s hackles about the government getting its Leviathan hands on too much private information.

In a way, the reluctance people are already showing to cooperate with this 2011 census is related to that. You may wonder, Lautenschläger writes, why anyone can have objections considering how keen people are to neglect their privacy on such Internet mainstays as Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk. (That notion is the inspiration for his piece’s title: “We are glassy,” i.e. it’s easy to see through us to find out what you want.)

But the point is really the opposite. Leave Facebook, etc. to the side – there, we take on voluntarily the privacy risks that we want and that we (think that) we understand. On the other hand, Sony recently perpetrated only the latest in a series of catastrophic breaches of what were supposed to be secured personal data, and there have been some similar home-grown German catastrophes as well (e.g. with Lidl, a supermarket chain, and Deutsche Bahn, where management misused personal data in its fight with unions). Apparently then, Germans-in-the-know are hardly ready to put their confidence in their government’s data-protection abilities. What’s more, they’re likely correct in their suspicions – the former East Germany be damned (and uncounted)!

UPDATE: And you thought I was just being cynical! Check this, again from Die Tageszeitung although not from our friend Herr Lautenschläger:

Translated: “The State emphasizes that Census 2011 data is optimally protected. [However] on-line the first security-holes have appeared,” as freelance (white-hat) experts have gotten to work putting the data defenses to the test. A fake census input-form has even popped up, to which phishing victims can be unknowingly diverted, featuring extra questions not in the original re: sexual preferences! #censusfail, one would have to remark; try again, try better.

                          

Wait – only three candidate cities? That’s right. Truly, the heyday of the Olympic movement must in some sense be already past, as Simeoni’s writing seems preoccupied with reasons not to volunteer to host Olympic games, and especially why it’s unlikely that Munich will get the opportunity to do so again, whether the German citizenry eventually decide they are up for it or not. For it’s a world of austerity now, and constructing the facilities and providing the various other guarantees (e.g. for adequate anti-doping control) necessary to stage either summer or winter games successfully costs a lot of money. (The German budget is €3 billion, but such estimates almost always undershoot the mark.) Yes, that can be viewed as an investment towards reaping the bonanza of throngs of tourists coming to visit and spend, but an equally-likely result is being left with a bunch of “white elephant” sports facilities with no real further reason for existence once the closing ceremonies have concluded.

Such considerations echo experiences with the (Football) World Cup – for example, South Africa has plenty of “white elephant” stadiums now, as likely will Qatar after 2022 – and in another aspect as well: corruption. Yes, the outrageous allegations surrounding the selection-process for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City were supposed to have resulted in the adoption of various anti-corruption measures – e.g. IOC Executive Committee members are forbidden from traveling to any of the candidate-cities until after the decision has been made. Then again, the world has just been treated to another spectacular example of questionable sports selection with the awarding by FIFA of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively, so the suspicion has to linger that the money and effort expended to make the best bid one’s city is capable of might just be wasted in the end when the truly best applicant turns out to be mysteriously and unaccountably passed over.

That’s a particularly daunting prospect for the Munich bid organizers considering the particular obstacles they still face to pulling this off at all. For one thing, Germanophiles will recall that Munich itself is rather flat, nestled in a river valley, while one thing you definitely need for Winter Olympics is mountains for the skiiers and snowboarders to slide down on. There would seem to be a solution for this in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a skiing resort just to the south – and itself in fact the sole host of the 1936 Winter Games – except that there are apparently a number of property-holders there who are refusing to sell the land they hold which is needed for the new Olympic facilities. One way or another – what’s German for “eminent domain”? – they need to be brought round by the time the IOC inspectors come a-callin’. Besides that, though, Ms. Simeoni also mentions the possibility that the German national legislature – the Bundestag – might vote against Munich ’18 or at least show itself to be so hostile that Executive Committee voting members get the hint. Some members of the Green Party, in particular, are aghast at the environmental atrocities planned in connection with the construction of the Winter Games ’14 facilities at Sochi – then again, that’s Russia, they do things differently there – and don’t want to countenance any such thing happening in Southern Bavaria.

Ummm . . . Anyone Remember the Massacre?

There’s another objection to the Games specific to Munich that I’m surprised to see mentioned nowhere in Ms. Simeoni’s article. Does anyone remember 1972? The Olympic Games happened in Munich then, also – and things did not go so well. That’s what made me so surprised when I picked up on this FAZ article in the first place? “Munich?! Why not just invite President Obama to take an open-topped car ride through the streets of Dallas?” That there does nonetheless seem to be a serious application – bid-book, financial guarantees and all – submitted by Munich to hold Olympic Games once again must say something about how the city and entire country have moved on from the Olympic Massacre that I would love to see some knowledgeable essayist – Herr Schneider? – treat at greater length. Or maybe that is instead the big unmentionable motive behind what seems to be so much reluctance to really have the Olympics there again – if we can believe Ms. Simeoni’s account. (Consider, though: A national poll of Germans showed only a 60% level of support.)

Tipsters, here’s your hint: It’s not going to be Munich anyway. According to the article, it’s going to be the South Korean candidate, Pyeongchang – assuming there hasn’t been some devastating War of Korean Unification in-between, cross your fingers – mainly because Samsung stands solidly behind that bid and Samsung speaks very fluently the sort of language – i.e. money – that IOC officials must harken to just as much as those of FIFA. So get to your local betting offices and place your wagers – and just remember that, if you don’t happen to read German and regularly peruse the pages of the FAZ, you heard it here first!

                          

No, if I had to get somewhere in Germany at short notice I would probablly take the bus. (Or perhaps I might use instead one of those new-fangled car-sharing services – but owning a car myself is simply out of the question.) Yes, it’s the bargain-basement option, not only in price but in the travel experience and amenities as well, but Eurolines does just fine by me. But now – as we are alerted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – there’s another bus option opening up inside Germany as well. It’s called DeinBus.de (dein bus = “your bus”), based out of Frankfurt-am-Main. As Melanie Amann, writer of the FAZ piece, tells us, DeinBus will take you from Cologne to Frankfurt for around €12, while the Deutsche Bahn charges €64, one-way!

But there’s never any free lunch, and there at least two flies-in-the-ointment that must also be mentioned:

1. Cologne-to-Frankfurt is about the only route that exists at this point. You see (and admittedly it’s hard to figure this out from the DeinBus.de site, even if you can read German), the company runs no fixed, permanent routes but instead accumulates via its site requests from potential customers to be taken from city A to city B at such-and-such a time; if the volume of those requests surpasses a certain threshold (apparently that is 20; clearly this is best for group excursions), then the trip is on. From the looks of the present selection, it looks like they’ve got a certain momentum going with Cologne-to-Frankfurt (and presumably the other direction as well) but not for anything else as of yet.
   
2. This is Germany, remember, where unbridled competition is hardly part of the national DNA. So yes, the Deutsche Bahn has sued DeinBus.de for infringing on the monopoly for transportation services it holds by law – from a Hitler-era law, in fact (1934), which allows exceptions to the Bundesbahn monopoly only where it can be proven that the new service offers a substantial improvement (wesentliche Verbesserung) over the trains, and simply offering a lower price over the same route does not count.

                          

But now firm decisions are finally being made in this matter by the German authorities – or at least are seeming to be made. For those interested, and with the required German language skills, the ongoing saga can even be followed fairly closely on the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed. I know: it’s that sort of thing that you are glad to leave for me to do instead, and I’m pleased to oblige. (One caveat: @Deutschland_ only follows material from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.) But for now, let’s go “over the jump” to this blogpost’s full article, since a couple of tweets from that @Deutschland_ feed need to make an appearance.

First came this one, overnight:

That tweet links to this Spiegel article, whose lede begins with the portentous announcement “The decision has been made: Economy Minister Brüderle has refused a billion-euro State guarantee from the Deutschland Fund for Opel.” That would be Rainer Brüderle, of the FDP party which is in coalition with Chancellor Merkel’s CDU party, who made the announcement yesterday (Wednesday, 9 June). Yes, it was a difficult decision to make, Brüderle let it be known, since so many jobs are at stake (roughly 25,000, in fact). But he can’t show such favoritism to single companies like that, after all, and anyway “I am sure that Opel has a good future even without such guarantees.”

Naturally, Opel management begged to differ, and reacted with what they described as “great incredulity.” But wait! There was always the gambit they had all learned back as three-year-olds: run to mama! The Chancellor outranks her Economy Minister, after all; maybe she would do something.

Another tweet arriving not long afterward showed that these hopes were not in vain:

That linked to this article. Sure enough, Chancellor Merkel was willing to say that Brüderle’s decision was not necessarily the last word on the matter. Better to wait for the meeting she was scheduled to have – today, Thursday, 10 June – with the Minister-Presidents (i.e the governors) of the four German federal states where Opel has production facilities, see what came out of that, and then maybe arrive at some decision. In any event, she declared, “In the talks with the Minsiter-Presidents I will do everything so that the workers that have striven so to keep Opel going will receive the help and support that is available to us.”

So maybe there was hope for getting the €1.1 billion State guarantee that Opel/GM was asking for after all, despite the Economy Minister’s outright rejection of the measure. Of course, that Minister is FDP while Merkel herself is CDU, and she admitted in her statement to the press that there remained differences of opinion between the parties on what to do.

Ah, but she didn’t know the half of it! Next we got this tweet:

That links to here, and you might want to click through even if you can’t read German, as the article is topped by a great picture (probably just a file-photo from out of the past) of Chancellor Merkel earnestly explaining something – with big hand gestures – to Economy Minister Brüderle and to Foreign Minister and Deputy Chancellor and FDP head Guido Westerwelle. For the headline (also in the tweet) reads “Merkel’s Opel course angers the FDP.” That’s only logical: Merkel after all has abrupty reversed an important decision made by her Cabinet subordinate who is supposed to be in charge of such things, who also happens to belong to another political party, the FDP, which has its own strong ideological reasons (concernig free enterprise, the proper role of the State, etc.) to want to block any more State guarantees for Opel.

This tale, therefore, is by no means played out. For one thing, we don’t yet know the result, if any, of that meeting of today with the four Minister-Presidents, although you could also suspect that that event was ultimately just a fig-leaf excuse for Merkel to do what she did. More significantly, we still have to see how seriously-angry FDP leaders want to get about this; in the worst case, it could lead to a fall of the German government. And that would be quite a worse case indeed, what with all the economic/financial crises going on in Euroland these days, the weakening of the euro, and also the fact that Germany actually doesn’t have a President these days since Horst Köhler resigned on 31 May.

If that happens, hold on to your hats! But surely the most powerful German officials will show enough statesmanship and responsibility (unlike the new Hungarian government, say) to settle their differences over Opel without causing such a catastrophe.

Anyway, you can be sure that I’ll keep watching the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed closely. If anything else dramatic happens, I’ll let you know.

UPDATE: GM has thrown up its hands and withdrawn its requests for financial guarantees for its Opel subsidiary from any and all European governments, as you can read about in English on the NYT “Dealbook” site here. “We need to move on,” announced GM Europe president Nick Reilly; the mother company will simply pay for any further needed investments.

So that’s that – then again, you never know. As the Berlin (and, admittedly, somewhat leftist) paper Der Tagesspiegel comments, this is a sudden, extreme change-of-direction (an “incalculable pirouette,” in the words of the article’s title) of the sort that the German government already witnessed late last year when the company suddenly turned down/reneged on the buy-out deal for Opel that had been previously agreed with a consortium headed by the Canadian auto-parts maker Magna. So who really knows what GM will do next? With all this in mind, the Tagesspiegel writer (one Henrik Mortsiefer) concludes that it’s best simply to remember the company’s strange idiosyncrasies and to always bargain hard with it, keeping in mind that its claims that disaster will ensue if it doesn’t get its way often have been little more than hot air.

Meanwhile, the grave strains caused by this whole affair between the two main coalition partners in the German government, the CDU and the FDP, remain.

                          

The tweet refers to an interesting article in Der Spiegel, Economic crisis accelerates dying-out of hospitals, and normally is something I would gladly re-tweet.* But then I realized that, when it comes to news about any European country’s health system, I owe my readers a bit more than that in view of the couple of posts I wrote on that subject in the recent past, especially one on the same German system that astute readers will have perceived as particularly heavy in its irony.

Nothing ironic about this latest news from Der Spiegel, though. That’s what those Europeans get for making health care something overwhelmingly (although usually still not exclusively) a public matter: when those authorities have their budgets squeezed and must cut back, the health system feels it. The article mainly keys off of a new survey among German hospital administrators and patients from Ernst & Young. German hospitals were already disappearing at a steady rate – 2381 total in 1992, down to 2083 in 2008 – but that trend is supposed to accelerate now that the local governments that pay for them are increasingly under financial pressure, and smaller hospitals are said to be particularly vulnerable even though they often turn out to be the most efficient. For those hospitals that do carry on, more than a third of them expect to have to cut personnel, and a fifth of them even plan to reduce their number of doctors.

That study also shows some surprising parallels of the German health system with the American one. The good news: somehow a strong spirit of competition exists among hospitals there, as 81% of those surveyed termed the competitive pressure they perceived as “high” or “very high.” The bad: medical costs are rising in Germany, too, namely by about 20% since the year 2000.

*For those who follow these blogposts but not my @EuroSavant feed, you might be interested to know that I follow a number of non-English Twitter newsfeeds and often retweet interesting things that come up on them, providing my own English summary.

                          

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results.

The obvious question to pose was, “Why did those results regress from those you achieved just over half a year ago at the federal level?” After all, Internet-related issues during that period remained fresh within the German political landscape, what with such things as court-mandated curtailed retention of citizens’ personal data to governmental hostility towards the wanderings of the Google Street View camera-car. Seipenbusch saw as a sign of his party’s success the increased attention to such digital issues being shown by the establishment parties, including a new commission on Internet und Digitale Gesellschaft (Internet and Digital Society) formed in the lower house of the German legislature (Bundestag) to take up such matters. Nonetheless, the electoral results for NRW remain there for all to see, and he attributed them to the supposed lesser relevance of such issues to voters at the state and local levels of government.

Seipenbusch himself did gain re-election as Pirate Party leader, with 52.6% of the vote, at a party convention called in the wake of those NRW results, and he interprets that as an endorsement by the party rank-and-file of his particular political approach, namely that of having quite a lot to say on digital/Internet issues but very little about anything else. Of course, most other political parties, given that they presumably exist in order eventually to get the chance to govern in some way, generally make sure they take up a position on all or at least most outstanding policy-issues. In the interview, the Pirate Party leader does show that he recognizes the pressure to widen the scope of the party platform that way – “I want to achieve a moderate broadening of the [party] program” – but then makes it clear that the “broadening” he has in mind goes little further than covering “all the themes of the Age of Information.”

Granted, Germany is set to take some high-tech initiatives in the near future – such as an electronic passport and ELENA, a chip-card for the registration and payment of government benefits – that makes it vital that informed public discussion take place. Still, there are many public issues that the Pirate Party will miss with this platform policy. Interviewer Kuhn asks him about marijuana legalization, for example; you’d think that would be something in which the Pirate Party’s constituency would also be highly interested. Seipenbusch’s reply: “Whether we will want to get involved in a dispute about that, only the future will show.” Likewise, he has nothing to say about the current Eurocrisis and the massive financial aid to Greece – even as it dominated German newspaper headlines at the time, the topic somehow never came up even once at that recent party convention!

These, one must sadly conclude, are truly more the hallmarks of a “gimmick” political party rather than one that is trying to build up its credibility in voters’ eyes to someday govern. And it is that which probably lies behind its faltering performance at the polls.

                          

Surely recovery will come about eventually, although with regard to Europe generally economists at the OECD are not optimistic about that happening until the second half of this year. One way for Germany to expedite that for itself, though (since the Germans earn so much from exports), is to get the euro to fall in value against the other major world-currencies – a process to which nothing has contributed more lately than the continuing confusion in the financial markets over Greece’s fiscal problems, which German obstinacy and tight-fistedness at the EU level has only prolonged. “A curious paradox,” Lambrechts calls this.

UPDATE: Strangely, the performance-vs.-confidence balance seems to be reversed in the US, as per this article from the New York Times.

                          

But remember, this is above all a weblog with a European bent, so – if it makes you feel better – I can let you know (from an article in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel) that a certain turbulence is also currently afflicting that model of social(ist) health care provision, the German Krankenkassen. Those are the non-profit, government-supervised insurance companies that cover the vast majority of Germany’s population and are restricted to basing their premiums solely on the insured’s income. (You’re required to have medical insurance coverage there, of course, with very few exceptions, although if you prefer you can buy it from purely-private, for-profit insurers instead.) As the article reports, the public Krankenkassen are now experiencing extraordinary customer-turnover, often in the hundreds-of-thousands. Why? Because the government authorized them in February to charge those they insure up to €8 (= $10.85) more per month in order to shore up their balance-sheets, and some of them took advantage of that.

That’s right: eight euros per month more! Apparently that’s a deal-breaker for many Germans, who in remarkable numbers have proceeded to resign from the Krankenkassen which implemented the measure (known as the Zusatzbeitrag, or “supplementary contribution”) to go join those which did not. It didn’t help that someone made an elementary mistake about how to implement it, in that they made any interested Krankenkasse have to bill customers directly for the extra amount, rather than just letting it be charged as medical insurance premiums normally are as a wage-deduction collected by employers.

Just a word here, then, to let all interested know that it is not always sweetness & light over where citizens need not worry about medical coverage. (Not that there’s any indication that the firms losing customers are in any danger of going bust – like I say, they are state-supported.)