Let Sleeping Germans Lie

[Geee]

Townhall:

The newly elected French Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is warning Germany that Mediterranean ideas of "growth," not Germanic "austerity," should be the new European creed. No surprise there -- reckless debtors often blame their own past imprudence on greedy creditors, especially if the latter are supposed to be guilt-ridden over causing two world wars.

All over Europe, the gospel is that tight-fisted Germans are at the root of the European Union meltdown: They worked too hard, saved too much, bought too little and borrowed not at all. All that may be true, in theory. But, in fact, faulting thrift and industry is a prescription for incurring anger and guaranteeing backlash -- especially in the case of the Germans, who are now asked to provide even more capital to help other European economies to recover.

There is one general rule about the history of the modern state of Germany since its inception in 1871: Anytime Germany has been both unified and isolated, armed conflict has inevitably followed.

We often scoff at such quaint historical laws -- forgetting that World War I followed from the inability of the French to harness German nationalism after the Franco-Prussian War. World War II was a result of the inability of the victorious allies either to dismantle the unified German state or incorporate a defeated Germany into some sort of continental alliance.

After World War II, the allies swore that they had at last come up with a novel tripartite solution: Germany would be split apart. West Germany was to be a member of both NATO and, eventually, the new European Union. France, Great Britain and the United States would be nuclear powers, but not so Germany, where nuclear physics and rocketry were born.

Seventy years of peace followed -- an abnormality in two millennia of Western civilization in Europe. But now, insidiously, the WWII-era constraints are eroding. Germany is united and very rich. The rest of the European Union is quite poor and beginning to crack apart. A ragtag NATO is confused by the new "lead from behind" America.

Yet the catalysts for the German wars were not just Europe's inability to contain and surround a naturally powerful German state. German fears and emotions counted too.