Germany s Four Neins

I will fly to Germany.

Germany is on the left. And Austria is on the right.

Germany eventually agreed to the creation of the euro only when French President François Mitterrand made it a condition of France s support for German reunification.

Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health.

Jemaah Islamiyah, a listed entity in Indonesia, is just one example of a group that claims that robbing non believers to finance its terrorism is justified.

Indeed, Germany s strategic position at the heart of Europe, as well as its huge economic and military potential, made it first a prize to be sought, and then, following Otto von Bismarck s completion of German unification in 1871, a nation state to be feared.

Germany was reluctant to give up the Deutsche Mark, a symbol of its economic power and commitment to price stability.

Either gradual attrition, with weaker countries defaulting, will lead to a more restricted German led club of virtuous countries, or Germany itself will choose to pursue a policy of narrow fiscal advantage by seceding from the eurozone.

Germany cannot, however, indulge its obsession with supply side reforms without also pursuing growth enhancing policies. As Germany knows from its own experience in the early 2000s, the benefits of supply side reforms namely, improved competitiveness and higher long term growth rates take a long time to emerge.

Bismarck s legacy was a Germany that dominated European politics until the end of World War II.

That failure placed the world on the path to the negative watershed posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Nonetheless, Germany must accept that the alternative to a democratically unified currency union is German economic hegemony. In the longer run, that outcome would destroy the common European project, in turn undermining Germany s own economic prosperity and strategic security a Bismarckian scenario from which Bismarck would have recoiled in horror.

But Germany itself would probably prefer to keep its British partner, rather than face the Mediterranean countries alone. Culture still matters.

ATHENS The centrality of Germany to Europe and, more widely, to world affairs has been amply, and often bloodily, demonstrated over many centuries.

Many Brazilians protested against the World Cup before it even started.

No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany, but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia, everywhere, systematically bribed.

So, in which areas must Germany lead? First, European public debt should be partly and gradually mutualized.

Across the Middle East, anger is high. This anger, however, cannot fall into random diatribes against Germans, or Germany.

They were the Siemenses of this world, coming from France, from the UK, from Japan, from Canada, from Germany, and they were systematically driven by systematic, large scale corruption.

A positive watershed, under appreciated today, developed in the years immediately after World War II with the political transformation of Germany and Japan.

The countries that are able to deploy more renewables (for example, Greece) could then sell the certificates to countries that need more of them (say, Germany).

During the war, Churchill and Roosevelt shared the idea that once Germany and Japan were defeated, British and US military forces should act as global policemen.

Who will be the French president courageous enough to apologize to Algeria and the Harkis? Of course, French crimes during Algeria s war of independence resemble those of Nazi Germany in neither scale nor motivation.

But the only technique that Putin appeared to have absorbed from his earlier career as a spy in East Germany was that of social control. That remains true today.

While Russia needs to integrate itself with Europe s remaining islands of innovation (Germany, above all), it is the growth potential of the Asia Pacific region that will determine the country s future. Here, the main partner is China, which Russia now supplies with fertilizers, seafood, timber, nonferrous metals, and increasing volumes of crude oil.

Germany plans to build at least 50 hydrogen fueling stations by 2015 as the start of a countrywide network. Japan and Korea have announced similar plans.

The previous year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel laid the plant s cornerstone herself, sending a strong signal of her seriousness about Germany s shift to clean, renewable energy.

So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure, because even the powerful government, which we have in Germany, comparatively, was not able to say, We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad.

Indeed, electricity prices in Germany are not systematically higher than in Greece, which nowadays is an electricity importer. As a result, Greek solar electricity would, above all else, merely replace more expensive conventional generation in Greece.

Of course, whether the cost is lowered does not depend on where the deployment takes place using German money to support solar deployment in sunny Greece would be more efficient than using it to support deployment in gloomier Germany.

Now even the last holdouts among the regime s opponents will be appearing on the roads of Europe. They will not appear on the roads of Russia, mind you Unlike Germany or France, Putin will not hesitate, while terrorizing tomorrow s refugees, to slam the door in their faces.

But, in reality, the West never promised not to expand NATO. In fact, in the spring of 1990, the United States presented a powerful case that a reunifying Germany could not be part of two different security systems.

But Germany itself would probably prefer to keep its British partner, rather than face the Mediterranean countries alone. Culture still matters.

But, while Greece cannot reasonably hope that large scale deployment of photovoltaic systems will turn it into the Saudi Arabia of solar electricity, Schäuble is right to point out that producing it in Greece makes more sense than producing it in Germany.

This is why interest rate spreads within the eurozone have been widening, with Germany and the Nordic countries benefiting from lower borrowing costs and the problem countries being punished by a high risk premium.

At the heart of Germany's troubles is the stubborn and internationally widespread idea that the economy is a large, clock like mechanism into which the state can intervene without consequences. The increasing mathematization of economics in recent decades has abetted this development.

But Germany has all of the leverage it needs to implement the stability oriented reforms that it wants for Europe. For starters, Germany, together with the European Commission, can compel France to pursue deeper reforms in exchange for more time to consolidate its deficit.

It was significant for another reason. This is an international mission, and this event was celebrated in Europe, in Germany, and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents, and American accents, and German accents, and French and Italian and Dutch accents.

Germany resisted the euro, arguing that full political union should come first. Since there was no chance that the other countries would accept political union, Germany s position seemed like a technical maneuver to prevent the establishment of the single currency.

The key to ending the European crisis is a stimulus plan that addresses deficiencies on both the supply and demand sides. That is why Germany s refusal to help find a way to finance the proposed European investment agenda which, for a limited time, would fund productive private investment is a mistake.

Perhaps there is still time to bring together, on neutral ground, some of the elements that comprised the old Syria. Or perhaps more radical solutions of the type implemented in Germany and Japan after World War II are now required.

The political and economic weakness of France and Italy, together with Britain s gradual withdrawal from EU affairs, highlight Germany s key role in rescuing the eurozone from the current crisis. But true leadership requires a sense of direction and a willingness to pay up, and, here, Germany has lately been found wanting.

This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin, because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general, do not focus enough, yet, on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society.

That failure placed the world on the path to the negative watershed posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Nothing foreordained that the US and its allies would prevail.