Page 36 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

36 I 30 Years of transition bne December 2019
some that remain unhappy at the solidarity tax and the massive subsides spent on bringing the east up to par and then having to accommodate
the sometimes profoundly different points of view in national politics.
At root of these tensions is the Ossis and Wessis don't have an identical
set of values and the necessary compromises in German domestic politics have been larger as a result.
It's taken two generations but these divisions have started to fade as the next generation, the children of “mixed” couples, are growing up. Berlin itself
is symptomatic of the process. In the 90s the city was still divided by its schizophrenic nature. The state’s push to remake the physical infrastructure was manifest in Potsdamer Platz – where the world’s first ever traffic light was installed to deal with the world’s first ever traffic jams – bifurcated by
the wall but transformed by a sea of cranes that built a symbolic centre of modernity. Today the ultramodern Sony Centre, a hive of shops, cinemas and restaurants, has filled what was no-mans land, crowned with a glass and steel tower that is the HQ of Die Bahn, Germany’s national railway company.
More tellingly Kollwitz Platz is the keystone of the ultra trendy Prenzlauer Berg that was invaded by the young following the fall of the wall. In the 90s run-down buildings in this relatively central district but in the former East Berlin were simply abandoned and
then taken over by young people who turned them into bars, clubs, restaurants and other small businesses. One of
bne’s editors at the time had a side business where he set up a ping pong bar that only sold bottled beer and pulled the punters in with free ping pong tables and DJ kit that was open
to anyone who wanted to use it.
But those young people quickly settled down and started doing up the houses. Germany is suffering from a deep demographic crisis with a replacement rate of 1.2 children per pair (you need a rate of 2.1 to keep a population size stable). However, the small park in the centre of Kollwitz
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Platz was famous for the number of small children that came there every day to play. The area around Kollwitz Platz was not only the most fertile in Germany, it had the highest birth-rate of anywhere in Europe at its peak.
In general the stark differences between the run-down but edgy nature of Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin and the chic neighbourhoods in the west like Charlottenberg have diminished. The architecture in East Berlin will still be very familiar to anyone who has spent any time in Eastern Europe, especially the massive apartment blocks along Karl Marx Allee, just off Alexander Platz, the heart of East Berlin, that look like they have been transplanted from Moscow, but the general dilapidation and lack of public services of the socialist system has disappeared.
The amalgamation of the two Germanys has had other consequences. As a result of this process, Germany is in a unique position to deal with the bad boy of European politics – Russia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is an
Ossi and like most of her generation studied Russian in school. Indeed, the German foreign ministry has a large share of Ossis working for it and its embassy in Moscow must be unique amongst those of the EU there for the large share of ordinary diplomats that speak fluent Russian. That favours Germany’s relations with Russia and has promoted business ties between the two countries. Germany has literally ten times more businesses registered
in Russia than any other European country and last year recorded record levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) that topped €3bn for the first time.
The German unification process has taught many lessons. The
first is that simply pouring all the money needed to modernise basic infrastructure – something that Russia is embarking on and other countries like Ukraine are trying to organise – is not in itself enough to create a prosperous modern society.
Another lesson is that values systems are deeply engrained and simply
offering more material goods is not enough to transform a society. This
ties back into the problems with the current capitalist model. To simplify
the problem, following the failure
of the socialist experiment and the “victory” of capitalism the predominate model became just “more capitalism”
as epitomised in Francis Fukuyama's “End of History” and US President Donald Trump’s “transactional” politics. In the meantime these ideas have
been debunked, but what is supposed to replace them remains elusive.
And your starting point makes a difference. East Germany was well behind West Germany, but it was well ahead of everyone else in the eastern bloc. However, as soon as it joined the rest of Germany the bar was raised and there was a lingering resentment that life for western Germans was
still better than for easterners. That created friction. The accession countries suffered much less from this as everyone in the country was in the same boat
and they could only dream of enjoying
a German standard of living, which remains the gold standard for most
of the East European population.
But having said all of this, some big positives have come out of the change too. The only really successful transitional model has proven to be “join the EU”
as every country that did join has seen standards of living and prosperity soar. The ready-made functioning institutions are at the core of this success, even though the governments of several new EU members, like Hungary and Poland, are working hard to undo the power
of these institutions. While the likes of Czechia and Slovenia had to build copies of these EU institutions as part of their accession process, the East Germans were simply plugged into the existing system.
The countries further east that have not joined the EU and never will have been left to cope with their ingrained bureaucrat-client system that is based on corruption – even supposedly progressive Eastern European states like Ukraine. This system is deeply entrenched and will not easily
be abandoned.