The crisis, so it seems, is not present in Europe – and certainly not in Germany before the elections. The news of job cuts, bankruptcies and the over-indebtedness of public budgets are hidden in the business papers such as the Handelsblatt and the Financial Times, while Mr Steinbrück and Ms Merkel regularly come up with good, meaningless news from Brussels and the G20 meetings.

There is deep silence in Brussels: Yes, a European bank supervisory body is under consideration; yes, a recommendation for the limitation of managers’ salaries is being formulated. And the new Central European member nations, which are in a very difficult situation, in some cases verging on national bankruptcy, will get small subsidies – ridiculously small, considering the magnitude of their problems. But there is no coordinated common strategy against the crisis. When France took an initiative in this direction during its Council Presidency in December 2008, it was briskly reined in by Germany. Oh yes, and at the same time, the heads of governments have, by the way, authorized themselves the suspension of the debt limit in the convergence rules. Renationalisation is in the cards. This is monstrous, in view of the existing economic integration in the EU.

As the great economist Paul Krugman wrote in the preface to the German edition of his book “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008″, Europe needs a massive, coordinated effort. Given the transnationality of major corporations, the integrated national economies of Europe will, he argues, under no circumstances be able to solve their problems nationally. He even refers to a German problem:

“For incomprehensible reasons, Germany’s leading politicians simply seem not to understand the enormous extent of the crisis, or the necessity for a forceful reaction to it.” (Krugman 2009)

In the negotiations with Opel, too, the German government has evidently manoeuvred itself into a corner. Instead of coordinating with the other European countries with GM-owned sites, all our government cares about is the traditional German Opel brand. Meanwhile, Great Britain, Spain and Poland are apparently offering financial support that would not protect only Opel, but also their own GM sites. That could make the attempt to carve only Opel out of the GM group considerably more difficult, however.

At a different level however, the Europeans do stick together: during the UNO conference on the world crisis at the end of June in New York, the OECD nation, led by the USA and the EU, blocked a few effective rules for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that would have provided relief for the poorest countries in the world.

Birgit Daiber, RLF Brussels