Our boilerplate introduction to the author of this piece Wolfgang Streeck:
Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
If you can plow through some of the econo-political rhetoric in this essay to the core ideas you get the sense he may be on to something.
From New Left Review, November 7:
Getting Closer
On 17 October, Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz invoked his constitutional privilege under Article 65 of the Grundgesetz to ‘determine the guidelines’ of his government’s policy. Chancellors do this rarely, if at all; the political wisdom is three strikes and you’re out. At stake was the lifespan of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants. As a result of Merkel’s post-Fukushima turn, intended to pull the Greens into a coalition with her party, these are scheduled by law to go out of service by the end of 2022. Afraid of nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, and also of their well-to-do middle-class voters, the Greens, now governing together with SPD and FDP, refused to give up their trophy. The FDP, on the other hand, demanded that given the current energy crisis, all three plants – accounting for about six percent of the domestic German electricity supply – be kept in operation as long as needed, meaning indefinitely. To end the fighting, Scholz issued an order to the ministries involved, formally declaring it government policy that the plants continue until mid-April next year, par ordre du mufti, as German political jargon puts it. Both parties knuckled under, saving the coalition for the time being.
The Greens – recently called ‘the most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag’ by the indestructible Sahra Wagenknecht – are rather more afraid of nuclear power than nuclear arms. Anesthetized by the rapidly rising number of Green fellow-travellers in the media and mesmerized by fantasies of Biden delivering Putin to The Hague to stand trial in the international criminal court, the German public refuses to consider the damage nuclear escalation in Ukraine would cause, and what it would mean for the future of Europa and, for that matter, Germany (a place many German Greens do not consider particularly worth protecting anyway). With few exceptions, German political elites, as well as their agitprop mainstream press, know or pretend to know nothing about either the current state of nuclear arms technology or the role assigned to the German military in the nuclear strategy and tactics of the United States.
As post-Zeitenwende Germany increasingly declares itself ready to be the leading nation of Europe, its domestic politics becomes more than ever a matter of European interest. Most Germans conceive of nuclear warfare as an intercontinental battle between Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) and the United States, with ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads crossing the Atlantic or, as the case may be, the Pacific. Europe may or may not get hit, but since the world would anyway go under, there is no need really to think about any of this. Perhaps afraid of being accused of Wehrkraftzersetzung – subversion of military strength, punishable with the death penalty in the Second World War – none of the suddenly numerous German ‘defence experts’ seems willing to confirm that what Biden calls Armageddon is a future that may become a present only following a protracted phase of ‘tactical’ rather than ‘strategic’ nuclear warfare in Europe, and indeed on Ukrainian battlefields.....
....MUCH MORE
HT: I think it was naked capitalism but don't actually recall where. Here's our latest link to Yves and the gang.
Previously from Professor Streeck:
Streeck: "The EU after Ukraine"
At New Left Review: "Europe: Who's In Charge, NATO Or The EU?"
At Open Democracy: "Wolfgang Streeck Sees An Increasingly Chaotic and Violent System As Inevitable"
At Inference Review (reviewing Mr. V.): Varoufakis: "My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment
