Loomnie

In the current edition of The Economist:

In some countries it [citizenship] is, in effect, on sale. In others, such as America, it may be an accident of birth, with no conscious choice involved. Rather than making a fetish out of passports, a better approach would be to use residence (especially tax residence) as the main criterion for an individual’s rights and responsibilities. That encourages cohesion and commitment, because it stems from a conscious decision to live in a country and abide by its rules. The world is gradually moving in this direction. But many states (mostly poor and ill-run) resist the trend and some rich democracies like the Netherlands and Germany are trying to curb it (see article), offering a variety of excuses.

Here.

First some ground explanations. Here in Germany, the favourite fashion label of neo-Nazi’s is Thor Steinar. The brand was banned in Germany in 2004 because its logo lookred like that of the Nazi period SS. The label subsequently rebranded itself and now has a legally acceptable logo. In any case, the neo-Nazis love it and it is well-known that if you are wearing that you are almost certainly a neo-Nazi.

State parliamentary elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in German) are approaching, and the parties have been busy campaigning, including NPD, the far-right, nationalist party, otherwise known as the German neo-Nazi party. Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, one of the states in the former East Germany, NPD already has some seats in the state parliament. I was in the state a few weeks ago and as this report states, the posters of NPD are normally so high on street lights that it is almost impossible to reach and deface, for those who might want to do so.

Some left-leaning youth have decided to fight the NPD by creating the figure Storch Heinar, which is itself a play on the name Thor Steinar – Storch is the German word for Stork, and Heiner, well, makes the whole name rhyme with Thor Steinar. The stork is dressed in the Nazi colours, with a Hitler mustache.

For more on Storch Heiner check the organisation’s website and this article, for more on the stork’s campaign, see this Der Spiegel article. For more on the new face of neo-Nazi fashion, see this, also from Der Spiegel.

I recently read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, a very instructive book on the recent financial that looks at the crisis from the point of view those who made money from it. So when I learnt from the Planet Money blog that he has written a piece for Vanity Fair on the country I now call home, I decided to give it a look. Apart from a fair amount of information on the apparent obsession of Germans with the human rear-end and what comes out of it, bits of the article are about German bankers, Germans and the financial crisis, and Germany and the future of the euro.

On Germans bankers and the crisis:

They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise.

On Germany and the future of the euro:

Either Germans must agree to a new system in which they would be fiscally integrated with other European countries as Indiana is integrated with Mississippi: the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyle of ordinary Greeks. Or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce “structural reform,” a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans. The first solution is pleasant for Greeks but painful for Germans. The second solution is pleasant for Germans but painful, even suicidal, for Greeks.

There is not much of the substance here that those who know a little about the financial crisis and are familiar with Germany wouldn’t know, but still, it is worth the read, if only to learn about German obsessions with the said derrière and what comes out of it. The piece is here.

By the way, I haven’t been able to find a German who will confirm the obsessions.

John Lanchester in LRB:

If European monetary policy is run according to German national interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances, or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German national interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can’t survive. It’s hard to tell exactly what Merkel thinks about all this. She is nobody’s idea of a caricature spendthrift, happily chucking money in the direction of the undeserving poor. Whenever the question of bailouts is mentioned, Merkel acts out an elaborate pantomime of reluctance to dish out more cash. It’s hard to tell whether she is really-o, truly-o this reluctant, or whether she’s hamming up her unwillingness for a domestic audience which strongly dislikes the idea of bailing out work-shy Southern Europeans. The fact is, though, that they are going to have to continue to do that, if the euro is going to continue to exist in its current form. Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast. This, if you think about it from a broad historical perspective, is quite a reversal. During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany’s sense of its special destiny. During the 21st century, the greatest danger to European stability is Germany’s reluctance to accept its special destiny. If the German taxpayer manages, however grudgingly, to accept that it’s her duty to shoulder the burden, the euro will muddle through. But it won’t be pretty.

Here.

After the defense

On 11.01.10, I had a public defense of my dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The questions were firm but fair, and I came away with a nice grade (yes, German Ph.D. dissertations are graded).

Thanks to everybody who in one way or another made writing the dissertation less of a pain than I am sure it would have been.

1. Google’s Africa play

2. Microsoft opposes a filing by Apple that seeks to trademark the phrase App Store

3. When the whole family is staring at screens, maybe it is time to try tech detox?

4. The informal economy: a story of ethnography untold

FT’s Gideon Rachman thinks that the answer to that question might be Yes:

The backlash against immigration is particularly visible in Europe. In Britain, the new coalition government has promised to reduce the number of immigrants from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. International banks and multinational companies are already complaining that their businesses are being badly affected. Over the past year anti-immigration parties have made breakthroughs in the Netherlands and Sweden – and a book lambasting the cultural effects of immigration has become a huge bestseller in Germany. In the US, the populist Tea Party movement has increased the pressure to crack down on illegal immigration from Mexico.

The re-regulation of capital movements is also moving up the international agenda, amid talk of a “global currency war”. As all the world’s major powers seek to export their way out of economic trouble, so tensions have grown. America complains that China is deliberately undervaluing its currency to maintain a vast trade surplus that is contributing to US unemployment. The Chinese retort that the US is printing money in an effort to drive down the dollar. Questions about the future of the euro have raised the spectre that capital controls might one day have to be reimposed within Europe, as part of a managed effort to break up the single currency. On a more minor, but practical level, some emerging markets – most notably Brazil – imposed controls on inflows of “hot money” last year, to prevent their currencies being boosted to hopelessly uncompetitive levels. Since a new global compact on currencies is unlikely in 2011, this trend is likely to gather momentum.

I know of many countries that will argue that they weren’t really part of globalization anyway (at least in the sense that it is described above), and that the role they play – as sources of primary resources – will remain largely unchanged, even if there were to be a relative retreat of ‘globalization’.

See also Kenneth Rogoff’s take on the topic, as well as Joseph Stiglitz’s.

By keith Hart. The conclusion:

The euro is the most tangible symbol of the European Union, but not co-extensive with it. For the last century or more, member states had supplied their citizens with a monopoly currency that served both as the reification of the national economy and as their principle link to the world market. The move towards political and monetary union in Europe is the most striking example of a general trend. Everywhere nation-states are coming together into regional trading blocs as one kind of response to globalization: NAFTA, Mercosul, ASEAN, ECOWAS etc. At the same time, many states have hitched their waggon to the sinking dollar. In the meantime, the sheer size and volatility of global money markets and internet commerce undermine the credibility of existing national polities as an effective bridge to world society. The international settlement after 1945 looks increasingly inadequate. Before long, calls for a world currency will become louder than at present… .

Money is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity…. Money links us imaginatively and practically to the widest reaches of society, while lending precision to the fulfillment of our most concrete desires and obligations. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative.

One of anthropology’s objects might be to explore those features of humanity that are most conducive to the making of world society. If so, the substantial intellectual gains made by ethnography in the twentieth century must be married somehow to humanistic, historical and philosophical inquiries adequate to the task. The study of money offers one strategic focus for this, since money, more than most institutions, links each of us directly with the contemporary world as a whole.

It is fairly long, but every bit of it is worth your time.

1. Missionaries save languages

2. Nigerians, self-congratulatory much?

3. At least 40 East African (CEOs) take public HIV tests

4. The most beautiful images in Google street view

5. Google street view presents: A Hole-Filled Version of Germany

6. Africa: Hitchhiker’s Quick Guide to the Mothership

7. ‘For the record, big butts do not, in fact, pose any danger to your sexual health.’

The Economist has a nice article on immigration in Germany. If you can recall, Angela Merkel recently said that multiculturalism has utterly failed in Germany. This was following the furore that was raised by the publication of a book that claimed that immigrants and muslims were causing the downfall of Germany. The book was written by Thilo Sarazzin, a member of the board of the German Bundesbank. He was subsequently forced off the board of the Bundesbank. (See the Economist article for a recap of the main issues.)

What some of the people I have spoken with are scared of is that this might yet become a major political issue, leading, for instance to the creation of an acceptable right wing party. (There are the crazies, like NPD, the neo-Nazi party, but nobody really takes them seriously.) The fear is that if Ms Merkel is unable to contain the discussions surrounding immigration within her party, it is possible that some members might decide to go with the general sentiment of anti-immigration and form a political party that retains the basic economic policies of the right of centre CDU, but adds to it anti-immigration rhetorics and policies. A party like that, I am afraid, will be appealing to certain segments of the German middle-class.