Why Isn’t Germany More Unpopular? (Is Angela Merkel the Answer?)

I really will get on with writing about counter-propaganda soon but in the meantime Angela Merkel is visiting London today and this reminds of an issue that has been bugging me for a while: why isn’t Germany more unpopular in Europe?

Hang on you say ‘Germany is up there at the top of the Nation Brand Index what are you on about?’

You don’t need to dig very far into the business pages to encounter two arguments about the Eurozone. Firstly, the chief beneficiary of the Euro is Germany which has been able to boost its exports because the Euro is a weaker currency than the Deutschmark would be.   Secondly, this economic success has made Germany the financial bastion of the Eurozone with the result that it is in imposing its deflationary ordoliberal policies to the rest of the zone. Hence rather than pursuing counter-cyclical Keynesian policies the Eurozone countries are largely pursuing self-defeating policies (see for instance the last five years of Paul Krugman columns in the New York Times)

OK so we have one country imposing self-interested policies that damage the interests of other countries. Wouldn’t we expect those other countries to vigorously resist and given the consequences are unemployment for national leaderships to be pressed to take a hard anti-German line by popular movements and a hostile media? The result might be that an Angela Merkel visit would end up like Richard Nixon in Venezuela in 1958...But with the exception of Greece I don’t see any real animus against Germany or Merkel (for example).

How do we explain this? I assume that part of this is the acceptance among Eurozone Europeans that the benefits of the Euro outweigh the costs. But I also wonder about the extent to which it is Angela Merkel herself that produces the effect. Partly this is about her skills as a political leader but also a matter of style. She’s so benign that she deflects most of the ‘fourth reich’ references and can’t be placed by the media within the traditional frames of German power. Hence the colourlessness of Merkel contributes to the hegemony of Germany within Europe because of the difficulty of mobilizing hostility against someone who seems so personally inoffensive.

This leads to a wider question about the role of national leaders in shaping national images. We all know that the image of the US took a bounce when Barack Obama took over from George W. Bush. We also know that conflict is associated with demonization of enemy leaders but how about an opposite process? Are countries more or less tolerant of other countries where the leader is seen as benign or threatening independently of the ‘objective’ level of conflict between them. There’s a sizeable literature on personalization in domestic politics maybe it’s an issue that deserves more attention in international relations.