A Common Discontent: Revisiting Britain and Germany

Stephen R. Graubard

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

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Summary:  Britain and Germany are beginning to have the sinking feeling that their once-promising zeitgeists-innovative Thatcherism and harmonious unification-have lost faith, energy and momentum. Revelations of Stasi sympathizers in Germany and star-crossed royalty in England are not helping.

To spend time in the United Kingdom and Germany in early 1993 is to become aware of levels of discontent unimaginable four years ago. Superficially, the disappointments appear to be linked to the worldwide economic recession, with levels of unemployment exceeding what dem-ocratically elected governments are supposed to tolerate. Except for those with a professional interest in arguing that the moment of recovery is at hand, there is little expectation that the happy days of 1989-minus the Soviet Union of course-are scheduled for an early return. Folk wisdom tells ordinary people that something more than an economic slowdown has occurred in what was once seen as a group of self-confident democracies on the road to making a new Europe.

This is not to suggest that the recession has not been serious, for Britain even more than for Germany. To have three million men and women unemployed out of a total population of some 57 million in the United Kingdom, with a million having had no work for a year or longer, is to experience the tragedy Margaret Thatcher imagined she had permanently overcome by her drastic and presumably effective free enterprise policies. The failure to make British industry competitive, productive and lithe, and its working population industrious, has deflated the most ambitious of the Tory Party's many well-advertised ideologies. The results of the recession are conspicuous, not only in the nineteenth-century industrial cities of northern England, but also in the home counties, in London itself: boarded-up, empty storefronts of a thousand high streets, homeless men and women sleeping in doorways off Fleet Street and along the Strand, widespread unemployment and underemployment spoken of in all social strata. It is particularly painful for the young, including many who are university graduates, and it generates a pessimism that is palpable. For the middle class the collapse of the real estate market has been an especially hard blow, made more serious by the fact that so great a part of a family's purported wealth is in its house and garden. In Britain the talk of "decline" is more pervasive than it has ever been, and not merely because of a devalued pound.

The situation in Germany is not nearly so serious. Only at the end of 1992, for example, did the Bundesbank feel obliged to acknowledge that the country was in recession. The evidence of prosperity remains conspicuous: in Bonn, where construction derricks fill the skies and building crews work to create more office space, the proposition that a once somnolent Rhine city is likely soon to be seriously diminished by the movement of Germany's capital to Berlin seems unlikely. In Düsseldorf, a city not famous for its hordes of tourists, the shop windows display merchandise of such luxury and expense that one can only believe that consumer confidence remains high, at least among well-paid executives. In Munich and Berlin, Hamburg and Mannheim, the solid comfort of yesterday is much in evidence. Yet German unemployment statistics tell a story constantly repeated by ...

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