Grecia saindo do euro: cronica de um desastre anunciado - Der Spiegel

Greece Before the AbyssOnly Bankruptcy Can Help Now

A Commentary by Stefan Kaiser

Der Spiegel, 14/08/2012

dapd

Lighting strikes above the Arcopolis in Athens.

Greece has disappointed its creditors yet again. Now its government plans to ask for more time -- and needs billions more in aid. But Greece's euro-zone partners are unwilling to provide any more help, meaning that the only hope now is to admit defeat and let the country make a fresh start.

Officially, at least, everything is going according to plan. In September, officials with the troika -- made up of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- are planning to travel to Athens to check on the progress that Greece has made with its cost-cutting program. Then, according to the plan, they could disburse billions more in aid out of the second bailout package for Greece, which the euro-zone countries and the IMF agreed on in February.

But, in reality, it is rather unlikely that all of the €130 billion ($160 billion) in the bailout package will ever be paid out. And what is even more unlikely is that the money would keep Greece from going bankrupt.
The assumptions on which the current program was based in February are no longer valid. At that time, it was thought that the Greek economy would only contract by 4.5 percent this year, but now it appears that this figure will be closer to 7 percent. This would mean even fewer tax receipts and even more social expenditures. What's more, given these circumstances, it's almost irrelevant that the Greek government is expected to ask for a two-year extension, to 2016, of the agreed austerity plan.
One thing is clear: In addition to more time, Greece also needs more money. And those who have been financing it thus far -- primarily the major euro-zone countries and the IMF -- are either unwilling or unable to give the country any more. In political terms, that is completely understandable: One can only imagine the earful that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would get if she were to present a third aid package for Greece before the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. In fact, the members of her own conservative coalition would probably chase her out of the building.
Truth be told, Merkel only has herself to blame for the fact that she is stuck in this pickle. She dug in her heels too much in insisting that the problems of Southern European countries could only be solved by drastic belt-tightening, and that what the Greeks were really lacking was the will to do what was necessary. Now she can hardly abandon this way of interpreting the crisis.
Delaying the Inevitable and Necessary
If it was ever the goal of Merkel and her allies to rescue Greece from bankruptcy, then they have failed. The only thing the drastic austerity measures have done is to exacerbate the economic crisis and push Greece's debts even higher. Nevertheless, the creditors have insisted on moving forward with their plan -- even though it already became clear long ago where it was heading.
The end of this approach now appears to have been reached. Neither euro-zone countries nor the IMF can provide Greece with more aid without sacrificing their own credibility. Given these circumstances, there is only one option left: Greece must go broke.
European politicians have balked from taking this step -- probably also because the new permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which is supposed to cushion the economic impacts of a Greek bankruptcy, has yet to enter into force.

Instead, they have tried to buy time with the help of a dangerous interim arrangement: The Greek government is supposed to borrow the money it needs from the ailing Greek banks. In return, the banks receive sovereign bonds that they can, in turn, provide as securities for new loans from Greece's central bank. In this way, Greece's central bank is financing the Greek state in what is really just a kind of shell game that gets riskier the longer it is played. In any case, all euro-zone countries will in the end be jointly on the hook for these liabilities.
A Greek bankruptcy would already be costly enough at the moment. Estimates say that it would cost Germany alone some €80 billion. Lest this figure climb any higher, the right thing to do would be to finally make that one fateful step.
No matter how unpredictable the consequences of a Greek bankruptcy might be, it appears to offer the only chance to resolve the messy situation. In this way, Greece would be free of its debts and would have a chance to make a fresh start -- either as part of the euro zone or not. And the creditors in Berlin and Brussels could finally free themselves from the spiral of threats and rescue actions that they have gotten themselves into.

A volta da diplomacia das canhoneiras (com luvas de pelica...): Alemanha e Grecia

No século XIX, e até a primeira metade do século XX, países que declaravam moratória ou se revelavam incapazes de honrar suas dívidas, quando não eram diretamente ocupados pelas potências imperiais, eram submetidos a "intervenção branca", ou seja, funcionários do Tesouro de alguma potência imperial passavam a controlar suas aduanas, suas administrações financeiras, ou seja, o tesouro real (ou do sultão, ou quem mais fosse o soberano).
Assim ocorreu com vários Estados dependentes do Mediterrâneo (Egito, por exemplo, mas também a Grécia), com a China, alguns caribenhos (o Haiti, administrado durante mais de 20 anos pelos americanos) e centro-americanos (idem), e outros pela periferia do capitalismo avançado. Até o velho Reino de Portugal foi humilhado duas vezes nesse processo.
Atualmente ocorre mais ou menos o mesmo com a Grécia, mas o "interventor" é agora um eurocrata, o que apenas torna mais deprimente a humilhação.
Ninguém mandou se comportar mal, gastando à tripa forra, como se dizia antigamente.
Ou paga, ou declara bancarrota, como a Argentina.
Dá para sobreviver, mas o custo, num e noutro caso, é sempre muito grande.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Germany's Role in Europe and the European Debt Crisis

Stratfor, January 31, 2012 | 1217 GMT

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By George Friedman

The German government proposed last week that a European commissioner be appointed to supplant the Greek government. While phrasing the German proposal this way might seem extreme, it is not unreasonable. Under the German proposal, this commissioner would hold power over the Greek national budget and taxation. Since the European Central Bank already controls the Greek currency, the euro, this would effectively transfer control of the Greek government to the European Union, since whoever controls a country's government expenditures, tax rates and monetary policy effectively controls that country. The German proposal therefore would suspend Greek sovereignty and the democratic process as the price of financial aid to Greece.

Though the European Commission rejected the proposal, the concept is far from dead, as it flows directly from the logic of the situation. The Greeks are in the midst of a financial crisis that has made Greece unable to repay money Athens borrowed. Their options are to default on the debt or to negotiate a settlement with their creditors. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Union are managing these negotiations.

Any settlement will have three parts. The first is an agreement by creditors to forego repayment on part of the debt. The second is financial help from the IMF and the European Union to help pay back the remaining debt. The third is an agreement by the Greek government to curtail government spending and increase taxes so that it can avoid future sovereign debt crises and repay at least part of the debt.

Bankruptcy and the Nation State

The Germans don't trust the Greeks to keep any bargain, which is not unreasonable given that the Greeks haven't been willing to enforce past agreements. Given this lack of trust, Germany proposed suspending Greek sovereignty by transferring it to a European receiver. This would be a fairly normal process if Greece were a corporation or an individual. In such cases, someone is appointed after bankruptcy or debt restructuring to ensure that a corporation or individual will behave prudently in the future.

A nation state is different. It rests on two assumptions. The first is that the nation represents a uniquely legitimate community whose members share a range of interests and values. The second is that the state arises in some way from the popular will and that only that popular will has the right to determine the state's actions. There is no question that for Europe, the principle of national self-determination is a fundamental moral value. There is no question that Greece is a nation and that its government, according to this principle, is representative of and responsible to the Greek people.

The Germans thus are proposing that Greece, a sovereign country, transfer its right to national self-determination to an overseer. The Germans argue that given the failure of the Greek state, and by extension the Greek public, creditors have the power and moral right to suspend the principle of national self-determination. Given that this argument is being made in Europe, this is a profoundly radical concept. It is important to understand how we got here.

Germany's Part in the Debt Crisis

There were two causes. The first was that Greek democracy, like many democracies, demands benefits for the people from the state, and politicians wishing to be elected must grant these benefits. There is accordingly an inherent pressure on the system to spend excessively. The second cause relates to Germany's status as the world's second-largest exporter. About 40 percent of German gross domestic product comes from exports, much of them to the European Union. For all their discussion of fiscal prudence and care, the Germans have an interest in facilitating consumption and demand for their exports across Europe. Without these exports, Germany would plunge into depression.

Therefore, the Germans have used the institutions and practices of the European Union to maintain demand for their products. Through the currency union, Germany has enabled other eurozone states to access credit at rates their economies didn't merit in their own right. In this sense, Germany encouraged demand for its exports by facilitating irresponsible lending practices across Europe. The degree to which German actions encouraged such imprudent practices -- since German industrial production vastly outstrips its domestic market, making sustained consumption in markets outside Germany critical to German economic prosperity -- is not fully realized.

True austerity within the European Union would have been disastrous for the German economy, since declines in consumption would have come at the expense of German exports. While demand from Greece is only a small portion of these exports, Greece is part of the larger system -- and the proper functioning of that system is very much in Germany's strategic interests. The Germans claim the Greeks deceived their creditors and the European Union. A more comprehensive explanation would include the fact that the Germans willingly turned a blind eye. Though Greece is an extreme case, Germany's overall interest has been to maintain European demand -- and thus avoid prudent austerity -- as long as possible.

Germany certainly was complicit in the lending practices that led to Greece's predicament. It is possible that the Greeks kept the whole truth about the Greek economy from their creditors, but even so, the German demand for suspension of Greek national self-determination is particularly striking.

In a sense, the German proposal merely makes very public what has always been the reality. For Greece to have its debt restructured, it must impose significant austerity measures, which Athens has agreed to. The Germans now want a commissioner appointed to ensure the Greek government fulfills its promise. In the process, the debt crisis will profoundly circumscribe Greek democracy by transferring fundamental elements of Greek sovereignty into the hands of commissioners whose primary interest is the repayment of debt, not Greek national interests.

The Judgment of Athens

The Greeks have two choices. First, they can accept responsibility for the debts on the terms negotiated and accede to the constraints on their budget and tax discretion whether imposed by a commissioner or by a less formal structure. Second, they can default on all debts. As we have learned from corporate behavior, bankruptcy has become a respectable strategic option. Therefore, the Greeks must consider the consequences of simply defaulting.

Default might see them frozen out of world financial markets. But even if they don't default, they will be present in those markets only under the most constrained circumstances, and to the primary benefit of creditors at that. Moreover, as many corporations have found, borrowing becomes more attractive after default, as it clears the way to new post-default debt. It is not clear that no one would lend to Greece after a default. In fact, Greece has defaulted on its debt several times and managed to regain access to international lending.

More significantly, defaulting would allow Greece to avoid fueling its internal political crisis by forfeiting its national sovereignty. Much of the political crisis inside of Greece stems from the Greek public's antipathy to austerity. But another part, which would come to the fore under the German proposal, is that the Greeks do not want to lose national sovereignty. In their long history, the Greeks have lost their sovereignty to invaders such as the Romans, the Ottomans and, most recently, the Nazis. The brutal German occupation still lives in Greek memories. The concept of national self-determination is thus not an abstract concept to the Greeks. Its loss plus austerity imposed by foreign powers would create a domestic crisis in which the Greek state would be seen as an economic and political enemy of Greek national interests along with the commissioner or some other mechanism. The political result could be explosive.

It is unclear if the Greeks will opt not to default. The certain price of default -- being forced to use their national currency instead of the euro -- actually would increase national sovereignty. There will be economic pain if the Greeks continue with the euro, and there will be economic pain if the Greeks leave the euro; the political consequences of losing sovereignty in the face of such pain could easily be overwhelming. Default, while painful to Greece, might well be less painful than the alternative.

The German Dilemma

The Germans are caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, Germany is the last country in Europe that could afford general austerity in troubled states and the resulting decline in demand. On the other hand, it cannot simply tolerate Greek-style indifference to fiscal prudence. Germany must have a structured solution that to some degree maintains demand in countries such as Spain or Italy; Germans must show there are consequences to not complying with the orderly handling of debt without default. Above all, the Germans must preserve the European Union so they can enjoy a European free-trade zone. There is thus an inherent tension between preserving the system and imposing discipline.

Germany has decided to make an example of the Greeks. The German public largely has bought into Berlin's narrative of Greek duplicity and German innocence. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has needed to frame the discussion this way, and she has succeeded. The degree to which the German public is aware of the complexities or the consequences of a generalized austerity for Germany is less clear. Merkel must now satisfy a German public that questions bailouts and sees Greece as simply irresponsible. Capitulation from Greece is necessary for her as a matter of domestic politics.

The German move into questions of sovereignty has raised the stakes in the debt crisis dramatically. Even if the Germans simply back off this demand, the Greek public has been reminded that Greek democracy is effectively at stake. While Greece may have borrowed irresponsibly, if the price of that behavior is yielding sovereignty to an unelected commissioner, that price not only would challenge Greek principles, it would bring Europe to a new crisis.

That crisis would be political, as the ongoing crisis always has been. In the new crisis, sovereign debt issues turn into threats to national independence and sovereignty. If you owe too much money and your creditors distrust you, you lose the right to national self-determination on the most important matters. Given that Germany was the historical nightmare for most of Europe, and it is Germany that is pushing this doctrine, the outcome could well be explosive. It could also be the opposite of what Germany needs.

Germany must have a free-trade zone in Europe. Germany also needs robust demand in Europe. Germany also wants prudence in borrowing practices. And Germany must not see a return to the anti-German feeling of previous epochs. Those are several needs, and some of them are mutually exclusive. In one way, the issue is Greece. But more and more, it is the Germans that are the question mark. How far are they willing to go, and do they fully understand their national interests? Increasingly, this crisis is ceasing to be a Greek or Italian crisis. It is a crisis of the role Germany will play in Europe in the future. The Germans hold many cards, and that's their problem: With so many options, they must make hard decisions -- and that does not come easily for postwar Germany.

O conto da cigarra e da formiga: versão União Monetaria Europeia

Pois é, sempre tem cigarras e sempre tem formigas neste mundo. E as formigas estão sempre sendo chamadas a ajudar as pobres das cigarras, que estão morrendo de frio e de fome por não terem trabalhado tão intensamente quanto as formigas, ou por não terem simplesmente trabalhado, vivendo do que lhes dava a natureza -- o sol, as praias, aquela vida meio baiana, dos gregos -- e não acumulando para dias menos favoráveis.
Bem, o que vão fazer as formigas?: deixar as cigarras ao relento, arruinando sua reputação?
Talvez fosse o caso de tirar as praias (não dá para tirar o sol) da administração das cigarras e deixá-las sob gerenciamento das formigas, para rentabilizar os investimentos e amortizar a ajuda que está sendo prestada.

Les "égoïstes" de la zone euro : pourquoi ils renâclent à aide

Claire Gatinois

Le Monde, 14/10/2011

On les appelle les "égoïstes" de la zone euro. Ces pays, qui, comme la Slovaquie, rechignent à payer pour sauver la Grèce et les dérapages budgétaires des autres "maillons faibles" du sud de l'Europe.

Après avoir voté contre, le Parlement de Bratislava a finalement approuvé, jeudi 13 octobre, l'élargissement du Fonds européen de stabilité financière (FESF) nécessaire au sauvetage d'Athènes. Mais en hésitant, le pays a effrayé les dirigeants européens et mis au jour la rigidité de la gouvernance de la zone et l'exaspération de certains membres : la Slovaquie mais aussi les Pays-Bas, la Finlande et, dans une moindre mesure, l'Allemagne. Point sur ces "égoïsmes".

La Slovaquie : ne pas payer pour plus riches qu'eux. Le blocage du vote sur l'élargissement du FESF au Parlement slovaque a d'abord répondu à un calcul purement politique. Il a permis à l'opposition de précipiter la chute du gouvernement de centre-droit.

Mais il a aussi fait écho à un ressentiment, "compréhensible" de la population, reconnaît Sylvain Broyer, économiste chez Natixis. La Slovaquie, entrée dans la zone euro en 2009, reste un pays pauvre. Plus pauvre que la Grèce et les autres nations que le pays est censé secourir. La retraite des fonctionnaires slovaques s'élève en moyenne à 600 euros par mois, contre 850 euros en Grèce. Même si le coût de la vie est moins cher en Slovaquie, le pays a le sentiment de payer pour assurer les retraites des fonctionnaires grecs.

Le soutien au FESF pourrait coûter au pays jusqu'à 7,7 milliards d'euros en garanties, soit 13 % du produit intérieur brut (PIB), souligne M. Broyer, qui rappelle que le pays bénéficie des fonds structurels européens, soit 1,6 milliard d'euros par an.

Les Pays-Bas : l'éthique protestante et l'esprit du capitalisme. Membre du club fermé des pays notés AAA par les agences de crédit, la Hollande est un exemple de rigueur et de discipline budgétaire. Selon les calculs de Natixis, compte tenu des recettes courantes, le pays ne mettrait qu'1,7 an à rembourser sa dette contre 2,02 ans pour la France et 2,3 pour le Royaume-Uni. Selon le Fonds monétaire international (FMI), son déficit budgétaire représentera 3,8 % du PIB en 2011 et 2,8 % en 2012. En dessous de la ligne jaune du traité de Maastricht (3 %).

"Cette discipline exemplaire est le résultat d'une fiscalité sévère qui trouve son fondement dans une forme d'éthique protestante", estime Shahin Vallée, économiste au centre Bruegel. Au Pays-Bas, on comprend donc mal de devoir aider encore et encore un pays comme la Grèce, "qui n'a pas présenté un budget à l'équilibre depuis cinquante ans", pointe Charles Wyplosz, professeur d'économie internationale au Graduate Institute de Genève.

La Finlande : le refus de l'aléa moral. Le pays peut mettre en avant des finances saines malgré la crise. Selon le FMI, la Finlande sera en excédent budgétaire en 2012. Le pays rappelle aussi s'être sorti seul d'une crise bancaire dans les années 1990. Pourquoi aujourd'hui soutenir ceux qui, comme la Grèce, n'ont pas respecté les règles du jeu ?

La Finlande incarne aussi le réflexe de repli sur soi. Après sa percée aux dernières élections législatives (19 % des voix), le parti nationaliste les Vrais Finlandais a pu exiger et obtenir des garanties contre les prêts à la Grèce. De tous les "égoïstes", le pays est ainsi, selon M. Vallée, "le seul à présenter un véritable euroscepticisme".

L'Allemagne : échaudée par la réunification. Angela Merkel affiche depuis quelques semaines une grande fermeté pour sauver la Grèce et éviter la contagion de la crise. Mais jeudi, la chancelière s'est encore fait rattraper par l'opinion publique.

Huit instituts d'économistes ont lancé un appel aux gouvernements pour arrêter d'investir leur énergie dans le sauvetage de la Grèce. "Les sommes engagées peuvent augmenter à l'infini", alertent-ils.

Ces experts savent de quoi ils parlent. Les transferts financiers entre l'ex-RFA et l'ex-RDA après la réunification ont coûté 1 300 milliards d'euros en vingt ans à l'Allemagne de l'Ouest. Et les Allemands considèrent avoir souffert pour redresser leurs finances publiques. Avec succès : le déficit budgétaire devrait atteindre 0,9 % du PIB cette année.

Si l'Allemagne, l'un des principaux contributeurs de l'euro, ne peut être considérée au sens strict du terme comme "égoïste", elle appartient au clan des durs, adeptes de la discipline budgétaire, et veut s'assurer que toute aide sera assortie d'engagements fermes.

Barack Miterrand Obama - Todd Buchholz

Barack Mitterrand Obama — Can Obama Pirouette?

September 6th, 2011

Todd Buchholz, September 6. 2011

The President has until Spring 2012.  If by May, it’s not “Morning in America,” it’ll be good night for Barack Obama.  The job market is miserable and the economy is limping along while economists feel for a faint pulse.  Obama has painted himself into a “Keynesian Corner.”  He sincerely believes that only government spending can help – but the cupboard is bare.  The deficit-to-GDP ratio looks stuck in a reckless 8-10% crater.  (Funny to recall that in 1983 Keynesians slammed Ronald Reagan as irresponsible when the deficit reached merely 6%, after an even higher, 10.8% jobless rate.)

Can Obama perform a swift 180-degree U-turn?  It’s been done before.  He should look to France and re-crown himself Barack Mitterrand Obama.  Like Obama, Francois Mitterrand was elected with strong left backing.  In 1981 he plunged into Keynesian prescriptions:  fat pay raises for government workers, a wealth tax on the rich, more vacation time for workers, and a boost in the minimum wage.  Union members got bigger voices at the bargaining tables.  Mitterrand even attracted four communists to his cabinet.  Happy Days were here again.  The Socialist Mitterrand would leave the bumbling Reagan in the dust.  Or so they thought.

Two years later, the French economy was a flattened soufflé.  Inflation hit double digits, while Mitterrand’s policies boosted the jobless rate above 10%.  Smart French businessmen hopped aboard the Concorde and fled the crumbling regime.  The French franc was evaporating.

Mitterrand was no fool.  By 1983, he began to push aside his socialist ideas for a French version of Reaganomics.  Suddenly, budgets were frozen, government payrolls shrunk, monetary printing presses shut down, and a Socialist government made it easier for firms to fire feckless workers.  Mitterrand called this “La Rigueur.”  Political observers called it the “Great Turn.”  The people called it a success, as the inflation rate plummeted and jobs came back to France.

Can Barack Obama follow the French pirouette executed so gracefully by Mitterrand?  I doubt it.  Though Mitterrand was an avowed and proud Socialist, he was also a nimble rascal.  Some insiders referred to him as the “Florentine,” as if he was tutored by Machiavelli himself.  Hell, he successfully covered up his work for the Vichy collaborators during World War II!

Obama strikes me as a true believer.  What he believes may be wrong, but it’ll take a Great Depression to change his mind.  Unfortunately, a Great Recession with a 9.1% unemployment rate just doesn’t seem serious enough to do the trick.

Alemanha-Grecia: um caso de amor e odio - Todd Buchholz

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Germany’s Mediterranean Envy

By TODD G. BUCHHOLZ

The Bew York Times, September 25, 2011

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Henning Wagenbreth

Related

• News Analysis: Europe Stews on Greece, and Markets Sweat Out the Wait (September 26, 2011)

• Times Topics: European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2009- ) | Germany |Greece

Related in Opinion

• Room For Debate: Why Aren’t Germans Protesting?

GREECE is broke and broken. Its budget deficit bulges near 10 percent of gross domestic product, while the Germans choke theirs down to just 1.5 percent.

Ask a typical German why and he’ll say: “They drink and dance during the day. We wait for sunset.” That’s the image. The hard-working, disciplined, punch-the-clock-on-time German stays solvent and sober. In contrast, the Mediterranean neighbor lolls around in fertile fields of lemons and olives.

And yet most Germans go along, if grudgingly, with bailouts. Recent elections show the Social Democrats and Greens picking up votes, even though they are even more euro-friendly than Angela Merkel’s government. Why are Germans willing to reach deep into their pockets for many billions of euros to bail out Zorba the Greek and his lackadaisical neighbors?

The standard answer: to safeguard the German economy. But this is flabby reasoning. Despite the Great Recession, the German economy has been bouncing along at a decent pace with a 7 percent unemployment rate, and it even racks up a trade surplus with China. Sure, adopting the euro in 1999 sliced border-crossing costs for German companies, but European monetary union was never chiefly about money. If money was the biggest concern, Germany would never have surrendered the gilded Deutsche mark, controlled by the austere, trusted Bundesbank, for a euro that might someday be twisted by a rabble of politicians baying for votes from Slovenians.

No, Germany’s real motivation to help Greece is not cash; it’s culture. Germans struggle with a national envy. For over 200 years, they have been searching for a missing part of their soul: passion. They find it in the south and covet the loosey-goosey, sun-filled days of their free-wheeling Mediterranean neighbors.

In the early 1800s, Goethe reported that his travels to Italy charged him up with new creative energy. Later, Heinrich Heine made the pilgrimage, writing to his uncle: “Here, nature is beautiful and man lovable. In the high mountain air that you breathe in here, you forget instantly your troubles and the soul expands.”

Nietzsche claimed that the staid German psyche was stunted and needed more than a beer stein of passion. He was fascinated by ancient Greece and famously juxtaposed sober Apollo with that reckless, wine-drinking southerner, Dionysus. A dose of Dionysus might not be so bad, he figured.

Today, Germany still looks too Apollonian. Companies like BMW and Siemens conquer industrial markets by manufacturing flawless, perfectly timed motors. But when do Germans experience the fun of Dionysus? Only when vacationing in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

Even then, they struggle to find the right balance. In Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice,” the humorless, authoritarian protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach loses his regal bearing and becomes infatuated while in Italy, letting go of his strait-laced ways. Aschenbach lurches from overly repressed to overly sensualized, dyeing his hair, rouging his cheeks and stuffing his mouth with overripe strawberries.

And then there’s Sigmund Freud, an Austrian whose Germanic surname translates as “joy.” If only. Freud, too, thought that Italy and the south offered a tantalizing “softness and beauty” that could save the Teutonic psyche. Instead of Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus, Freud poses superego and id. The id hosts a wild imagination and ecstasy. The superego is that German librarian-frau with her hair tied up in the bun telling you to “shush!”

On the map of Germany you can find quite a few towns with my family name of Buchholz. My wife once scolded me for acting too uptight, saying “You take all the fun out of everything.” Wow, I felt both powerful and bad. I could take all of the fun out ofeverything. Forget Apollo — even Zeus didn’t have that much power! But a starchier-than-thou power sickens the soul.

So today Germany has the power and the discipline and yet still feels bad for its neighbors. Germans are simply unwilling to sever the emotional bond they feel with their unhurried but passionate brothers and sisters to the south.

During Oktoberfest, Germans in biergartens will lift a glass and sway arm in arm to a popular, schmaltzy German tune called “Griechischer Wein” (“Greek Wine”). Haunting and rousing, the lyrics compare Greek wine to the “earth’s blood.” The German narrator spies a group of Greek men drinking together and longs to be with them. He doesn’t even have to ask, for the dark-eyed men stand up and invite him to join them.

Despite a history of proclaiming their superiority, deep down Germans are not sure they’ve got it right, after all.

Todd G. Buchholz is the author of “Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race.”