Twenty-five years since the reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, large differences still exist between the two parts of the country. Incomes are much lower in the East and unemployment is higher, in spite of large transfers that have been directed to the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
The video mapping “Sounds and Lights of Unity” is projected on the Arcades of Cinquantenaire to celebrate the 25th anniversary of German reunification, in Brussels, Belgium, October 1, 2015. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir.
On a number of levels, the reunification should have been a straightforward process: East Germany, after all, was supposed to be absorbed and simply become a part of West Germany, acquiring in totality its legal and political system, as well as its currency. Yet, underneath the economic gap, differences in informal norms and policy preferences linger. In the federal elections in 2013, the post-communist political party Die Linke recorded its best results in the former East German states of Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Brandenburg. A well-known study by economists Alberto Alesina and Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln suggests that this may reflect a persistent gap in the attitudes of Germans in the East and the West towards a wide range of policy questions – most importantly in their attitudes towards the role of the state in the economy.
Eastern Germans are also more likely to support the far-right National Democratic Party. Many of the recent arson attacks against asylum seekers in Germany seem to be disproportionately concentrated in the former GDR, as are the protests against the country’s relatively lenient asylum policy.
Germany’s experience offers a lesson for Europe as a whole. After 25 years, in spite of a shared cultural heritage, political determination to make the common state work and costly transfers, a re-united Germany is still a work in progress. One should then expect many more creaks in the functioning of the European Union (EU), an immensely more ambitious project of economic and political integration currently encompassing 28 different nations, and a much greater degree of diversity on all fronts.
What is more, the EU is a genuinely evolutionary enterprise. Unlike reunited Germany, there has been no blueprint for how the organization ought to look – though many would agree with the very broad assessment of classical liberal economists Friedrich von Hayek and Lionel Robbins that “there must be neither alliance nor complete unification; neither Staatenbund [confederation] nor Einheitsstaat [unitary state] but Bundesstaat. [federal state].”
Policy mistakes, instances of over- (or under-) reach, and a lot of muddling through are to be expected. The real question, then, should be why the EU isn’t a much greater disaster than the reasonably orderly, though perhaps bureaucratized, rigid, and over-regulated entity that it is.
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