For decades, Germany has skimped on its civil service and cut budgets wherever possible. Now Berlin is paying the price. But the causes go much deeper than that, touching on the fundamental relationship between the German state and those who have recently arrived. In Germany, a 66-year-old democracy, the police have positioned themselves as “friends and helpers,” but it is a promise that young men from North Africa don’t immediately understand.
.. The consequence is that, in some places, law and order is restricted, or doesn’t exist at all. Like in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Or in troubled city quarters in Frankfurt and Berlin during the entire year.
.. A good place to start, particularly given the dark events in Cologne, is with the police. How is it possible that the square in front of the train station could morph into a zone of lawlessness? Why was the state not present on that New Year’s Eve night? Was there a lack of police? Where they overwhelmed by the mob?
.. Krieten argues that the justice system must do the opposite. It needs to make its presence felt and engage with young men who often have a problem with self-determined women and, as a last resort, know only the kind of violence they may have learned from their own families. “Instead of perpetuating the illusion that you can just deport them all,” Krieten says, “the truth is that we must solve the problems here.”
‘The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse’—An Interview
As she correctly predicted, the EU is on the verge of collapse. The Greek crisis taught the European authorities the art of muddling through one crisis after another. This practice is popularly known as kicking the can down the road, although it would be more accurate to describe it as kicking a ball uphill so that it keeps rolling back down. The EU now is confronted with not one but five or six crises at the same time.
Schmitz: To be specific, are you referring to Greece, Russia, Ukraine, the coming British referendum, and the migration crisis?.. Europe could have used the kind of leadership she is showing now much earlier. It is unfortunate that when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, she was not willing to allow the rescue of the European banking system to be guaranteed on a Europe-wide basis because she felt that the prevailing German public opinion would be opposed to it. If she had tried to change public opinion instead of following it, the tragedy of the European Union could have been avoided.
.. You have been so involved in promoting the principles of open society and supporting democratic change in Eastern Europe. Why is there so much opposition and resentment toward refugees there?
Soros: Because the principles of an open society don’t have strong roots in that part of the world. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is promoting the principles of Hungarian and Christian identity. Combining national identity with religion is a powerful mix. And Orbán is not alone. The leader of the newly elected ruling party in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, is taking a similar approach. He is not as intelligent as Orbán, but he is a canny politician and he chose migration as the central issue of his campaign. Poland is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogeneous countries in Europe. A Muslim immigrant in Catholic Poland is the embodiment of the Other. Kaczyński was successful in painting him as the devil.
.. I might not have survived if my father hadn’t secured false identification papers for his family (and many others). He taught me that it’s much better to face harsh reality than to close your eyes to it. Once you are aware of the dangers, your chances of survival are much better if you take some risks than if you meekly follow the crowd. That is why I trained myself to look at the dark side.
.. As long as I can find a winning strategy, however tenuous, I don’t give up. In danger lies opportunity. It’s always darkest before dawn.
.. The campaign for the Brexit has deliberately misled the public. Currently, Britain has the best of all possible deals with Europe. It has access to the common market where nearly half of UK exports go while it is not weighed down by the burden of having joined the eurozone.
.. President Xi Jinping can carry on with his current policies for another three years or so, but during that time, China will exert a negative influence on the rest of the world by reinforcing the deflationary tendencies that are already prevalent.
.. Putin is a supreme tactician who entered the Syrian conflict because he saw an opportunity to improve Russia’s standing in the world. He was ready to keep pushing until he encountered serious resistance. President Obama should have challenged him earlier. If Obama had declared a no-fly zone over Syria when Russia started to supply military equipment on a large scale, Russia would have been obliged to respect it.
Germany on the Brink
But it could also double or treble this migration’s demographic impact, pushing Germany toward a possible future in which half the under-40 population would consist of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants and their children.
Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery?
I saw the collective, institutional side of this process in the ongoing scrutiny of public statues and street names, the markers at the sites of atrocities, and the brass-plated stones embedded in the sidewalk outside my apartment building that listed all the Holocaust victims who’d once lived there. I saw the individual side of it in the lives of my German friends who’d spent a gap year volunteering at hospitals in Israel, who studied Yiddish in a spirit of preserving the endangered language of a culture their great-grandparents sought to annihilate, or whose relatives read their Stasi files and confronted the neighbors who’d informed on them to the East German police.
.. The longer I lived in Germany, the more steeped I became in this attitude toward the past, and the stranger the scarcity of visible markers of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans seemed on my visits back to the U.S. I understood that the two countries’ histories have different timeframes, different geographies, different varieties of wrongdoing, but some of the broader lessons of Aufarbeitung — that individuals and societies can improve themselves morally by struggling against the human urge to look away from the sins of the past, or that atonement is a process that instills a sense of responsibility for the past rather than an action that starts from that sense — felt strikingly absent in America.