> The German colleague who'd suggested I attended this thing offered the
>following gloss: Yes, he said, xenophobia is widespread and deep-rooted
>in Germany--much more so than anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. One
>consequence of German unions' strength and central place in the economy
>is that they have no interest in alliances with "fringe elements." And
>most German unionists are still bedazzled by the American "jobs machine."
Hardly. Deutschland ain't any more racist or xenophobic than the USA. They have skinhead thugs, we have the KKK and survivalists, etc. Germans do, however, have this tendency to constantly insist that they're much worse than anyone else -- it's why they're so pro-European, which is a good thing, but you have to take the Weltschmerz with a grain of salt.
The German unions are like any other large institution: there are conservatives and radicals. The DGB is the umbrella organization for the entire German union movement, kind of like the AFL-CIO, so it's pretty conservative; IG Metall is far livelier, for example. German unions aren't drawn to the Greens or PDS mostly because the SPD is still powerful, and the welfare state is deeply entrenched in the EU; finally, not even the conservatives have anything good to say about US poverty rates, our lack of a welfare state, or our vicious polarization. They talk about the jobs machine, but they really mean our culture of high-tech innovation and world-class universities.
> What I'd like to know is, what does it mean when the program of the
>strongest European union movement for dealing with European integration
>is to clone Alan Greenspan?
It's because Greenspan kept US rates so low in the early Nineties, back when the EC was strangulating itself with hideous Euromonetarism in order to qualify for the Maastrict accords, is all. What the DGB and other unions want is low interest rates, and now they pretty much have them -- 3% short-rates, which given 0.8% inflation and 2.7% growth, are stimulative indeed. They should be kicking up a fuss for more EU spending, of course, but this is something only the more radical unions, like IG Metall, are seriously studying right now.
Finally, "Eurohegemony" is no joke. We do owe these people $1 trillion, and are running $90 billion annual trade deficits with them, and their banks are the biggest on the planet. Latin America, SE Asia, and Africa all owe most of their debt to the EU nowadays, not the USA.
-- Dennis