>joining South Korea and horning in on East Asia's
>keiretsu/chaebol developmental state while the developmental getting is
>good, of course.
I don't wish the fate of East Germans on North Koreans, however. Besides, since South Korea is poorer than West Germany, one must expect the worse for North Koreans if North and South Koreas get "unified" on capitalist terms. If the real (not official) unemployment rate is 30% in East Germany, I think it is safe to predict a much higher unemployment rate for the post-socialist North Korea.
***** Financial Times (London) November 4, 1999, Thursday London Edition 1 SECTION: COMMENT & ANALYSIS; Pg. 23 HEADLINE: COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Yearning for the bad old days of Communism: East Germans are in the grip of nostalgia, west Germans are fed up with subsidising them. What has happened to unification?
BYLINE: By QUENTIN PEEL
They call it Ostalgie - the wave of nostalgia sweeping former East Germany, a hankering after the bad old days of Communist rule in the German Democratic Republic.
It is not just the old folk who suffer from it, or those who had good jobs under the Communist system. There is an angry younger generation growing up in Germany's poor east, convinced that things used to be better before unification.
According to an opinion poll in Der Spiegel, the Hamburg-based magazine, easterners think their old regime was better on seven out of nine counts on which they were questioned. Healthcare, education, industrial training, law and order, gender equality and social security were all superior, they believe. Even housing provision was seen as more generous.
It is a sorry commentary on the state of German unification, 10 years after the Berlin Wall came down, and nine years after formal unification.
There is a backlash, too, in the wealthy west, where growing numbers are fed up with paying extra taxes to subsidise bankrupt eastern industries, create jobs for the unemployed and finance massive transfers of cash to rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure.
The fact is that German unification is in trouble on every front: economic, political, social and psychological. In spite of the channelling of public funds from west to east, the gap between Ossis and Wessis is as wide as ever.
The economic division is obvious, although still understated. Official unemployment in the east is around one in five, double the rate in the west. But if you discount jobs in job-creation schemes, real unemployment is more like 30 per cent. That is not counting all the women who have simply withdrawn from the labour market, as well as around 1m workers who commute to western Germany each week.
The political divide is glaring, too. When Berlin went to the polls last month, 40 per cent of voters in the east of the city voted for the PDS - the reformed Communist party - against 4.5 per cent in the west.
Some easterners, mostly young men, are voting in growing numbers for parties of the far right, such as the Deutsche Volksunion, which won 13 per cent of the vote last year in the state of Saxony Anhalt.
It is a situation that ought to be causing soul-searching in the hearts of the traditional western political parties, which have seen their support slump as many voters simply stay away from the polls. And yet among Wessis there is little sign of fresh thinking, let alone understanding, on the nature of the eastern problem....
It has been more a process of colonisation than unification, more like a hostile takeover than a merger of equals. There has been huge investment, along with massive job losses, and decimation of the eastern leadership in every sector.
"The Wessis are arrogant. They always know best. They behave like the British in India," according to one eastern liberal a couple of years after unification.
Andre Brie, chief election strategist for the PDS, and a member of the European parliament, would refine that description. "At least in India the British preserved the local leadership," he says. "They did not do that here."
Part of that process was inevitable. Unification meant adoption of West German law in totality. Westerners had to be employed to operate it, says Steffen Reiche, the culture minister in Brandenburg, outside Berlin, and one of the leading easterners in the Social Democratic party.
But little has been done since then to redress the balance. Westerners occupy 75 per cent of the top civil service jobs in the east, 90 per cent of professorships in universities and 99 per cent of top jobs in industry and the integrated armed forces, according to Mr Brie....
It is not just the arrogance of the Wessis that intelligent Ossis such as Mr Brie and Mr Reiche resent. It is their ignorance. For whereas all but 15 per cent of easterners have now visited the west, 40 per cent of westerners have yet to set foot in the former GDR....
Westerners thought their system would be welcomed with open arms, and instantly adopted as the ideal. They did not hide their contempt for the GDR way of life, and they certainly did not try to understand the very different world their compatriots had lived in.... *****
Yoshie