> Germany's trade unions were annihilated under Fascism and reconstructed
> by CIA and AFL tutelage post-war. The Cold War anti-Communist laws
> ensured that they were deeply conservative organisations.
The Westernization of the German Labor Movement. Cultural Transfer and Transnational Network Politics in the 1940s and 1950s by Julia Angster http://www.ghi-dc.org/conpotweb/westernpapers/angster.pdf is dealing extensively with this issue. How traditional socialism was replaced by Anglo-American liberalism and consensus capitalism in the German union movement after the war.
> The green
> movement in Germany has its origins in the counter-culture reaction
> against the post war settlement of which the unions were a part.
I strongly disagree. Mainly the German Greens grew out of the student movement of the 60ties. Most of its tactics and issues were imported from the US. Despite its sometimes anti-American rhetorics, in the late sixties 'Americanization' of the German political scene (that started in the unions right after the war) was continued by the student movement and later on by the Greens. Today the Greens are the strongest advocats of 'transatlantic partnership' in the German political spectrum. This is personified by the slavish admiration Joschka Fischer has for Madeleine Albright.
> Unfortunately, lacking any base in the working class it rapidly spun off
> in a reactionary direction, i.e. austerity and constraint.
>
An inheritance from our American masters as well.
Johannes