> How much of Germany's economic problems can be
> attributed to the integration with East Germany?
It's actually just the reverse: absorbing East Germany was the best thing to ever happen to Central Europe -- it forced the bourgies to spend somewhere around 1 trillion EUR in new infrastructure, unemployment insurance, etc. over the course of the 1990s, and helped offset the worst of the early 1990s downturn. It also created lots of demand in Eastern Europe, as folks migrated to construction projects around Berlin.
Here's a little-known secret: AMD's revival against behemoth Intel is, to a large extent, due to the workers of Saxony, who got those Athlons flying off the assembly lines in record time. In fact, Eastern Europe is the EU's trump card, the export-platform it needs to compete against East Asia.
-- Dennis