Children of the Scorn

Over at Atlantic Community, a sort of -reaching for the margins- of idea-land outreach think-tank funded by the German-Marshall Fund that is loosely directed to studying NATO, a thought has emerged that suggests that Germany is neither fully integrated with the West, and isn’t married to it.

The speculation in founded on the idea that young Germans agitate for ideas that would inherently push Germany away from NATO, the EU, and “the west” in general. It’s specious. Take it from a relative “old goat” who has long observed German society, (both former sides of it,). German students agitate about anything, but abandon it for the safety and comfort of an income and sleeping indoors. The exception comes with the seemingly endless array of ideologically oriented fellowships and other paid activism, but that really isn’t why I don’t see much in Hans Kundani’s argument.

1. It’s an especially myopic assumption when it’s partly founded on what is likely ones’ own view of oneself within the framework of the argument. If one is a student or former student who saw a lot of “red-green-eat only harvested tree bark” agitation, the unquestioning and pedantically predicable theme of student political activity in Germany, it’s easy to assign too much importance to it.

It ends for most of them once they develop even the slightest amount of meaningful life experience. Which is to say, the stuff they did on their own initiative and invention - not that of the hairy, middle-aged political organizers that scope out for the fresh meat on Campus every year. Once they get away from the aging neo-Marxists with the musty bouquet of serial monogamy with one single-issue after another, things really change for them. They get to live and think for themselves, not hear others try to convince them that they really are actually living and thinking for themselves.

2. To begin with, Germans, as a society, probably can’t imagine “going alone”, even if just as a matter of public image, not in the way the evil American “non-concentualists” (read: that they are “out of the fold” when they aren’t dominated by the left whom Europeans falsely assume are their kind of transnational progressives).

3. Alignment with power centers to the east, which is to say either Russia or Asia Minor is inconceivably risky/scary/unknowable to the German public, especially as the “near abroad” of Poland, Hungary, the Baltic States, and the like, are hitching their fate to western Europe, if not the United States directly.

4. Germans generally underestimate the degree to which they ARE Western civilization, if not an essential shorthand outline for “the west” and –Europe- itself. It’s hard to find any social or cultural interest uniquely associated with the culture of the Atlantic that isn’t also dominant in Germany, and at least partly German in origin. Moreover, when you look at the ways German work, play, save, invest, build, worship, conduct themselves in a community, and try to carve out their personal autonomy in, you’ll likely find that they are more likely to resemble Americans and Canadians than they are Russians, the people of the Near East, Asia Minor, or other western Europeans for that matter.

The idea that they’re creating their very own new path, veering off, or Age of Aquarius or whatnot isn’t supported by much of anything. When you look at how quickly migrating Germans adapt to American, Canadian, or Australian life compared to anywhere else, even part of the EU that are economically similar to Germany, it’s hard to say that a population that is more likely to import and adapt habits and ideas from the west of it, rather than initiate them, will ever take up anything else on a dime.

To take, for example, an improbable and culturally disconnected interest in, say Reggae, elementary anti-corporatism and anti-everything-socially-functional-ism, or the Kabuki theatre of marching with red flags as an indicator, is to not be looking too far beyond ones’ very immediate surroundings, or ones’ self-image.