Today, Germany’s President, Ms. Merkel, took a fairly tough stand regarding Greece and the euro. In an address to the Parliament today, she said the “most important goal is to ensure the stability of the monetary union”. Another indicator that Germany really is leading Europe?

FRANKFURT — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, adopting a harsher tone toward Greece than the one expressed by some other European leaders, said Wednesday that Europe needed better rules to police its members and tacitly endorsed a proposal to eject wayward countries from the group of countries that use the euro.

Speaking before a session of Parliament in Berlin, Ms. Merkel referred to a proposal made last week by Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister. As Ms. Merkel described the proposal, “It would even be possible to exclude a country from the euro zone when over the long term it no longer fulfills the conditions.”

“Otherwise we can’t work together,” Ms. Merkel said, though she stopped short of explicitly endorsing the idea.

Ms. Merkel’s comments came two days after finance ministers for the 16 countries in the euro zone promised loans, if necessary, to help Greece overcome its massive debt problems.

The ministers have not yet agreed on how to structure the aid, and Ms. Merkel’s statement Wednesday seemed to suggest that European leaders are interpreting the aid promise in different ways.

A hurried aid package is “certainly not the right answer,” Ms. Merkel said. She placed the burden on Greece to implement an austerity program that is designed to slash a budget deficit equal to 12.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

“Merkel Suggests Evicting Errant countries from Euro” accessed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/world/europe/18merkel.html?ref=global-home

Having captured 11% of the total global arms market, Germany is the world’s 3rd largest arms dealer. Following right behind the US and Russia, is this yet another indicator that Germany is a global force to be reckoned with?

THE VALUE of Germany’s weapons exports has doubled in the last five years, according to a new study, making it the world’s third-largest arms dealer after the US and Russia.

Despite the worldwide economic slump, the arms industry is experiencing a boom, said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), with a 22 per cent increase in sales in 2005-2009 compared to the previous five-year period reviewed.

Huge demand for German-built submarines and tanks has seen Germany capture 11 per cent of the global arms market, according to the report.

Given Germany’s disastrous military past and its unpopular military present in Afghanistan, the findings have prompted a critical reaction in Berlin.

“These figures show that we need much stronger arms controls and tighter criteria for weapons exports,” said Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth. Most of Germany’s exports were to Nato countries such as Turkey, Greece and South Africa. “But when Germany sells arms to India and Iran,” she said, “one has to ask the government what this has to do with responsible foreign policy.”

Article from the Irish Times accessed here.

Now, as the European Union thrashes out a possible rescue plan for debt-stricken Greece, the importance of Germany has been thrown back into relief. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France can come out and pledge all the support to Greece he wants, but in the end, it’s Germany that matters.

This isn’t just because it has Europe’s most powerful economy and its largest population. It is because Germany has proved to be a paragon of its own virtues: thrift and hard work. That can’t help but annoy its more profligate neighbors.

It has been clear for weeks that if Greece is to get any help from Europe, it must persuade Germany first, which is why everyone keeps taking the German population’s temperature on the idea of a bailout. The response is overwhelmingly negative. One German magazine put the Greek statue Venus de Milo on its cover, with its middle finger up in the air, under a headline that said “Swindlers in the Euro Family.”

We must note an even greater difficulty. The notion that the big threat is fiscal indiscipline is false.Greece is a special case. Today’s fiscal excesses are not the result of fiscal indiscipline, but of private indiscipline. The latter, moreover, was an inherent element in the workings of the eurozone itself. It is how the eurozone economy balanced, at a reasonable level of overall demand, in the pre-crisis period.The point is best understood from the financial balances of eurozone members in 2006, before the crisis, and 2009, at its height see charts. The balance between income and expenditure in the private, government and foreign sectors must sum to zero. In 2006, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria ran huge private surpluses, relative to GDP, while the private sectors of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain ran huge deficits. Fiscal positions seemed under control everywhere: Ireland and Spain even ran substantial albeit illusory fiscal surpluses. Meanwhile, the private surpluses of Germany and the Netherlands were offset by huge capital outflows. In all, we see private disequilibria, but the illusion of fiscal stability, with countries more or less in line with treaty criteria for fiscal deficits.

via FT.com / Columnists / Martin Wolf – Germany’s eurozone crisis nightmare.

Germany has the most fiscal flexibility among European Union members to help Greece, but public opposition to any assistance has been vehement. The debate has crystallized broader German misgivings about the European project into a public outcry.

“It’s like a mosaic and the Greece crisis is the last stone,” said Wolfgang Nowak, a former senior adviser to Mrs. Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, and head of Deutsche Bank’s International Forum. “More and more there is the feeling that French farmers, Polish farmers, Spanish infrastructure, that Europe is not a community but something held together by a German pay check.”

Check out this article in NYT about Germany’s impact on the European economy:

As Glasbau Hahn and thousands of other small German exporters rebound from a dreadful 2009, they give the European Union a much-needed shot of growth. Unfortunately, some of their success comes at the expense of countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

The so-called peripheral countries have incurred crushing debts in part because they bought too many Mercedes cars and other imports from Germany and elsewhere, without producing enough of their own export goods. In fact, goods from Greece, Spain and Portugal were often no longer competitive because in the last decade those countries had let wages rise faster than productivity and had become too expensive.

Sorry for missing class last week. In light of the discussion you had, leave comments here discussing some of the different strategies that you talked about. Here is a list of ideas that we had for last year’s competition:

- Taking charge of the writing by either doing it on my own computer or working right by the writer to make the paper come out right.

- Be honest, don’t be suspicious of others, don’t act super-professional, treat people like friends, find something unique about people to use as a conversation-starter each day; Some will disagree, but in my experience nobody ever tried any tricks with me at all because they could tell I was genuinely friendly and had no secret motives or suspicions

- Go for unique angles, you don’t want to do what everyone else is doing

- Divide and conquer. However, you need to have a “friend” in your bloc to back you up. Watch out for schools (Alma) who double team as diff. countries in blocs. They cheat together and have the same prepared information. Be aware and resolved to lead.

- Creating a strong voting bloc, bridging different voting blocs /working groups, writing general and rather meaningless resolutions (if there’s no substance no one can disagree with)

- Divide and conquer. [My partner] and I worked great because she made friends with the enemies and I made friends with everyone else. Pretty soon we had no enemies. Be aware of what is happening in many of the working groups.

- Speak to all the people on the sides and back of room

- Take a little time, get to know people on a personal level; work with people, even if you find them annoying. Be wary of people who might try to backstab you—you can work with them, but keep close tabs.

- Having a main idea for each topic. Approach other delegates, state your idea to them and be willing to work together and negotiate. The key is to make an effort to reach consensus and good team work.

- Teaming up with 2 or 3 other countries to then build a voting bloc on multiple working papers.

- Speaking up, being assertive but understanding, using a non-threatening approach to confront those who stand in your way. Be active in every step and process. Agree with people—make them feel included and important but assert your ideas.

- Divide and conquer. I think this was very important as we were able to get much more accomplished. Even while [several of our delegates] worked on one massive resolution, division of labor was imperative.

-Take charge of computer, listen, call on others to speak so they trust you as a leader and want you to be the leader because you are not a tyrant but fair. Share recognition

-Just being nice and meeting after hours! Most of the positioning gets done out of session.

-Present but not loud, very clear in speeches and negotiating, taking a simpler approach

-Be a leader and be loved by all.

- Being a liason with the dais, only making suggestions that improve the resolution/discussion, not just to get a word in

- Being nice, convincing people you know what you’re talking about, twice people who know a lot, but who aren’t leaders to do work for you

- Getting as many people to sign on to the paper (give input and approval) and continually check up with them and introduce it to new people.

- Split up. Know what your partner is doing, but work primarily in different groups. Use your strengths and play off of them. Be congenial and not too intense.

- Split all 4 BYU delegates, and merge papers from BYU led groups as we go. Don’t be a full time author, but delegate so that everyone reports to you. Most key—get input from everyone all the way through.

- Appeal to many—allow for small changes, or additions in working paper by other countries/signatories.

- Get known early. Be vocal. Make allies early on and stick with them to build a coalition around you. Build relationships with director.

- Presenting ideas at first that were new and would solve the issue, seem knowledgeable about the topic. Divide and conquer with partner. Become the name of the resolution.

- Be inclusive to everyone, be friendly, willingness to cooperate, build coalitions but don’t trust everyone completely unless you have basis to do so.

- Be absolutely as involved as possible; trey to help everyone, and sincerely work to help them; Either organize the writing of everyone’s ideas, or write them myself; Be the person that always has an idea, for a resolution of how to fix something; knowledge—provide research.

- Being a friendly, approachable, knowledgeable delegate; desire to build consensus; treating self and partner as leaders—acting in confidence.

- Divide up the partnership and create as many resolutions as possible of course being the lead delegate each one and refer to your own and your partners papers as your country’s paper.

- Getting to know them/sharing levels of knowledge so they’d respect and understand that we knew what we were talking about.

- From day 1 pin pointing who the strong delegates are and quickly working on working papers with them.

- My partner and I utilized the old “divide and conquer”; Although we were strong on our position for each topic, decided to sit back and first to get a feel for direction committee was going, then began to subtly slip our ideas in until we had taken over and were leading within each group.

- Nice and super friendly and outgoing to everyone; picked out leaders of blocs, lead Africa ourselves, get those leaders together to do a massive paper with an entire global perspective. Resulted in US and Mexico with power over all the regional blocs and having wide support for resolution.

- Since Laura is good at writing and I like talking to people, we decided to work individually. She became the one who was in charge of writing in one group and I was involved in all the other paper’s contexts. After every session I told her about the other papers and she told me what she was writing at the time.

- Become friends first then people were more willing to do your bidding. Grab the laptop and be in charge of writing the paper. Make sure you always mention your country’s name in speeches, negotiations, with the dais, make yourself known etc.

- Make them think you’re great. Make yourself seem harmless.

Your NMUN Background Guide is an important key to understanding the direction you will take in session.

http://www.nmun.org/ny_committee_guides.html

The seeds of the current debacle were planted early. In 2003, four years after the euro’s birth, France touched off a firestorm by spending lavishly to tame a recession, declaring with a shrug that it had agreed only to “the principle of Europe.” Nations like Portugal, which made painful budget cuts to qualify for euro membership, asked why they should sacrifice if a heavyweight like France didn’t. Greece and Italy echoed similar views.

So what will likely happen?

When the dust settles, Europe will probably still be a union with separate national parliaments and fiscal policies, says Thomas Mayer, the chief economist of Deutsche Bank. But he says he foresees economic policies that will be more tightly coordinated between countries, with a mechanism to resolve crises like the one brought on by Greece today. If that happens, the number of stable countries adopting the euro would probably grow, cementing Europe’s economic might as the decades pass.

via Contemplating the Future of the European Union – NYTimes.com.

Now the combination of Russian opposition (which, among other things, reduces European enthusiasm for expansion), geopolitical instability (do we want to get sucked into a new Russia-Georgian war?) and the general decline of US interest in Europe make a strong new push for expansion unlikely — even if the Yanukovych government wanted to join NATO.

So here we are: stuck with a security fault line in Europe, while the Russians will continue to fish where there aren’t any signs.

via Lessons From Ukraine: Mostly About Russia – Walter Russell Mead’s Blog – The American Interest.