Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz in London last month
A state whose economy is tanking while its leader prefers to strut the world stage, eyes fixed on (and $billions poured into) Project Ukraine as living standards plummet for his own citizens? A centre-right party – the centre-right party – rudderless, led by a nonentity and facing eclipse by a surging far right? A public discourse in which structural economic decline, fuelled by rentiers and accelerated by spectacular own-goals to further Washington ends, is entirely absent?
I know what you’re thinking! I have to be speaking of Great Britain, right?
And yes, all those things apply here but I speak now of a country far more important. I speak of Europe’s former powerhouse and now flailing heavyweight, The Federal Republic of Germany.
I allude often to Germany as both engine and, if you’ll pardon my switch of metaphor, canary in the coalmine of the European economy. Of how its Washington-groomed leaders, like Europe’s in general, prioritise US agendas at the expense of the plebs whose interests they were elected to represent.
I’ve spoken too of the deeper ailments which Germany’s – and, again, Europe’s – Atlanticism exacerbate. I mean the West’s economic and political capture by creditor oligarchies which found it more profitable to offshore most manufacturing to the global south while allowing what remained to atrophy through underinvestment to the point where – to take a particularly potent indicator – Germany’s once mighty auto industry, its output eagerly purchased by Asia’s burgeoning middle classes, is now resoundingly outperformed by China’s better, cheaper and cleaner models.
What I seldom speak of are the internal politics of what is still Europe’s lead economy. I don’t have the quals, but know a chap who does. Over to Alexander Mercouris for a sprightly – a shade under twenty-one minutes – take on the shifting sands at the Deutscher Bundestag.
* * *
“I mean the West’s economic and political capture by creditor oligarchies which found it more profitable to offshore most manufacturing to the global south while allowing what remained to atrophy through underinvestment to the point where – to take a particularly potent indicator – Germany’s once mighty auto industry, its output eagerly purchased by Asia’s burgeoning middle classes, is now resoundingly outperformed by China’s better, cheaper and cleaner models.”
A point which is just as applicable to military production as it is to civilian production.
Driven home and expanded upon by Patrick Armstrong in this piece from March this year:
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2025/03/03/an-idiots-guide-to-war/
“You don’t fight wars by firing bundles of dollars at the enemy……
“……Thanks to offshoring manufacturing, the Western industrial base mostly has to be built from the ground up.”
So far, so obvious. However, Armstrong pursues this to its inevitable and logical conclusion:
“Is that even possible?
If you think about it, an apprentice machinist on an assembly line fifty years ago was being taught how to do it by a master machinist who had been taught by a previous master and so on back to the middle of the 1700s when industrial production was invented.
Each in the series advanced the technique, of course, but it’s still a chain you could trace back, machinist by machinist, for all that time. If that sequence of teacher-learner-teacher is broken, if the teacher has retired or died leaving no apprentices, how long will it take to get it back?
Putting a pallet of engraved paper in the floor of an empty building and hoping it will turn into a pallet of artillery rounds is magic thinking.”
And not only a pallet of artillery rounds but anything requiring the skills, knowledge, expertise and, most importantly, Experience to make and produce anything from simple screws to a country’s infrastructure.
The past forty years or more of offshoring and deindustrialisation across the West* has systematically removed all the necessary expertise and experience which Armstrong identifies in favour of recruiting people from the bus queue, giving them a day or two Computer Based Training (CBT) and a week or two with someone whose only being doing the job themselves for six months.
Because the only legitimately recognised skill is the management of making money. Thus, in the past week, we have the UK ‘Labour’ Government having to take (temporary) ownership of specialised steel producing facilities in Rotherham and Stocksbridge** until a buyer can be found (if ever) because in a financialised rentier economy more money can be made in the short term parasitic Ponzi Scheme that the UK and the rest of the Western Economies have become than actually making stuff of value.
So much for Thatcher’s private sector being more ‘efficient’.
* Including in the USA where examples such as investment in microprocessor factories having to be written off because the skills and expertise to clean the facility to production standards no longer exist in the USA and bringing in the skills from outside is next to impossible because that would mean importing Labour from the “Jungle” rather than the “Garden”)
** Specialist steels that are necessary just as much for, say, fighter jets, artillery pieces and naval vessels as they are for bridges, tower blocks, and railway tracks.
Nicely put.
Guten Tag Phil…….
At last, a topic that I do know a bit more about than your average Joe.
Here an interesting take for your faithful btl contributors, and yourself of course:
This Prof. is known for his theories on games etc. but he delves into the German Car Industry, specifically VW. Its worth the 13 minutes with English sub-titles.
Anyway, greetings to all .
Cheers
Billy ( for those who aren`t aware, I am a SAFFA who has been living in Germany for many years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YUawp_QCNA
Guten tag, Billy. I’ll add this to my watch list. I’ve seen one or two short but on-point videos on German car makers’ incapability – and by extension the West’s at large, US included – to meet the challenge of China.
Why else would we be sliding into WW3?
I had to look up SAFFA – you’re a South African expat, right?
Hi Phil,
indeed.
Cape Town born and bred.
Left in 1986 because essentially I didn`t believe that the Powers that be would ever release Mandela, and I certainly didn`t want to raise any children in that fucked up country.
That`s the short version of my odyssey via Switzerland, Italy, and then only to end up in Germany which was never my intention…..
Cheers
Billy