Foreign Affairs: The Collapse of German Centrism

It seems like we are talking more about nationalism in Germany, Ireland, Spain, and Sweden these days which is a sign of how far the center has shifted in Europe as mass immigration has discredited liberalism. These countries used to lag behind the rest of Europe.

Foreign Affairs:

“In the late summer of 2015, when it seemed that the flow of refugees into Europe might never abate, German Chancellor Angela Merkel held a press conference. She’d just visited a refugee center near Dresden when she uttered what she surely thought was a throwaway line. “Wir schaffen das,” she said, or “We’ll manage this.” In its banality, the phrase seemed equally far removed from Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” and Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” Whereas politicians in the United States traffic in the aspirational language of marketing, political debates in Germany are couched in the language of trivial chores. You could say “Wir schaffen das” about the laundry, the grocery shopping, or taking out the trash. The phrase was typical of a politics that has long tried to bury ideology under layers of administrative detail.  …

That the AfD’s extremist positions can mobilize a large contingent of German voters should not come as a surprise. A longitudinal study begun by researchers at the University of Leipzig in 2002 has consistently found that more than one-third of Germans hold xenophobic views. The sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer conducted a ten-year-long empirical survey between 2002 and 2011 and came to similar conclusions. His final survey revealed that nearly half of all Germans believed that there were “too many foreigners” in the country, while one-third agreed that there were “natural differences between blacks and whites.”  …”

Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt’s party which governed Germany for decades is has sunk to 11 percent in the polls. It is smaller than AfD now at 14 percent and the Greens at 22 percent.

Reuters:

“At a party conference on Friday, the SPD gave their new leaders, Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, a mandate to talk to Merkel’s conservatives about continuing in government and set out some relatively modest policy demands. …

A Forsa poll put the SPD on 11%, 3 points down from a week ago and hitting a low last seen in June after previous leader Andrea Nahles quit due following the party’s worst-ever result in elections to the European Parliament. …

The poll put Merkel’s conservatives up 1 point at 28% and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) also up 1 point at 14%.”

Where do you think Germany will be a decade from now? I don’t see liberalism bouncing back. It is getting weaker and weaker.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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27 Comments

  1. Tacitus on Germans “a people without either natural or acquired cunning, they disclose their hidden thoughts in the freedom of festivity.”

    • Which ‘ germans’, there many different tribes, of vastly different character. How extensive was tactics knowledge? The Romans were only familiar with the western tribes.

      Most importantly, the current ‘Germany’s are Gothic invaders of the 6th cent a.d. the ‘Germans’ of Roman times are extinct.

      • I think it is the Goths that are extinct. The Ostrogoths were defeated in Italy and vanished from history, the same with the Visigoths defeated in France and Spain that disappeared. Some Goths survived in the Crimean peninsula, that’s all.
        Many other Germanic tribes
        of ancient times were defeated and evaporated from historical records, Cimbri, Teutones, Usipetes, Tencteri, Sicambri, Tubantes, Bructeri, Chatti, Harudes, Vangiones, Nemetes, Quadi, Chauci, Hermunduri, Cotini, Bastarnae, Varistae, Marsi, Vandals, etc

        The current Germans maybe descend from Saxons, Marcomanni and Alamans.

  2. More Tacitus on Germans…”They love fighting, sleeping and feasting; they hate peace and serious work. Therefore they live in poverty. They have no cities and their villages primitive and badly organized.”

    Strabo “Live in dire poverty and tend to live like nomads, even if they are not quite nomads. The farther North they live, the poorer they are, it seems.”

    Velleius on Germania, “a nation born to lie ”

    I do like the Germans around us, but they are in excessively nice mode actually. That’s the programming in their heads these days.

    Grüße

      • Cristina Romana Alva H (Christy)

        No way
        l’m a literal peasant from the middle of nowhere in South America, I certainly spend more time among soybeans and animals than human beings.
        I’m a barbarian, I mock the ancient barbarians and ended up becoming one of them.

    • As above, those people are extinct. The current ppl in Germany are Gothic invaders from the far north.

      Sure they were poor, no agriculture because of facially compacted soil. They didn’t prosper until the invention of the iron plow.

      • Many if not most modern Germans aren’t the Teutons or Nordics of the past, they are generally shorter and darker “Alpines”. Beethoven and Hitler are examples of that.

    • Nemo,

      There are two German personas. One that they show to strangers in public, and the other of their true selves that they share with close friends and family.

      • November,,,,

        People say, Germans are clean outside and dirty inside.
        Sometimes I wonder what happens behind close doors with our German neighbors.
        They are very nice but a weird volk

  3. “I do like the Germans around us, but they are in excessively nice mode actually. ”

    Consider, they have experienced massacre after massacre.
    Wars of The many 300+ german states, 30 years war, ww1,ww2 and occupation for the past 75 years.

  4. Germany cannot move forward until ZOG’S mercenary army is withdrawn. Once that happens the natural flow of European history can resume.

    • Pretty much, spahn.

      Germany is like a man in a straightjacket, it can move, but not much.

      They lost 12 million of their best in ww2 , alone.
      With all the hate spread against them, I’m surprised they weren’t exterminated.

  5. “That the AfD’s extremist positions can mobilize a large contingent of German voters should not come as a surprise. A longitudinal study begun by researchers at the University of Leipzig in 2002 has consistently found that more than one-third of Germans hold xenophobic views. The sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer conducted a ten-year-long empirical survey between 2002 and 2011 and came to similar conclusions. His final survey revealed that nearly half of all Germans believed that there were “too many foreigners” in the country, while one-third agreed that there were “natural differences between blacks and whites.” …””

    What is extremist about the longing for a homogeneous country?

    • “What is extremist about the longing for a homogeneous country?”

      ABSOLUTELY NOTHING !

      It’s normal , natural and healthy.

      There is a group that has been putting toxic poisons into the minds and institutions of White nations for over 60 years.
      A group notorious for poisoning.

  6. “That the AfD’s extremist positions can mobilize a large contingent of German voters should not come as a surprise. A longitudinal study begun by researchers at the University of Leipzig in 2002 has consistently found that more than one-third of Germans hold xenophobic views. The sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer conducted a ten-year-long empirical survey between 2002 and 2011 and came to similar conclusions. His final survey revealed that nearly half of all Germans believed that there were “too many foreigners” in the country, while one-third agreed that there were “natural differences between blacks and whites.” …””

    What is extremist about the longing for a homogeneous country? You can bet Foreign Affairs will never stigmatize Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians in a similar way.

  7. I was in Braunschweig last weekend for the AfD’s convention, and, without belaboring the point, they did something there that gave themselves an advantage that they didn’t have when the weekend began.

      • Exactly. Southerners bitch and moan about Yankee occupation and Reconstruction, but men primarily from Dixie are doing the same thing to Germany at zog’s behest for nearly 80 years with no end in sight.

  8. Don’t be shocked if the AfD, SPD and Free Democrats form a ruling coalition after the next election. The Greens are Green on the outside, Red on the inside. The Catholic CDU/CSU is finished.

    The SPD has always had a law & order pro German faction.

  9. Liberalism is reaching its full extension like the universe when the energy to expand further ceases, and the contraction begins in earnest. Only liberalism will snap like a rubber band stretched too far and snaps suddenly. We live in interesting but dangerous times.

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