Search

Begin New Search Political Geography Germany

821. Country Economic Forecasts: Germany

Publication Date:
12-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxford Economics
Abstract:
Germany appears to be slipping deeper into recession. The latest industrial figures are alarming: production fell 2.1% in October and orders were down 17.3%. If output remained at current levels to year-end, then Q4 would be down 3.2% on Q3, but the situation is deteriorating. The manufacturing PMI is below 40 and the expectations component of the Ifo is at its lowest level since the first oil crisis in the early 1970s. Key to the rapid decline has been an abrupt halt to investment, both in Germany and globally. Investment in machinery and equipment had stalled in Q3 and domestic orders of capital goods then dropped 6% in both October and November. Business investment will fall by over 4% in 2009. But exports have also seen a rapid decline, having fallen in both Q2 and Q3, while export expectations are near all-time lows. Export volumes are expected to drop next year, despite the depreciation of the euro. We have slashed our growth forecasts, with GDP now likely to fall by at least 1% in Q4. And we now do not expect the economy to emerge from recession until 2009H2 and for the economy to shrink by over 2% in 2009 overall – the biggest drop in over 60 years. Rapidly declining oil prices and an extended recession mean inflation could fall close to zero by next summer. Inflation has already slowed to 1.4% in November from a peak of 3.1% in July.
Topic:
Economics and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
Europe and Germany

822. Flexible Markets, Stable Societies?

Author:
Wolfgang Streeck
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The dissolution of the standard employment relationship since the 1970s has been paralleled by a destabilization of family relations. The paper, which is a slightly revised version of a plenary lecture at the 2008 Meeting of the German Sociological Association, discusses possible connections between the rise of more flexible labor market and family structures, and explores how they might tie in with the declining birth rate. The co-evolution of labor markets and family relations can be explained by both the attractions and the constraints of free markets. The current shift toward a new social policy aimed at increasing fertility is presented as an example of how expanding market relations and the uncertainty to which they give rise in personal life cause demands for state intervention. The logic seems remarkably similar to that of the current banking crisis, where the liberation of financial markets from traditional constraints and the progressive commodification of money have ultimately issued in irresistible pressures on the state to step in and restore the social commons of stable expectations and mutual confidence. In both cases, and perhaps generally, capitalism seems to imply a need for a public power capable of creating substitutes for social relations invaded by market relations and as a consequence losing their capacity to perform some of their previous functions.
Topic:
Government, Markets, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Germany

823. A New Vision for Afghanistan

Publication Date:
12-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, Princeton University
Abstract:
The Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (LISD) at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs convened a review conference under the theme, “A New Vision for Afghanistan: By Afghans, with Afghans, for Afghans and Afghanistan,” on September 4-7, 2008 on the Petersberg/Bonn, Germany. This was the tenth LISD-sponsored colloquium on Afghanistan since 2001. The meeting was funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Government of the Principality of Liechtenstein, and the Stiftung fuer Selbstbestimmung und Internationale Beziehungen, in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Terrorism, War, and International Security
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, New York, Central Asia, Asia, and Germany

824. "Transnations" Among "Transnations"? The Debate on Transnational History in the United States and Germany

Author:
Kiran Klaus Patel
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
Comparing the rise of transnational history in the United States and Germany is difficult, mainly because of the many connections between these historiographies. Still, the article argues that the paths into a transnational historiography were quite different on both sides of the Atlantic. Apart from similarities and connections, the text therefore highlights the intellectual as well as institutional differences of the debates in the U.S.A. and Germany.
Topic:
International Relations and Political Theory
Political Geography:
United States, America, Europe, and Germany

825. Can the West Save Africa?

Author:
William Easterly
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
The last few years have seen unprecedented attention to an attempt by Western governments to rapidly develop Africa. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005 for "a big, big push forward" in Africa to end poverty, financed by an increase in foreign aid. Tony Blair commissioned a Report on Africa, which released its findings in March 2005, likewise calling for a "big push." Gordon Brown and Tony Blair put the cause of ending poverty in Africa at the top of the agenda of the G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland in July 2005. In the 2005 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, the G-8 agreed to double foreign aid to Africa, from $25 billion a year to $50 billion to finance the big push, as well as to forgive the African aid loans contracted during previous attempts at a "big push." Two years later, Germany again made Africa an important item on the agenda of the G-8 summit it hosted in Heiligendamm in June 2007. There, the G-8 again reiterated the promises made in 2005. Japan pledged to double its own aid to Africa in May 2008 over the next five years. Most recently, the G8 Summit in Japan in July 2008 agreed: "We are firmly committed to working to fulfill our commitments on Official Development Assistance made at Gleneagles, and reaffirmed at Heiligendamm, including increasing...ODA to Africa by US$ 25 billion a year by 2010."
Topic:
Development and Emerging Markets
Political Geography:
Africa, Japan, United Kingdom, and Germany

826. The "Going" of the Third Reich: Recivilizing Germans through Political Education

Author:
Dieter K. Buse
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Historians and political sciences have begun to discuss how and when postwar Germany overcame its authoritarian past and reestablished democracy and a tolerant civil society. This article argues that the national and regional Offices for Political Education have contributed significantly to the recivilizing process. The article provides the first preliminary academic attempt to outline the offices' historical background, their changing institutional structure, and their place in the civic education context since the mid 1950s. A series of case studies examine the historical literature disseminated by specific offices to illustrate the process of overcoming a problematic past and constructing new identities. In turn, the historical role models promoted by the offices, the manner in which federalism was presented, the timing of and fashion in which the Holocaust became a significant theme and the way in which regional identities were understood and fostered, are examined. These cases illustrate how historical information was employed, at first in fairly simple and propagandistic fashion, but always to inculcate democratic and civil norms. The question of the impact of the offices' work is left open, since research on reception has yet to be undertaken, but some evidence about their important contributions to reshaping German values is provided.
Topic:
Democratization, Education, and Government
Political Geography:
Germany

827. "Subaltern Nationalism" and the West Berlin Anti-Authoritarians

Author:
Jennifer Ruth Hosek
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
The West Berlin anti-authoritarians around Rudi Dutschke employed a notion of subaltern nationalism inspired by independence struggles in the global South and particularly by post 1959 Cuba to legitimate their loosely understood plans to recreate West Berlin as a revolutionary island. Responding to Che Guevara's call for many Vietnams, they imagined this Northern metropolis as a Focus spreading socialism of the third way throughout Europe, a conception that united their local and global aims. In focusing on their interpretation of societal changes and structures in Cuba, the anti-authoritarians deemphasized these plans' potential for violence. As a study of West German leftists in transnational context, this article suggests the limitations of confining analyses of their projects within national or Northern paradigms. As a study of the influence of the global South on the North in a non-(post)colonial situation, it suggests that such influence is greater than has heretofore been understood.
Topic:
Nationalism and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, Cuba, Island, and Berlin

828. Access to Secret Police Files, Justice, and Vetting in East Germany since 1989

Author:
Gary Bruce
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
In order to situate the current debate on whether the Federal Commission for the Files of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (the Stasi Archive) should cease to be an autonomous institution in the larger context, this article traces the history of the Stasi Archive and of the Stasi Files Law since 1989. Key to understanding the Stasi Archive and access to its files is the 1989 revolution which saw demonstrators demand access to information gathered by the secret police. Although the research quasimonopoly that the Stasi Archive enjoys would be ended by integration into the federal archives, file access for Stasi victims—the raison d'être of the archive—would be jeopardized. Calls for the dismantling of the Stasi archive are, therefore, premature. Some criticism can be directed at the vetting and trial process in East Germany since 1989, but it is important to remember that the Stasi Archive acted only in a support capacity for those activities.
Topic:
Security, Communism, Corruption, and Law
Political Geography:
Germany

829. Migration and Cultural Interaction across the Centuries: German History in a European Perspective

Author:
Dirk Hoerder
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Once upon a time, German studies seemed to be an easy field to define. Like fairytales, the resulting stories were addressed to a faithful audience—but here, an audience of adults, true believers in the nation and nation state. Today, by contrast, we understand that defining area studies is, in fact, a highly complex task involving overlapping regions and social spaces, and analyses of borderlands, interpenetrations, and métissage, as well as of processual structures and structured processes. Even geographies have become “processual.” The origins of area studies are often traced to the U.S., the hegemon in the Atlantic world's academe, and the emergence of American studies in the 1930s. Nevertheless, something like area studies also emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century, juxtaposing 1) a country and its colonies; and 2) a country and its neighbors. The former were inferior societies, the latter competitors in world markets and, repeatedly, enemies in war. Area studies—after a preceding period of knowledge acquisition as reflected in early mapmaking— became colonial studies, competitor state studies, enemy state studies—in each case transnational, transterritorial, and transcultural. Unable to deal with the concept of “trans,” i.e., with fuzzy borders and shifting categories and geographies, scholars in each bordered country set their own society, their Self, as the “yardstick.” The Other, the delimited opposite, was meant as a background foil before which their respective own nation was to appear as the most advanced and to which—knowledge and interest are inextricably linked—the profits from worldwide trade and the spoils from colonial acquisitions were naturally due (Folien- or Spiegeltheorie). Since then, motivations for country studies have become more complex but they basically are framed still by bordered territories, “national culture,” national consciousness or identity, nation-state policies, and international relations. Once the ideology of “nation” is abandoned, the blindfold removed so to say, it appears that German-language people may be studied in America or Russia—or Africans, Poles, and Turks in the German-language societies (plural!).
Topic:
Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, America, Europe, Turkey, and Germany

830. New Places, New Identities: The (Ever) Changing Concept of Heimat

Author:
Uta Larkey
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
This article analyzes contrasting notions of Heimat and Fremde, as explored cinematographically by three contemporary German filmmakers. The spatial aspect of Heimat, traditionally connected to a particular region or even neighborhood denotes the sense of belonging, whereas the temporal aspect—often associated with childhood and youth—carries the sense of longing. In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept has shifted to include identity, reflection and self-reflection, the loss of Heimat, and even multiple Heimaten. The article argues further that the notions of Heimat and Fremde are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent. Peter Lilienthal's film Ein Fremder concludes that in parts of German society the binary opposites of Heimat and Fremde are still intact. On the other hand, Peter Patzak in Adeus und Goodbye shows how Heimat and Fremde are mutually dependent and include a search for identity and individuality. In Michael Gutmann's travelogue-documentary, Familienreise, the protagonists experience aspects of Fremde and Heimatlosigkeit without ever finding Heimat.
Topic:
Migration
Political Geography:
Germany