Ethics and the Old Continent

The EU also has to address economic and ethical issues. Every day brings fresh news of Chinese takeovers or partial acquisitions of companies. A totally undemocratic country where millions of people are being exploited to create its new wealth. Large European fashion and leather companies continue to exploit the miserably paid workers in Bangladesh so that their local customers can buy cheap goods. A hundred million dollars for Bernie Ecclestone, the head of Formula One.

Josef Ackermann pays 3.2 million to settle the Mannesmann case. Fortunately, the superrich have no need to fear a trial, because they have a strong community spirit. But there are two nice examples that deserve a mention: 86-year-old Warren Buffett has donated 95% of his enormous fortune to charity, saying his children will still inherit enough to lead privileged lives. The bulk of his fortune has gone to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates earned billions with Microsoft. In 1965 top earners earned 20 times more than the lowest paid, whereas today the ratio is 1:276!

In France, wealth tax is not allowed to exceed one year’s income. It’s easy to take out expensive life insurance or put money into bogus companies. Liliane Bettencourt, France’s richest woman, paid zero euros rather than 81 million euros in wealth tax. Bernard Arnault, chief executive of the luxury-goods company LVLH should have paid 5 million, but in the end the state received just 179,000. In Germany, the debate about inheritance tax goes on and on. How low it should be in terms of sustaining a business or how high in terms of an unearned inheritance is unclear, even under a new law.

Deutsche Bank is in a bad way, but Josef Ackermann received 64.5 million euros between 2006 and 2016. The two board members in 2009 who went on to become directors earned 50 and 29 million respectively (‘earned’?). Deutsche Bank has committed real crimes and the US has fined it many billions of dollars. But it is ‘too big to jail’, unlike shoplifters and small-scale drug dealers who face prison sentences.

Deutsche Bank has committed real crimes and the US has fined it many billions of dollars. But it is ‘too big to jail’, unlike shoplifters and small-scale drug dealers who face prison sentences.

And if the bank teeters on the brink, another principle kicks in, it is “too big to fail’. After the Federal Reserve and US government failed to save Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008, resulting in the global financial crisis, the state, i.e. the taxpayer, had to step in to plug the hole. ‘Privatise profits, socialise losses’ – we’ve heard this before.

What is a child? In Europe this is quite easy to define. But UNICEF estimates that around the world 191 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are being forced to work or kept as slaves, not including child soldiers. In 2002, the International Labour Organisation recorded 352 million workers between the ages of 5 and 17. The World Day Against Child Labour was launched on 12 June 2002. In Europe, we shouldn’t forget what it used to be like. The British government passed the Factory Act in 1833, which prohibited the employment of children under the age of 9 in the textile industry. In France, children as young as six were working in the mines until 1880. Children were able to crawl along coal seams that were too narrow for adults. Few people were bothered by the fact that they were often killed or crippled in the process.

After the liberation of Marseille in 1944, I was briefly employed by a port company. I saw at first-hand how hard the dockers worked to load and unload the ships. But then lifting gear came along, and today you don’t need much muscle power to load a container! But that’s not to say that no-one is left behind in our society. Big cities are full of homeless people. In Paris, public and private organisations are trying to help – particularly in winter.

At least in France, the underclass includes the inmates of overcrowded prisons, where they are forced to live in inhumane conditions. This is stated by the European Court of Human Rights on an almost annual basis. In September 2016 it was revealed that the largest prison in the Paris area in Fresnes, which holds 2,700 prisoners (and is operating at 191% capacity!) is infested with rats, which contaminate everything with their droppings. Of course it is a place where real criminals are punished, but misery creates new criminals. For everyone ‘right at the bottom’, the debate about whether the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer has little significance. Being at rock bottom might be reality, or it might be false self-identification.

Being at rock bottom might be reality, or it might be false self-identification.

In Germany, as in France, we’re constantly hearing: ‘I'm on benefits, but the refugees who come here get more than me.’ In fact, the figures prove the opposite, yet people still believe they are being disadvantaged. Are the rich getting richer and the poor poorer? There are many indications that the answer is ‘yes’, but not all the counterarguments are invalid. It is true that when the upper echelons earn more the average goes up and poverty increases measured against this average. But anyone who loses their job because a company decides to make mass redundancies – often merely to increase its share price – should be called poor.

Being young has a different meaning in Germany compared to France. You can stay in the Junge Union or the Jusos – the youth organisations of the CDU and SPD – until you are 35. Amazing! But the two countries still have to answer the same basic questions. Let’s look at just two of these. Young people who attend grammar schools are likely to have a brighter future than those who attend lesser schools. But that’s not all. Later, as students, they have some major advantages in the cultural sphere, such as when visiting museums or attending concerts. They only have to show their student card to get a discount. But there’s no young worker’s card.

The Brexit referendum in the UK demonstrated how opinions can be artificially manipulated through lies and a fictitious portrayal of the European Union.

Every year the national debt goes up. Interest is the second item in the national budget – after education and training and before defence. The burden of repayments is being shifted to future generations. Pension contributions have to rise, while future pensioners will get less. On the German labour market, the figures speak for themselves. The percentage of 15-34 years olds in low-wage, short-term or temporary employment is about three times higher than that of older people.

Children usually belong to the first half of people’s lives, so we have to ask how the parent generation is treated. It is better for parents in France than in Germany. They get higher tax relief and better pensions, especially for civil servants (whose pension is calculated on the basis of their salary in the final six months, whereas for everyone else it is based on the average of the last 25 years).

Let me cite my own example: with four children, my pension is not 75% of my final salary, but 86%. If you have seven children, you get 100%, so the eighth child is useless! In 2001 Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that large families ‘have been disadvantaged in terms of consumption and wealth creation because of their upbringing’, despite the fact that these children will end up paying the pensions of the childless. A generational injustice? After all, childless people have always had to pay more taxes.

What is the role of the media? 2016 saw the publication of a valuable collection of articles entitled PEGIDA – Warnsignale aus Dresden, edited by Werner Patzelt and Joachim Klose. Over 500 pages, the contributors look at basic issues relating to the media. What do the PEGIDA people have to say? Do their statements correspond to reality? To what extent does fake news influence other people? This brings us to the opinion polls. Interesting questions bring an interesting volume of responses, just so the pollsters can influence the decision-makers. President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned secret polls every day to find out what he should or shouldn’t say.

President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned secret polls every day to find out what he should or shouldn’t say.

It has recently been revealed that the German Chancellor has been supplied with large numbers of unpublished surveys, which may or may not have influenced the content, but certainly the wording, of her policies. Fortunately, big decisions sometimes fly in the face of public opinion. If Angela Merkel had instructed polling company Allensbach to find out whether or not Germany should take in refugees, the answer would have been negative. The same applies to the treaties signed by Willy Brandt in Warsaw and Moscow in 1970.

In Moscow, Putin rules the media even more consummately than his counterpart in Budapest. Both at home and abroad, he can feed false facts to his citizens with impunity. Of course, the EU and NATO are held accountable for all the sins of this world. Germany is also systematically portrayed in a false light. Donald Trump has set something of a world record for lying. He simply doesn’t care whether what he says is true, he just wants to say things that incite others. Lies became the background and foreground of the election campaign, in line with the French proverb: Plus c'est gros, plus ça passe [The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed].

In Moscow, Putin rules the media even more consummately than his counterpart in Budapest. Both at home and abroad, he can feed false facts to his citizens with impunity. Of course, the EU and NATO are held accountable for all the sins of this world.

In France we also hear some gross distortions from the likes of Marine Le Pen and Nicolas Sarkozy. Libération, a daily newspaper that, unfortunately, is not read enough these days, has a section called Désintox (detox) in which it compares real facts and figures with the allegedly true ones. Laurent Wauquiez, the far-right head of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, contested that France constantly buys German locomotives while the Germans only buy German ones. Désintox revealed that most French locomotives are manufactured in France, and that Germany does not practise this French kind of ‘economic patriotism’ but has some of its locomotives manufactured in Poland and the Czech Republic.

More subtle, less aggressive methods are also employed. In 1974, when I was regularly writing columns for Le Monde, the newspaper’s director, Jacques Fauvet, asked me why I was always criticising our paper. I replied that I would read them carefully for a month and then send him a report, which ended up running to 30 pages.

I mentioned some major issues, such as the derogatory tone always used in reports about Germany and the US, and the absence of any criticism of China. And more minor ones, such as the fact that the newspaper did not like a rally of 300 lawyers in the Palace of Justice, so it added the proviso ‘out of 2,500 lawyers in Paris’ in brackets after the number 300. I asked why similar reference numbers were never given for student or worker rallies.

In April 2016, the newspaper wanted to prove that the Institute of Political Studies had been infiltrated by right-wing extremists. Hence the headline: ‘Alain de Benoist welcomed with open arms at Sciences Po’, and the sub-heading: ‘Students invite the figurehead of the New Right.’ But upon reading the article it became clear that the auditorium only had 50 seats and groups of at least 30 students at the Institute had the freedom to invite any speaker.

A newspaper doesn’t necessarily have the same identity for every reader. Since 1992, Sciences Po has had an Alfred Grosser Chair, which is filled every year by a different German professor. The Institute places an advertisement in the German newspaper Die Zeit, attracting around a dozen applicants. Die Zeit is the paper where German universities advertise! Like many provincial French newspapers, it is often said that it is an advertising paper broken up by the odd bit of journalism. But this is not the case Le Canard enchaîné, perhaps the most important French weekly newspaper. It accepts no advertising and has maintained the same price since 1991, yet it still makes a profit.

A group of us would rent a copy for an hour, read it and then virtuously return it to the newspaper vendor. Over recent years, Le Canard has almost never been found guilty of error or misrepresentation – and regularly wins all the cases brought against it. Like many others, I read it every week with a mixture of interest, admiration – and disgust. Because it focuses on the negative, the reader ends up thinking that the reality of politics and society is even more devastating than they thought.

To what extent is Le Canard similar to Germany’s Spiegel? The comparison is obvious, but a Canard editor has never ended up in prison for treason, as happened to Conrad Ahlers in 1962. I was particularly affected by this because I had known Ahlers since 1947, when he was doing a fine job as editor of the youth newspaper Benjamin, and anyway I disliked Franz Josef Strauss. In 1966, my colleague and former student Jürgen Seifert and I co-edited a book about this ‘Spiegel Affair’ entitled Die Spiegelaffäre – Die Staatsmacht und ihre Kontrolle. There were also skirmishes as a result of the sometimes controversial writings of Rudolf Augstein.

A group of us would rent a copy for an hour, read it and then virtuously return it to the newspaper vendor.

Who can say what the identity of a newspaper is? Germany still has many family-owned newspapers providing a wealth of information, while most of the newspapers in France – including larger regional publications – are barren places if you are looking for political and international news and comment. The same can be said of the main evening news broadcasts on TF1 and France2.

In France, as in Germany, the information market is dominated by a few large media groups, though they do not necessarily dictate the line their newspapers should follow. In Germany, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group has a national and international breadth that has no counterpart in France. It seems to give the publications that it owns a great deal of editorial autonomy. It remains to be seen whether printed newspapers will continue to survive.

The worst thing about Facebook, the wonderful invention that made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire, is not the way young people reveal the intimate details of their lives. It’s the ease with which people can be identified and defamed. Before they even become aware of this defamation, the post has already been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. It’s pointless to try and contradict it because nobody can control who it has reached. The famous aria about slander in Rossini’s Barber of Seville fades into insignificance compared to what happens today – at a time when most Facebook users have never heard of Rossini and his opera.

The famous aria about slander in Rossini’s Barber of Seville fades into insignificance compared to what happens today – at a time when most Facebook users have never heard of Rossini and his opera.

I learned what culture is in 1984. German news magazine Stern published a detailed survey carried out by the Allensbach Institute. ‘What do you think is definitely a part of culture?’ – Goethe: 84.5%, Mozart: 80.2%, television: 10.6%. ‘What do you like to do most in your free time? – Television: 66.9%. No sign of Goethe or Mozart. What conclusion can we draw? Culture is something that other people do!

His Italian literature course would have done better to include the contract of the metalworkers’ union. Have you ever read it, Miss? Aren’t you ashamed? It means life for half a million families. You keep telling yourselves how well educated you are. But you have all read the same books. Nobody ever asks you anything different.’

Knowledge of society should be part of culture.

The students are right. Knowledge of society should be part of culture. But where does it end? A physicist who attends a lot of exhibitions is said to be cultured. But a musician who knows nothing about science is not called uncultured.

To put it another way, if our two grandsons (22 and 23 years old) come to visit and realise that we are listening to Mozart or Bach, they say: ‘Your music again!’ (our three granddaughters don’t all say that). One of our grandsons has read the complete works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but his literary culture is not his musical culture. He was delighted when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize. Why shouldn’t Bruce Springsteen – who I also like a lot – also be considered culture? For young people, he’s also a bit of an antique! Musiclovers are all so different. It would be hard for me to wave my arms in the air for hours on end and clap my hands every other minute like at a good rock concert.

The biggest French festival of this kind is held every year in a small village in Brittany. Les Vieilles Charrues (The Old Ploughs) brings together 300,000 rock fans every year. Am I happy when I’m in the audience for ‘my’ music? In concert certainly, but less so at the opera house. I get annoyed when the audience bursts into applause after an aria, demonstrating that they are not really moved by the drama. A third kind of audience, which I have often admired on television, is the 20,000 people who turn up to the Waldbühne in Berlin. They are so carefree as they sit or lie on the grass with their children, all listening, all happy, enjoying all kinds of music, and particularly when the Berliner Philharmoniker are playing and they are allowed to whistle along to Das ist die Berliner Luft at the end.

In both France and Germany, the youngest children are looked after in crèches or day-care centres – or maybe not. In Paris, there are so few places that parents have to enrol their kids before they are born. A German court ruled that the state had to pay parents compensation if there was no place available for their child. That’s certainly not the case in France!

Can schoolchildren have a cosmopolitan attitude at the age of six or seven? The answer is yes, if you act like the towns of Edingen-Neckarhausen, near Mannheim, and Plouguerneau near Brest, at the western tip of Europe. They have been twinned for more than 50 years. Every year, several hundred children spend weeks or even months in their twin town. What a joy it is to hear the little schoolkids of Plouguerneau singing German songs! The next generation of the twinning project is in place, and the little ones will learn a lot about Germany and Europe from a young age.