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Coping with disparity: continuity and discontinuity in economic policy since unification
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posted on 05.08.2014, 13:39 by Jeremy LeamanFourteen years on, Germany remains an abnormal state in which many of the features
of abnormality have become firmly entrenched, i.e. normalised. This is the best
approximation to a shorthand characterisation of Germany’s political economy in
2004. Whatever features of ‘normalisation’/ homogenisation/ standardisation or
convergence with an EU or OECD ‘norm’ can be adduced for Germany, there are
features of abnormality which persist; these arguably set the Federal Republic apart
from comparator states. In this paper, I only intend to examine selective aspects of
economic policy, but there is little doubt that these have been and continue to be
significantly affected by Germany’s abnormal features: the uniqueness of the German
Question in European history, the trauma of European genocide, defeat,
dismemberment and separation, national division along the systemic fault-line
between ‘East’ and ‘West’, its – in part unwelcome – role as hegemonic ‘first among
equals’ within the EU, and then Unification: the first and as yet only experiment in
which a state socialist society was reabsorbed into a prosperous capitalist economy.
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