Neutral Germany? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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'Cold war' communist versus capitalist ideological struggle (1946 - 1990) and everything else in the post World War II era (1946 onwards).
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By Atlantis
#14519207
In what has become known as the Stalin note, the Soviets offered to reunite East and West Germany in 1952 on condition that the united country would become neutral and demilitarized. The offer was rejected by the then chancellor Adenauer, but we can suppose that the Western allies would have tried to prevent it anyways.

What would have been the consequences of a neutral Germany in 1952?

Would it have weakened the West?

Would it have strengthened the Soviets?

Would it have prevented the collapse of the SU?

Would a neutral buffer between the blocks have reduced tension?

Would it have prevented Nato East expansion?

Would there have been a European Union and what would it look like?

Would communism still be a viable economic system today?

What about the social-market economy?
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By Lexington
#14519208
Atlantis wrote:we can suppose that the Western allies would have tried to prevent it anyways.


I'm not sure if that's true: the Soviets and the West managed to do this in Austria (Austrian State Treaty).

If, however, Germany had been reintegrated and neutralized like Austria...I don't see any reason it would have affected the Cold War much.

The European Union, on the other hand, probably wouldn't exist since the Germans would have been committed to neutrality. Austria itself didn't join the EU until the 1990s because of that commitment.
By Atlantis
#14519210
Lexington wrote:The European Union, on the other hand, probably wouldn't exist since the Germans would have been committed to neutrality. Austria itself didn't join the EU until the 1990s because of that commitment.

To start with, there would have been a corridor of neutral countries (Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Finland) which would have had a common interest in neutrality and could have formed an economic zone in between the political blocks. Even other countries might have had more leeway and associate with the neutral countries and thus prevent the crystallization into the blocks. The iron curtain hadn't been drawn completely closed by that time.
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By Lexington
#14519231
There was a thing called the non-aligned movement, which was headed by one of the countries you mention (Yugoslavia), but it did not achieve much during the Cold War. I still don't see any reason that adding Germany to it would have done much. It might have cooled tensions somewhat, but the Cold War was fought in the developing world mostly: Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, Afghanistan..
By Atlantis
#14519237
Lexington wrote:It might have cooled tensions somewhat, but the Cold War was fought in the developing world mostly: Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, Afghanistan..

What happened in the third world were proxy wars that would have been sideshows to any war in Europe. The center of tension was the East/West divide in Europe. It didn't turn into a hot war because the consequences would have been too devastating for both sides.

You remember the Morgenthau plan, which was to turn Germany into an agrarian nation? It was abandoned because the US wanted Germany's industrial strength to rebuild Europe. I think to keep Germany in the Western camp was of great importance to the US.
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By Lexington
#14519265
Atlantis wrote:What happened in the third world were proxy wars that would have been sideshows to any war in Europe. The center of tension was the East/West divide in Europe. It didn't turn into a hot war because the consequences would have been too devastating for both sides.


The war in Europe never happened and if Germany were neutralized it would have been even less likely to happen in Europe.

I still see no reason that the rest of the Cold War: Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and so on would not have happened because of a neutral Germany. These things had nothing to do with Germany or Europe.

Atlantis wrote:You remember the Morgenthau plan, which was to turn Germany into an agrarian nation? It was abandoned because the US wanted Germany's industrial strength to rebuild Europe. I think to keep Germany in the Western camp was of great importance to the US.


And the Morgenthau Plan did not happen, because you're right: the US, France, and Britain agreed a stronger Germany was a good idea.

But still, adding Germany's economy to the non-aligned movement probably would not be large. It was a pretty big thing and yet didn't matter in the whole cosmos of the Cold War.
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By fuser
#14519314
It wouldn't had much effect on Cold War I think

Atlantis wrote:The offer was rejected by the then chancellor Adenauer, but we can suppose that the Western allies would have tried to prevent it anyways.


They did prevented it.

Lexington wrote:There was a thing called the non-aligned movement, which was headed by one of the countries you mention (Yugoslavia), but it did not achieve much during the Cold War.


I don't think its quite true, many nations managed to maintain their neutrality during the period when both superpowers were on their asses to join their side. Without NAM, there would had been numerous conflicting Baghdad pact, SEATO etc.
By Atlantis
#14519662
Lexington wrote:adding Germany's economy to the non-aligned movement probably would not be large. It was a pretty big thing and yet didn't matter in the whole cosmos of the Cold War.

But wasn't the non-aligned movement primarily a third-world affair? A neutral corridor from Yugoslavia to Finland across the center of Europe would have been a different affair altogether. I think it could have changed the direction of history. If Germany had been able to trade both with the East and the West, the SU might have been able to modernize with Germany's help and not fall back behind the West.

Atlantis wrote:They did prevented it.

I guess so, Adenauer wasn't much more than a US puppet like most conservative chancellors in Germany.
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By Negotiator
#15212137
Atlantis wrote:I guess so, Adenauer wasn't much more than a US puppet like most conservative chancellors in Germany.


:eek:

Only the conservative ones ?


Sure, I can see Brandt and maybe partly still Schmidt breaking the tradition, with their "Wandel durch Annäherung", but otherwise, nope.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_du ... 3%A4herung

(Very surprisingly there is no english version of this article)


But where did Gerhard Schröder get his economical ideas ? Directly from Wall Street.

And thus Schröder did the deepest and worst kowtow towards the USA ever. He basically opened the german economy for sale. He caused a mass exitinction of smaller businesses. All because he did what Wall Street told him to do. Obviously Wall Street told him what would be good for THEM, not the germans.

Schröder was the biggest US puppet Germany ever had.


He resisted joining the US war against Iraq though. Not so Merkel, who went to Washington and pubically told Bush jr she was sorry Schröder didnt join. Not the moment that gained her any popularity in Germany, but people forget. She of course never took anything back what Schröder had done either.

But if you thought Merkel would live in a constant kowtaw towards Washington, well, Scholz so far seem to be only worse. Scholz leads a government of US agents.



P.s.: I mean your statement would be true if you said "any actually conservative chancellor" because the only progressive chancellor Germany ever had so far was really only Brandt.
By Atlantis
#15216737
Negotiator wrote:Only the conservative ones ?

Sure, I can see Brandt and maybe partly still Schmidt breaking the tradition, with their "Wandel durch Annäherung", but otherwise, nope.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_du ... 3%A4herung

(Very surprisingly there is no english version of this article)

But where did Gerhard Schröder get his economical ideas ? Directly from Wall Street.

And thus Schröder did the deepest and worst kowtow towards the USA ever. He basically opened the german economy for sale. He caused a mass exitinction of smaller businesses. All because he did what Wall Street told him to do. Obviously Wall Street told him what would be good for THEM, not the germans.

Schröder was the biggest US puppet Germany ever had.

He resisted joining the US war against Iraq though. Not so Merkel, who went to Washington and pubically told Bush jr she was sorry Schröder didnt join. Not the moment that gained her any popularity in Germany, but people forget. She of course never took anything back what Schröder had done either.

But if you thought Merkel would live in a constant kowtaw towards Washington, well, Scholz so far seem to be only worse. Scholz leads a government of US agents.

P.s.: I mean your statement would be true if you said "any actually conservative chancellor" because the only progressive chancellor Germany ever had so far was really only Brandt.


You are arguing from an ideological point of view which ignores real-politics.

The Social Democrats got rid of class struggle and other ideological baggage back in 1959 in Bad Godesberg. Thus, by a hard left definition, all Social Democrats are traitors.

Germany firmly accepted the social market economy which is quite distinct from US/UK capitalism. To throw everything into the same hat really is pointless.

Schroeder was pro-industry because Germany is an industrial country. Without a strong industry, most of you would have to starve to death. The Americans quickly realized that when they shredded the Morgenthau plan.

Schroeder was also strongly in favour of improved relations with Russia. In fact, it's the axis Moscow-Berlin-Paris that opposed the US invasion of Iraq that rattled Washington to the point they had to throw a spanner into EU/Russia cooperation by fomenting a coup in Ukraine. It worked marvellously well. Now, there is no way Russia/European relations can be mended in our lifetime. Washington took this very personal. By sabotaging NS2, demonizing Schroeder's personal friend Putin and by destroying Russia/European relations for good they took revenge on Schroeder while achieving their geopolitical goals, but it could well turn into a home goal.

Schroeder has condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, like every self-respecting politician has to, but he also pointed to the elephant in the room: Nato East expansion.

Schroeder deserves our respect. He will sacrifice his own interests for what he believes to be right. He sacrificed his job at the chancellery to bring Germany back after being termed the "sick man of Europe" due to the enormous economic costs of reunification in the 1990s. Today, this former German chancellor who won election victories for the Social Democrats is treated like a pariah by the whole the country because he does not recant. He believed in Russian/German friendship and in German energy security with Russian gas.

What can we accuse him of? That he was too naïve about the perfidy of Anglo-politics? Yeah, Germans are very naïve about that, not me, though :lol:

That Merkel was naïve in that respect is not surprising. Growing up as the daughter of a protestant pastor in a dissident environment in the former East Germany under de facto Soviet occupation, she had a complicated relationship with Russia and yearned for Western values guaranteed by a benevolent US hegemony like virtually every other East European. I think she has been disillusioned in the meantime.

Even if she speaks Russian and Putin speaks German, her fabled close relationship with Putin always was a myth. She can't get along with macho men like Putin.
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By noemon
#15216767
Putin invaded Ukraine while spitting on Schroeder's and Merkel's face in the process. Noone forced him to invade.

1) The west signed Minsk II with Putin effectively agreeing to all his demands.
2) Ukraine was never going to get into NATO while Putin occupies parts of it.
3) Yanukovych(Putin's stooge) was elected with a mandate to sign the EU-Ukraine trade agreement, he u-turned and euromaidan followed. Putin engineered the crisis and not the west.

Just as Putin invaded and not the west.

Your favourite scapegoat is no longer available and German hypocrisy, perfidiousness and duplicity is now over.
How sad. :*(
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By noemon
#15216775
Telegraph wrote:The pain of western sanctions is beginning to be felt outside of Russia. A US-led threat to ban Russian oil imports has triggered a sharp oil shock.

Image

The price of Brent crude surged to $139 a barrel – its highest since 2008 – on Sunday night. That is a jump of almost $40 since the invasion began. Remember the heady days of the pandemic when the price of Western intermediate briefly turned negative as the global economy came to an abrupt stop?

Experts believe British motorists could soon be paying as much as £1.75 a litre of unleaded. Though if, like me, you had the misfortune of driving up the A1 at the weekend, you would have seen that some shameless forecourt operators are already charging close to that.

A regulatory investigation must surely be forthcoming into the profiteering that is taking place on a daily basis at the country’s petrol stations, exacerbating the cost of living squeeze.


Meanwhile, gas prices have been propelled into another stratosphere altogether. After topping €200 a megawatt hour for the first time on Friday, European gas prices surged above €300 on Monday morning.

It is a stark reminder that there is more than an element of self-harm to the crackdown on the Kremlin. Still, most people I talk to seem to accept that there is a price to pay, and one worth paying, for isolating the Russian economy.

Amid the carnage, one man is still sitting pretty: Gerhard Schroeder, the 77 year-old former German chancellor, who has spent much of his time since leaving office in 2005 forging ever-closer and lucrative ties with the Russian energy industry, and the Kremlin.

There is a whole grubby world of senior Western figures content to shamelessly lobby on behalf of Russian interests on the global stage, usually in return for handsome fees – but Schroeder sticks out, not least by virtue of his standing.

In Britain, the closest we can come to someone of his position is Lord Greg Barker. The Tory peer was the former climate change minister under David Cameron’s government but is arguably better known, in the City at least, for earning millions of pounds at EN+.

In 2019, he took home $7.8m in salary and bonuses as the architect of the “Barker plan”, which enabled the company to escape direct US sanctions.

Another is Sir Michael Peat, a former private secretary to Prince Charles and whose family name is the “p” in KPMG. Sir Michael has earned £1.9m since 2011 as a non-executive director of steel and mining outfit Evraz. Barker has bowed to intense pressure and stood down but Sir Michael is clinging on.

Still, the pair are fringe players compared to a man who won two German elections, was regarded as the charismatic, flamboyant antithesis of dour predecessor Helmut Kohl, and whose tax and labour law reforms were credited with laying some of the foundations for Germany to become the economic powerhouse of Europe. Magazine Der Spiegel says Schroeder came close to achieving “hero status” within his own party.

His legacy threatens to be destroyed by his reputation as Germany’s most high profile Putinversteher (Putin-whisperer) - establishment figures that mistakenly believed they could “tame Vladimir Putin with empathy and friendly accommodation”, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Sunday (FAS) recently described it.

These individuals span the full political spectrum from the far-Left Die Linke to the far-right AfD, and also the centre-Left Social Democratic Party (SPD), of which Schroeder is still a member, alongside successor-but-one Olaf Scholz.

But no one matches the former German chancellor for prominence, or the extent to which he has so actively courted the Putin regime. Schroeder has amassed an incredible four directorships at the heart of the Russian energy industry.

He became chairman of state-backed oil explorer Rosneft in 2017, prompting a public rebuke from Angela Merkel because the company was subject to Western sanctions at the time. The role earned him £500,000 last year.

He also holds senior posts with the companies behind the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural-gas pipelines, a relationship that has enraged the German political classes because Schroeder signed the controversial deal for a £3.4bn gas link between Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea with Putin, just two weeks before leaving office.


Yet, despite a fierce backlash including a personal plea from Scholz and calls for his SFD membership to be revoked, Schroeder is unrepentant. In recent weeks, he has delivered a further snub by agreeing to join the board of Kremlin-controlled oil giant Gazprom.

His intransigence heaps great shame on Germany, at a time when the country is desperately trying to reinvent itself as an EU hardliner by advocating for the toughest possible sanctions. Schroeder is an uncomfortable reminder of everything that was wrong with Germany’s approach to Russia for decades.

Events have quickly demonstrated that the policy of mercantilism and strategic pragmatism towards Moscow that Merkel championed during her time in office was desperately naive.

The Russian president has made many in the West look like fools, chief among them Emmanuel Macron, who, according to Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk, continues to be manipulated by Putin.

Germany is plagued with Russian apologists but Schroeder will be remembered as the most dangerous of Putin’s useful idiots.
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By Negotiator
#15218304
Atlantis wrote:You are arguing from an ideological point of view which ignores real-politics.


Pfft.

First of all, of course I have an ideology. Everbody has one. Yes, even you.

Your "real-politics" turn out to be nothing but irrelevant propaganda statements.

You use the oldest trick of every ideologist: claiming to be in posession of the truth, and not actually having any ideology themselves.


Atlantis wrote:The Social Democrats got rid of class struggle and other ideological baggage back in 1959 in Bad Godesberg. Thus, by a hard left definition, all Social Democrats are traitors.


The social democrats are traitors, which is a popular saying, because they violated the interests of their voters on multiple occasions, starting with supporting WW1, but also with Schröders destruction of the social state.

Technicalities like the one you mentioned are grossly irrelevant.

Whats relevant, whats "real-politics", is what actually happends, not some statements somewhere.

Besides, the SPD officially claimed they wanted a democratic socialism until after Schröder.


Atlantis wrote:Germany firmly accepted the social market economy which is quite distinct from US/UK capitalism. To throw everything into the same hat really is pointless.


No.

But you have clearly not even the slightest hint of knowledge about economics, so I will just stop commenting.


Atlantis wrote:Schroeder was pro-industry because Germany is an industrial country.


As I already said, Schröder massively destroyed small businesses, he made selling companies tax free - which is why large potions of the german industry are now owned by the USA - and he gave large companies massive tax cuts.

There is nothing "pro industry" about that, whatever this retarded term is even supposed to mean. This directly rams up the wealth of the already super wealthy. Nothing else.

A developing country lacks investment power.

A highly industrialized country like Germany does not lack investment power, but investment chances. Ramping up the wealth of the already wealthy doesnt help the industry one bit. Ramping up the income of average people would actually create investment chances, thus increase economic power.

But neoliberalism - the current economic ideology - does the opposite, because thats in the interest of the already superrich.


Atlantis wrote:Schroeder was also strongly in favour of improved relations with Russia. [blablabla]


The rest of your posting is irrelevant, since I never said otherwise. Obviously Schröder has ended up working for Gasprom, so yes he was friendly with the russians. Everyone was, until about 2013. In 2014 they did the coup in Ukraine and thats when the tone started to change. The USA again needed an enemy to justify their riddiculous military expenses. That Russia decided to invade Ukraine is a huge win for the USA.

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