Abstract
On Thursday, 12 July 1990, an interview with Margaret Thatcher’s Minister for Trade and Industry, Nicholas Ridley, was published in the conservative British magazine The Spectator. Mr Ridley denounced the imminent introduction of the European Monetary Union as a ploy by a reunited German superpower to take over Europe. He did not abstain from drawing parallels to Hitler’s Third Reich, and called the French ‘poodles of the Germans’. Eventually he was forced to resign, but a lot of questions on both sides of the Channel (and the Atlantic as well) remained.
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Notes
Many sources: for example The Economist 21–27 July 1990, pp. 101–2; compare Alain Lipietz, ‘The Debt Problem, European Integration and the New Phase of World Crisis’, New Left Review, 178 (1989) pp. 47–50.
These affinities were, of course, somewhat modified over the years by both parties’ electoral strategies to capture a secure position as Volkspartei, in the middle of the political spectrum. But, as Scharpf pointed out, the main vehicle for this trend towards ‘political centrality’ was exactly a consensus-orientated compromise across parties, and not within parties. The labour wing within the CDU, for example, gained only occasional importance. Capitalist appeasement within the SPD, on the other hand, was achieved mainly through compromise with the unions, and not against them. See below, Note 9, and compare Gordon Smith, Democracy in Western Germany (Aldershot: Gower, 1986) pp. 231–32.
See Fritz W. Scharpf, ‘The Puzzle of the West German Consensus’, Government and Opposition, 16, 3 (1981) p. 388.
Fritz W. Scharpf, ‘Entwicklungslinien des bundesdeutschen Föderalismus’, unpublished manuscript, (Cologne, June 1990) pp. 11–12.
See the references to the so-called ‘Myrdal-syndrome’ in Karl Kühne, ‘Europa 1993: Geburt eines neuen Demiurgen?’ in Franz Steinkühler (ed.), Europa ’92 (Hamburg: VSA, 1989) p. 33.
For Italy, see Donald Sassoon, Contemporary Italy (London: Longman, 1986) p. 83; the situation is similar in all Mediterranean member states.
See Ingeborg Toemmel, “Europäischer Binnenmarkt und mediterräne Peripherie’, Prokla, 75/19, 2 (1989) pp. 29–46.
See the overview in Helen Wallace, Europe: The Challenge of Diversity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) pp. 29–46.
See Elmar Altvater and Kurt Hübner, ‘Das Geld einer mittleren Hegemonialmacht — Ein kleiner Streifzug durch die ökonomische Geschichte der BRD’, Prokla, 73/18, 4 (1988) pp. 26–36.
Fritz W. Scharpf, ‘Regionalisierung des europäischen Raums’, and ‘Diskussion’, both in Regionalisierung des europäischen Raums (Cologne: Kohlhammer, 1989) pp. 7–33 and 40–1.
See Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) pp. 3–4.
W. Gerstenberger, ‘Sectoral Impacts of the Internal Market on German Manufacturing Industry’, Final Report (Munich: Ifo-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, 1989) p. 47.
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© 1992 William D. Graf
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Hueglin, T.O. (1992). Gross-Deutschland in Europe: Planned or Unplanned Effects of the German Anschluß on Hegemonic Leadership in the European Community. In: Graf, W.D. (eds) The Internationalization of the German Political Economy. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22227-8_12
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