United We Stand

Published: October 3, 2009

19 years ago today, a country was united and an export behemoth was born. If you know your history, then you know I'm talking about Germany.

The Soviet regime came to an abrupt ending in the early 90's. With it's end also brought hope for freedom and independence for those with in it. In this case, East gGermany was one of them.

It was a political miracle and an economic disaster. With the rally cry for a United Germany and bad economic knowledge of the Chancelor at the time, Germany was united. Back track a little, let's see what happened to Germany after World War II.

First, we have Germany divided into four regions, under the leadership for four major powers: United States, Britain, France, and Soviet Union. The United States, Britain and France learned from their mistake before, namely, the harsh punishment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, would not bring lasting peace. So the three nations work together, mainly with the financial support of the United States, brought market reform and democratic ideologies to the western part of Germany. It's true that West Germany's road wasn't paved to be perfectly smooth, but it's safe to say that the westerners gave Germany what it needed to get back into the game as a world player.

On the other hand, there's East Germany. Germany's assault on Soviet Union was one of the bloodiest campaign in history, with the pride of two very evil men at stake - Stalin's Stalingrad (no longer called Stalingrad) and Hitler's Nazi army. At the end of it, the Soviets wanted revenge. They took what they need from Germany and installed a puppet government there with monitering from the KBG. After several decades, East Germany was poor, polluted, and almost hopeless. How important was East Germany to the Soviets? Not that important. You can see this from the rise of Putin, who was sent to East Germany because he wasn't trusted enough to work for Moscow in the KBG. This, of course, was destined to change.

In the end, you have two Germanys, the west being developed, both in terms of economics and having social safety net, while east, being poor, opppressed and thoroughly plundered. If you know politics, you would know that East Germans would demand the same thing that West Germans have once the two country reunited. It would increase the government expenditure on the Western end because it would have to provide social safety net, infrastructure building and also cleaning up the environment (yes, Germans are well aware of the environment). For the most part, this is bad economics for West Germany, at least in the short run. However, through the mighty teachings of Keynesian and the natural demand for improvement and efficiency of humans, German rised to be the largest exporter in the world, until the Chinese took over anyways.

Today, looking back at this remarkable achievement of the Germans, I often wonder how the fuck did the Germanys gone from bankrupted to the leading exporter in the world in comparison to the United States, being the wealth and generious country who gave money to Germany to rebuild after World War II, ending up with trillions of deficits. Somethings went terribly wrong with the American government. Hopefully, a Bro named Obama would have what it takes to fix it.