Isn't It Ironic

Stolid as it is, Germany does not strike one as fruitful soil for irony. Unless it is completely unintentional, of course. But wherever you look, irony just slaps you in the face.

Take the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently under negotiation between the USA and the EU. If the crowds taking to the streets here to protest against it are to be believed, TTIP is a straight road into the abyss. Why, those courts to resolve disputes between foreign investors and governments would put our venerable institutions at the mercy of greedy international corporations! Unthinkable!

But ironically, this is precisely one mechanism that has benefited Germany time and again. As a prolific investor in foreign lands, the country has often resorted to such a recourse to protect its investments. Just a hypothetical example: if YPF had been German, would Germans have been so nonchalant when Argentina decided to expropriate it from its foreign owners and nationalise it? In the end, Repsol (the actual Spanish owner) received some compensation only thanks to the existence of such courts.

Then there is the deep distrust of the quality of American regulators as a reason to reject the TTIP. No less than 97% of Germans consider them of inferior trustworthiness than the local ones. And yet, ironically, it was American regulators that uncovered Volkswagen’s cheating on emissions levels. German and EU regulators, despite a number of hints that something was amiss, did nothing. So much for trustworthiness. (By the by, it also fell to American regulators to enforce rules in the cases of the FIFA and the World Cup scandals.)

Or take the political-party landscape. For a country that is so export-oriented, which trades with the entire globe and where 99.6% of its 3.7 million companies are small and medium enterprises, it strikes one as ironic that voters should have booted out the Liberals, the party that represents business and the free market, and elevated the Left, the heirs to East Germany’s Communist party, to the level of leading opposition in parliament, eclipsing even the Greens.

Or Angela Merkel’s reelection victory in the latest general election, in 2013. Despite an impressive performance by her CDU/CSU conservatives, she emerged weaker than before. Short of an outright majority, and after the ousting of her little-loved junior coalition partner, the Liberals mentioned above, she had to court the Social Democrats to form a government. They accepted only after making sure that many of their political pet projects made it into the new government’s programme. In the end, it feels as if the Social Democrats had actually won the election, minimum wage and lower retirement age now set in law. Irony indeed.

And the biggest irony of all: that all the efforts Germany has put in since the pile of rubble it was after World War II to convert itself into one of the wealthiest, most orderly, most beautiful and well-functioning places in the world should produce such a grumpy bunch of citizens. My, do they like to complain about things. A true national sport.