© G Jewels

But for the family name she acquired at marriage, it might have been just a tale for the society pages: a handsome middle aged woman who had given up a successful career to raise children, only for the man she loved to chase other women and seek a divorce. Lonely and depressed, she turns to alcohol. Finally, she commits suicide, hanging herself in a barn behind her house in one of the wealthiest areas in suburban New York, leaving behind four children, all of them under the age of 18. A tragedy to be sure, but life can sometimes be like that.

Marine Le Pen of the Front National © RemiJDN

Twenty-eight years ago, almost to the day, Mayor William H Hudnut (the third) of Indianapolis signed into law the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance. Had it not been struck down by the courts, it would have defined certain kinds of pornography as a civil rights violation against women.

This was not, however, a victory for feminism. Far from winning the argument, the radical feminist authors had entered into an unholy alliance with the far more influential conservative Right, thus unwittingly advancing the cause of censorship and anti-obscenity. Indeed when elements of their legal approach was incorporated into Canadian law, it was achieved through the existing obscenity law. MacKinnon and Dworkin probably agreed on nothing else with their temporary conservative allies, who were acting to protect the traditional nuclear family that the feminists wanted to abolish.

Twenty-eight years later, and across the Atlantic, there exists a new opportunity for a similarly unholy alliance, and my message is: don’t be tempted to give credibility to hatred.

During this year’s elections in France, the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who received 18% of the vote, campaigned against halal meat becoming the norm for meat produced in France. Given the rest of her manifesto and her party’s racist history, we know that this is driven by hatred of Muslims, yet along with the rest of her campaign, Le Pen attempted to give her policy a softer tone by making it an issue of animal cruelty.

Unfortunately, the production of halal meat does seem to be cruel to animals. European law forces abattoirs to stun animals before being killed, but an exception is made for religious slaughter, and thus often -although not always- animals’ throats are slit while still conscious, and it can take several minutes of agony before death. Thus there is a direct conflict between animal welfare and freedom of religion.

There is bound to be, then, a temptation among animal activists to team up with the Front National’s campaign against halal meat. Animal cruelty is rarely a big enough issue alone to effect change, and thus in the past it has required alliances to be made around specific causes.

Consider the ban on hunting with dogs in the UK: surely an alliance between animal activists who were genuinely concerned with the suffering of foxes and a few Labour MPs who saw an opportunity to stick it to a few toffs on horseback. Halal meat, like fox-hunting, is not the most important item on the animal movement’s agenda, yet anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, like anti-toff sentiment, makes it an area where success is attainable.

Just like Dworkin, MacKinnon and the conservative Right in North America, the animal movement and the fascist Le Pen agree on nothing but this one issue.

The animal movement is committed to equality as a moral ideal, regardless of sex, race, religion or species. Le Pen’s fascists want to prioritise one race, nationality and religion over all others. Indeed in Animal Liberation, the philosopher and activist Peter Singer makes a direct comparison between the the oppression of women and minorities and the continuing oppression of animals. The recent Peta adverts, which all but condone sexual violence, have been not only a betrayal of the noble principle of equality, but counter-productive. Joining the far Right’s agitation about halal meat would be too.

The animal movement must choose its battles carefully. Yes, it must choose those it can win, but it mustn’t get caught unwittingly lending credibility to those who stand for everything it is against for the sake of an easy, shallow, victory. It must not, in seeking to liberate animals, ease and legitimise the oppression of a religious minority.

Charlie Cadywould is a politics student at Cambridge University, and hopes to avoid becoming another statistic when he graduates in June. A political wonk with a love for opinion polls, he ran the Cambridge students’ campaign for a YES vote in the AV referendum, and previously interned with the EU delegation in Lesotho. Charlie occasionally tweets at @ccadywould

Video still from 'Squeeze' (2010) © Nicole Klagsbrum/Andrea Rosen Gallery

Is capitalism – is consumerism – all that it’s cracked up to be? That’s the question I asked myself after visiting a new exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery.

What I was struck by in the Mika Rottenberg exhibition was how we in the materialized West never really appreciate that there is a whole underclass that produce – and get rid of – the products that we take for granted.

Rottenberg uses the medium of the moving image – film. However, these are not films to eat popcorn to. She draws her inspiration from the “poetry” of Marxism.

People use their vitality in order to make products…every product contains part of their lives….I like the idea of measuring something not by it’s ‘use value’ but by the processes that were invested in its making – the amount of ‘life’ that was put into it.

One of the films in the exhibition, Cheese (2007), is a haunting, evocative piece loosely based on the Grimm’s fairytale of Rapunzel and also the seven Sutherland Sisters, who travelled around America selling their hair growth products. These women milk goats whilst tending to their astonishingly long hair and wearing large, cumbersome dresses in the process. These women are expected to be both beasts of burden and objects of beauty.

Still from ‘Cheese’, 2007 © Nicole Klagsbrum/Andrea Rosen Gallery

Apparently ‘The Sutherland sisters could have been said to have ‘milked’ their long hair as they made millions selling their baldness cure’,  and even now, every time we watch an advert for a grooming product on television we are assaulted by ‘good looking’ individuals who tell us that by using their product we will automatically become a ‘better’ people.

Other pieces in the exhibition highlight how sexuality is used to sell products that are often not all they seem to be. In Mary’s Cherries (2004), women in bright uniforms create maraschino cherries from red acrylic fingernails. The production line used to create this only highlights the absurdity of women literally using their bodies to create products to be sold on as a delicacy.

However, the most bizarre, and certainly the most piercing work [see main image] in the exhibition is Squeeze (2010). Mexican women are working on a Californian lettuce farm. However, underneath this large scale, production line farm, is another world: a subterranean, grimy world.

A group of Chinese women reach from underground portals to rub and clean the Mexicans’ hands. Meanwhile, detritus from the world above is crushed and pounded down to create an enormous square that’s to become a fictitious ‘artwork’.

Another woman in this subterranean warren is manufacturing a magical blusher from her pink cheeks, then later she is compressed between moving walls. Elsewhere in the burrow a giant woman rotates in chair endless. What does all this mean?

“The driving force of capitalism is fiction” Rottenberg says.

It thrives on a form of storytelling that inflates the value of objects…In shooting the ‘documentary’ I wanted to get out of my own world, creating a direct portal for the real world. But it is not an attempt to make my work more realistic. It is maybe an attempt to show that reality is as bizarre as my own fiction.

Rottenberg highlights the throwaway culture of today. All the products we use have been produced by somebody, and yet it’s not often that we appreciate that fact. So next time you buy something, stop, and think…

James Jacobs left university wanting to become the next George Orwell, though frankly he’ll settle with being Janet Street Porter. His interests include International Development, Constitutional Affairs and the Arts. He keeps a blog: CultureArtNews, and you can find him on Twitter @jameswjacobs

Some pigeons enjoying democracy near Buckingham Palace © Jon Rawlinson

In act that’s likely to be seen as an affront to those fighting for democracy in countries around the world, the Queen will today sit down with bloody dictators to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee at a lavish lunch in London.

Among those expected to attend are Bahrain’s King Hamad al-Khalifa, a monarch who has presided over a brutal crackdown on protesters in the country. As noted in The Guardian today, even as he prepares for his royal welcome, in Bahrain the crackdown is continuing, this time with the arrest of a journalist who criticised Bahrain’s alliance with Saudi Arabia:

 A journalist who criticised Bahrain’s proposed union with Saudi Arabia was seized from his home near Manama on Wednesday and his current whereabouts are unknown, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says.

Ahmed Radhi, a freelance who contributes to local news websites and has an Arabic blog called Silahi Qalami (“My weapon is my pen”), was reportedly arrested by security forces at 4am after they broke down his door.

Although there is no information about any charges against him, Radhi was arrested in the wake of comments he made in radio interviews on Monday and Tuesday criticising the proposed union with Saudi Arabia, his family members told the London-based Bahrain Press Association.

In London activists are planning to protest the King’s attendance, with the message going out on Twitter that:

Bahrainis will protest 2 pm Friday outside Embassy at 30 Belgrave Square against inviting a dictator to Diamond Jubilee. All welcome

Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told the BBC:

Inviting blood-stained despots brings shame to our monarchy and tarnishes the Diamond Jubilee celebrations,

It is a kick in the teeth to pro-democracy campaigners and political prisoners in these totalitarian royal regimes.

Seemingly ignoring the fact that no one in any position of authority has been prosecuted for the crackdown in Bahrain, a UK Foreign Office spokesman said:

We have consistently encouraged the Bahraini government to take further urgent steps to implement in full the recommendations of the Independent Commission of Inquiry as His Majesty the King has committed to doing.

This includes bringing to account those individuals responsible for human rights abuses.

In addition to King Hamad, it’s thought that Swaziland’s King Mswati III will also be in attendance. Swaziland’s absolute ruler uses state funds to finance a lavish lifestyle while the majority of his people live in abject poverty.

© The U.S. Army

Following his conviction for war crimes at a UN-backed Special Court, Charles Taylor -addressing the court- singled out the United States as he suggested that not everyone is subject to international law:

President George W. Bush not too long ago ordered torture and admitted to doing so. Torture is a crime against humanity. The United States has refused to prosecute him. Is he above the law? Where is the fairness?

While Charles Taylor may be a war criminal, and the excesses of the Bush administration are nothing compared to his own reign of terror in Liberia and Sierra Leone, he still managed to pinpoint what many consider to be the unfair way in which international law appears to go after ‘easy targets’.

Read more about the trial at CharlesTaylorTrial.org

By way of a temporal journey back a few months: I was reading a BBC article recently which discussed the decision by the German state of Bavaria to allow the publication of Mein Kampf after it’s copyright expires in 2015. I was then directed to a story about how the booksellers Waterstone’s apologised for including the book on their Christmas recommendations list. They stated in a wilting response that no politics section should include the volume and that they were sorry for the offence caused.

One must be categorical when an instance like this occurs: offence is not justification for censorship. At this stage and for the sake of simplicity I’ll say that the only justification for stopping people from accessing certain materials is to prevent the incitement to violence — which was not the reason given or a even a risk in this scenario. The free perusal and purchase of freely written and published materials is the yeast of our British vintage, the proposal to stop the publication of a book in an attempt to reduce offence represents a grave reduction of the literary cannon which is available in this culture and from which it derives its experience and ideas. People can and will take offence at nearly anything, and in this case it would seem that the patron was seeking to make a kerfuffle rather than being truly hurt. The hard fact is that offence is a worthy collateral for literary variety, debate, knowledge and progress.

An essential read for anyone seeking to understand one of history’s most despicable figures. A shocking and vital warning to future generations.

This was the recommendation which accompanied the book, establishing it as part of Waterstone’s Christmas list, which offended the patron. The statement is entirely true, every word, and in quite unquestionable taste. It is not for the publishers or the sellers or the government to decide what is moral and then for them only to allow material which follows their rules to be published, it is for the publishers and sellers to distribute all they dare and for the individual to construct their own morality.

Waterstone’s was not seeking to ‘promote’ the book, as the sensitive patron said. They knew that it is pornographically hateful and full of nauseating racial fabrications and similarly nauseating personal aggrandisement; to say anything else would be a cheap insult to the seller. The reason why it is so important to allow people to access horrors like this is because it teaches the reader an important lesson about humanity. Hitler is and will always be a fascinating and imperative study, alongside the different but comparatively important study of the people who gleefully scoffed his fodder. I even get the impression that those who call for the censorship of this book are a little too confident about how admirably they would have behaved had they been alive during that period.

We can’t make the wars and holocausts of history disappear, and in the same way in which one should remember Cromwell and his actions every time one visits Parliament and sees his statue — which should never be removed — we should, and should always be able to, cast a regular, cynical and inquisitive eye over Hitler’s pap. The proposal that I already know all I need to know and someone else should be able to tell me what I am allowed to read and buy strikes more of the humourless and cruel censors who policed this benighted period of history than the heroes for whom such a restriction on liberty was an anathema.

The instincts and delusions which were the germ of this book and the regime exist, dormant or in other forms, today; we can’t erase them, pretending that they don’t or never existed is counter-productive, our best chance is to study and attempt to understand them to as great an extent as we can. I hope that you, dear reader, rather than gaining all your historical knowledge and understanding through the pages of a textbook and from the mind of a historian, would want to (at least sometimes) inform your conception of history by studying the original and contemporary sources then drawing your own conclusions — it will be more shocking than you expect.

Oliver Cox writes on politics and related issues, and is currently working on a new group-blogging project. You can read his own blog here, and find him on Twitter @peoplespoet

© Fabien Ecochard

President François Hollande’s call for a new growth-led approach has resonated with many people across Europe who continue to suffer from a seemingly endless cycle of economic decline and painful public sector cuts. Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, who have strongly criticised the self-defeating nature of the Eurozone’s austerity-based economic policy, have also welcomed his election as a much needed breath of fresh air. Yet amidst this initial wave of optimism, it is important to remain realistic about what Hollande can truly achieve.

Most importantly, unlike the dramatic political upheaval we have seen in Greece, Hollande’s victory was not primarily the result of a protest vote against austerity. Public spending in France has actually slightly increased since the financial crisis began, with the public sector now accounting for 57% of GDP. The few austerity measures implemented by Sarkozy were nothing like on the scale of the drastic budget cuts implemented in Greece, and were based largely on tax increases rather than a reduction in spending. If anything, many French people actually quite approved of Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis, and viewed him as more competent and decisive than his opponent. Furthermore, both Sarkozy and Hollande pledged to reduce the budget deficit to zero, albeit with a one year difference in time-scales. The French elections were marked not so much by a rejection of austerity, but rather a rejection of Sarkozy himself, specifically his personal image which over the course of his presidency had become viewed as vulgar and abrasive. You could say that Hollande didn’t win this election, Sarkozy lost it. As so often happens in leadership contests, personality trumped policy.

A central element of Hollande’s campaign was that he would be a ‘normal president‘; in other words, that he would not be another Sarkozy. Ever since he celebrated his 2007 election victory by dining in a lavish restaurant with a group his millionaire friends before taking a holiday on one of their luxury yachts, instead of withdrawing to a monastery as he had promised, Sarkozy’s popularity ratings began their steady, inexorable decline. He became known as a ‘bling-bling president‘, unfitting for the highest office of a country where leaders are traditionally expected to act with a high degree of dignity and class. His subsequent divorce followed by a widely publicised marriage with singer-model Carla Bruni, and the now infamous rude exchange with a man who refused to shake his hand, combined to cement his crass image. Personal dislike of Sarkozy overshadowed his performance as president, and by May 2008 his approval rating had dropped to a mere 32%, despite having been France’s most popular leader since Charles de Gaulle when he was elected just one year earlier.

Contrary to Sarkozy, Hollande comes across as friendly, dignified and unpretentious. He fully understands the importance of symbolism in French presidential politics. There were no yachts or extravagant restaurants after he won the presidency, but an initial victory speech in the square of his small sleepy home-town of Tulle. One of his first measures will be to reduce his own salary by 30%, in stark contrast to Sarkozy who doubled his salary within his first year. Undeniably, Hollande’s campaign also proposed a more radical, substantial agenda, including a 75% tax rate for the super-rich and the creation of 60,000 teaching jobs. But he also understood that France remains a majority right-wing country, as shown by the first round of the recent elections, and that in order for him to win public image and personality would have to take a front-seat over more substantive issues.

So what does this all mean for Hollande’s challenge to German-led austerity and the future of the Eurozone? Most importantly, Hollande will be keen to distinguish himself from the days of ‘Merkozy’ and especially from Sarkozy’s perceived weakness in his partnership with the German Chancellor. With Merkel refusing to budge on renegotiating the fiscal pact, Hollande is pushing for a complementary growth pact which would enable the European Investment Bank to fund more low-interest loans for small or medium size businesses and infrastructure projects. This would enable him to save face, but will provide little relief for debt-stricken countries such as Greece. While it is technically a not-for-profit institution, the bank ultimately seeks to make an annual profit and to preserve its AAA credit rating through low risk investments. It might therefore be able to give a well-needed boost to business, but is unlikely to address the fundamental imbalance social crises and political instability which continue to hamper economic recovery in the Eurozone.

A more radical approach is required if the Eurozone is to survive intact, including a significant rise in wages and consumer spending in Germany, a temporary relaxation of the strict conditions laid out in the fiscal pact, and greater fiscal transfers to Europe’s increasingly impoverished periphery. The pooling of government debts into Eurobonds is also crucial in order to reduce interest rates for highly indebted countries and facilitate repayments. A currency union requires not just budgetary responsibility amongst member states, but economic solidarity.

Hollande has expressed his support for a number of these policies, in particular the issuance of Eurobonds, a proposal which still faces strong opposition from Germany. But he is ultimately answerable to the French public, who whilst being opposed to austerity measures being imposed in France, have no more appetite for transferring their wealth to Greece, Portugal or Spain than Germany does, and are more concerned with domestic issues such as enduring unemployment.  He must also look to the upcoming legislative elections in June, where he needs to secure a parliamentary majority, and faces the threat of charismatic Marine le Pen’s far-right Front National making some sort of alliance with Sarkozy’s now leaderless right-wing UMP.

So whilst Hollande may enact some of his more progressive policies at home, he is unlikely to focus his efforts on a substantial change in policy at the European level, where it is currently most needed. A political compromise with Merkel, in which Hollande comes out with enough concessions to look strong in front of his countrymen without threatening the status quo, seems almost inevitable. Ultimately, the French elections were dominated by France’s politics of personality, not Europe’s politics of austerity. We should then remain apprehensive as to whether the new President will succeed in implementing the sort of radical change in approach many are hoping for.

Paul Haydon is currently studying a masters in European Public Policy at University College London. He has previously worked at the European Parliament, and at a magazine in Shanghai, China. You can read his blog here 

© ACLU of Northern California

The recent US Republican primary campaign once again brought America’s use of the death penalty into the spotlight, following Rick Perry’s statement of certainty that the state of Texas had never put an innocent man to death. Others were not so sure, particularly about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who had been executed under Perry’s watch as the then Governor.

Writing in The New Yorker, David Grann’s article Trial by fire looked in detail at the bungled investigation and suspect science that led to Willingham’s death on charges of arson, for a house fire that killed his children. Grann revealed the torment of Willingham, stuck on death row trying to prove his innocence:

Over the years, Willingham’s letters home became increasingly despairing. “This is a hard place, and it makes a person hard inside,” he wrote. “I told myself that was one thing I did not want and that was for this place to make me bitter, but it is hard.” He went on, “They have [executed] at least one person every month I have been here. It is senseless and brutal. . . . You see, we are not living in here, we are only existing.”

A new investigation by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review reveals another such case in Texas, where mistaken identity led to the execution of Carlos DeLuna in 1989, for the murder of a woman with a hunting knife.

Los Toyacos Carlos: Anatomy of a wrongful execution, sets out in great detail how Professor James Liebman and his team quickly uncovered holes in the investigation. Carlos DeLuna had always claimed he was a victim of mistaken identity, and that the man responsible for the murder was Carlos Hernandez. This claim was considered a fantasy by prosecutors and police, yet it took just days for the researchers to find not only that Hernandez existed, but that he had a history of violent knife crime. According to the editor of the review:

The Article chronicles the murder of Wanda Lopez in Corpus Christi, Texas on February 4, 1983 and then traces the intersecting lives of Carlos DeLuna, who was ultimately convicted of murder and executed on December 8, 1989, and Carlos Hernandez, the likely culprit. In painstaking detail, the authors have identified the numerous missteps, missed clues, and missed opportunities that led authorities to prosecute Carlos DeLuna for the crime of murder, despite evidence not only that he did not commit the crime but that another individual, Carlos Hernandez, did. At a minimum, we hope that this breathtaking story will be an adequate answer to those who question whether it is possible that an innocent man has ever been executed for a crime he did not commit in the United States.

Read the full investigation at the Columbia Human Rights Law Review

Ghazni province, Afghanistan © isafmedia

Writing in The Independent, Kim Sengupta reveals how a trip to celebrate the Taliban’s retreat in Ghazni province, in fact just demonstrated the blurred and inconclusive nature of the whole Afghan war:

The mortar rounds came in from the hills, spraying shrapnel as they sank into the red earth; long bursts of machine-gun and Kalashnikov fire followed, all aimed at the helicopter landing strip. The attack just missed its target – the aircraft in which the governor was leaving after a public meeting to celebrate the defeat and expulsion of the Taliban from this area. The helicopter scrambled away, as did a second one in which a group of journalists was due to travel, with just two passengers on board. The rest of us ran to a disused school which was being used as a headquarters by Afghan and Nato forces for the mission to clear insurgents from the villages in this harsh and unforgiving stretch of Ghazni province.

The firefight lasted for 70 minutes, with Soviet-era heavy machine guns, manned by Poles and Afghans, answering the incoming Taliban rounds. A few of these fell on a track leading to an old fort of the Gilzai tribe, 300 yards away, where senior officials had been telling a crowd of about 500 villagers at a shura, or public meeting, about the bright future which lay ahead for them, now the enemy had been forced to flee.

© Saadick Dhansay

The election in March 2012 of Joachim Gauck as Germany’s President demonstrates a remarkable achievement of recent German history. For the first time since unification in October 1990, Germany has a Chancellor and President from the former East Germany. Widely admired both for the size of its export oriented economy, Europe’s largest, and for its more enlightened way of doing capitalism, Germany had the capability and the necessary goodwill before the start of the Eurozone crisis to take a positive leadership role during the downturn.

Its voice within the EU is very strong, as it has been since the EU’s inception. Yet Germany has squandered these advantages.

It has actively resisted taking coherent action that might help to resolve Europe’s problems, even when the OECD has called for a bigger bailout fund. German political leaders have instead surrendered to domestic political concerns. For such a powerful global actor to take this course of action demonstrates considerable weakness.

Germany has pursued a policy course that is strongly focused on imposing balanced budgets on Eurozone members, and obsessed with maintaining low inflation. One could perhaps reasonably argue that a tough stance on fiscal policy when deficits and debt abound would be merited, so long as the outcomes of such a policy could accurately be said to be fair. Yet the imposed penury and masochistic fixation with balanced budgets and low inflation rates are neither fair nor achievable. This blinkered focus has led to poor policy, and poor policy in turn has serious consequences like unemployment, poverty, and loss of social cohesion, with millions of Europeans at the sharp end. Meanwhile, there is little sign of growth across the continent.

Germany’s abysmal failure to lead or endorse anything approaching a sustainable solution to the Eurozone’s many challenges is in large part a result of cynical short term political calculation and cowardice. That Germany has benefited substantially from being part of the Euro is repeatedly understated or even ignored by German politicians and media keen to secure domestic political capital from being seen to be tough on the more profligate countries of southern Europe. Yet Germany itself benefited during the boom years from running budget deficits. And Germany has received a large boost from the Euro. As commentators such as Will Hutton correctly observe, Germany has gained hugely from having the same exchange rate as less competitive exporters such as Greece and Spain. Membership of the Euro has helped Germany to increase its share of world trade in the past ten years while the trend for most other developed states has been in the opposite direction. It stands near the top of the WTO’s tables of biggest exporters alongside China and the US, countries that have far larger populations that Germany’s 82 million.

The key point here is that recent policy choices Germany has made are not inevitable. There are alternatives. After all, the role of politicians is to assess the best choices given the circumstances and then take what they consider to be the most appropriate actions. In the EU and Eurozone case – and Germany’s has been a dominant voice within Europe – politicians have too often made the wrong choices for the wrong reasons. If Germany had taken different decisions, circumstances in turn could be very different. Yet it has continued to defy the notion that those with greater power have greater responsibility by sticking to targets that are impossible for others to meet.

The revelation that even the fiscally conservative Netherlands would not be able to meet its side of the bargain under self- defeating Eurozone measures on budget deficits serves to further illustrate that the policy is unworkable. It simply cannot succeed. Germany is indicted on this issue.

Meanwhile, a decline in credit lending to consumers and businesses across Europe and higher rates on existing lending such as mortgages, which puts more people at risk of default, continues to be a significant problem for the continent.

And yet Germany remains committed to actions that can be described, at best, as piecemeal and, at worst, dangerous. From a cursory glance at 20th century history, it is clear why Germany’s authorities and many of the German people have a strong aversion to inflation and debt. Whether German guilt about its past is a reason for the country’s current inaction, as some commentators have claimed, is very contentious. Yet, whether this is true or not, there should be no excuse for policies that are causing needless suffering in the present.

The measures announced following a meeting of European finance ministers on 30-31 March inspire little confidence that a lasting solution can be achieved soon, especially when the US, G20 and IMF have joined the OECD in calling for a larger bailout fund. As the Financial Times’ Wolfgang Münchau has noted, Germany continues to resist a full merger between the European Financial Stability Facility and its permanent successor, the European Stability Mechanism.

In the current circumstances, where further European integration is required, Germany’s position is prolonging the crisis by refusing the follow an integrationist route. It is not that Angela Merkel, or Germany’s hawkish constitutional court, wish ill on the rest of Europe. It is simply that that Germany’s blinkered position, while at least partially understandable, is both ineffective and counterproductive. This position, however, seems likely to face a greater challenge following the election of the Socialist Party’s François Hollande as President of France on 6 May, and parliamentary elections in Greece on the same day. If, as seems likely, President Hollande uses an upcoming EU summit to emphasise “growth, responsibility and governance” instead of austerity and balanced budgets, German leaders may at least have to compromise.

The knowledge that things could be so different makes Germany’s actions all the more exasperating. It is rightfully an influential and widely admired actor. From its successful export-focused economic model – the type of which the likes of the UK and US can only dream about – to its successful democracy and remarkably peaceful unification, Germany has much to be proud of in its recent history.

Yet for such an actor to shirk from its responsibilities underscores that it is German weakness, not strength, that is a problem for Europe at the present time.

Roland Bensted is the Europe editor of The Heptagon Post. He has worked at the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, and is currently employed as a Senior Researcher at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. 

A version of this article can also be seen at The Heptagon Post