Masha Gessen Journeys to a Jewish Land Without Jews

Sasha Senderovich, Forward, September 9, 2016

For a couple of weeks several years ago, my Facebook wall filled up with photos from friends participating in the First International Summer Yiddish Program in Birobidzhan, the capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far East. These were delightful group pictures taken next to the main points of interest for visiting Yiddishists and seekers of Jewish curiosities: the monument to the writer Sholem Aleichem located in front of a Soviet apartment block, the statue of Jewish settlers in a horse-drawn cart next to the train station, signs marking government ministries in Russian and Yiddish —the two official languages of this federal region located on the border with China.

Then I began seeing photos from inside hospitals, paint peeling off their walls: many program participants had fallen ill with salmonella. In time, thankfully, they all recovered and returned to their home countries with stories to tell. Far fewer participants came to Birobidzhan the following summer. There was never a third time, or, for that matter, a fourth. The program’s twenty-first century participants ended up recreating the pattern of Jews who traveled to the region in the early Stalin years and after the Second World War: each wave of migrants discovered that Birobidzhan was a place where Jews could not be.

Masha Gessen’s new book about Birobidzhan conveys this realization in its title: the Jewish Autonomous Region is a place “Where the Jews Aren’t.” The Soviet Union created Birobidzhan as a Jewish region in the context of its nationalities policy, based on a view that ethnic groups were historically, culturally, and linguistically linked to particular geographic areas. Jews presented a problem: they were an ethnic group lacking a discrete “national” territory. Birobidzhan was intended to resolve this discrepancy — thousands of miles away from the center of Jewish historical geography in Russia’s Western borderlands, an area known as the Pale of Settlement. For a century and a half, distinct patterns of everyday life and culture developed in the Yiddish language in the Pale, beyond which most Jews were not permitted to settle. Roughly two million Jews moved from there between 1881 and the First World War — mainly to the United States but also to South Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere. More departed in the wake of pogroms after the Bolshevik revolution, around 1920, and moved to European countries, including Germany. Still, millions more Jews remained in the former Pale, whose territory had been divided into new Soviet republics named after titular ethnic groups such as Belarusians and Ukrainians.

The Soviet government built on — or, rather, as Gessen explains, co-opted — the enthusiasm of some proponents of Jewish cultural autonomy, such as the historian Simon Dubnow, as it sought to have Jews defined as one of the Soviet national groups. After a failed attempt in the early 1920s to establish agricultural Jewish colonies in Crimea, the new territory in the Far East was selected; ethnic Koreans and Chinese, among other groups, populated the area at the time. In the late 1920s the first Jewish settlers moved to the region at the confluence of the Bira and Bidzhan rivers, enticed by the promise of creating socialist Jewish culture in Yiddish and also by the expectation that they would undergo a transformation from an economically backward people into muscular builders of factories and tillers of the soil. The territory was upgraded to the status of an autonomous region in 1934, and was championed across the Soviet Union and abroad as the home of the Jewish people.

But no more than a few thousand Jews moved to Birobidzhan in the 1930s. Many — faced with the harsh climate and isolation — returned home or moved on. Many others were killed in Stalinist purges. The project went dormant toward the late 1930s, only to experience another short-lived renaissance after the Second World War, followed by another purge. For the rest of the Soviet period, the region remained a backwater, made all the stranger by continuing to carry the word “Jewish” in its name on the country’s maps, including during times of systemic anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Autonomous Region is still part of the Russian Federation and Yiddish is still, nominally, its official language. At present, an estimated 1,500 people out of its roughly 165,000 residents are Jewish; only very few of them speak Yiddish. When Gessen traveled to Birobidzhan in 2009 — two years after salmonella sickened the international Yiddishists — she found little more than the esoteric remnants of a place that has always existed somewhat tenuously. An influential observer of contemporary Russian life, Gessen offers perceptive details of Birobidzhan in the present, taking a tour of its museums, monuments and remaining Jewish institutions. These appear to her “like so much of Birobidzhan, an unconscious exercise in the falsification of history.” She is told by one of the last speakers of Yiddish that although some captions in the local museum are incorrect, they will never be corrected because no one can read them anyway. She orders, at Café California, a “schnitzel a la Birobidzhan,” which turns out to be made of pork. She observes that like many local museums in Russia, the exhibit on Birobidzhan’s history begins in a “profoundly ahistoric” fashion with a section on geology. Rocks are “an ideal museum exhibit,” Gessen writes, because, unlike exhibits on culture, history, and politics, they “do not need to be rearranged in case of a regime shift.” Throughout this concise and engaging book, Gessen strives to offer the story of Birobidzhan as idea, location, and experience.

The map created for the book by the cartographer Darya Oreshkina, skillfully illustrates how Birobidzhan sits at what Yiddish idiomatically calls ek velt — the edge of the world. Gessen, too, quips that the town’s original name, Tikhonkaya, which means “Little, Quiet One,” was “someone’s polite way of saying ‘godforsaken.’” At the same time, Oreshkina’s map, drawn as a segment of a spherical globe, reminds us that the Earth is round and that any point on the planet could become central if framed accordingly. Gessen’s narrative similarly aspires to locate Birobidzhan at the center of several inter-related stories: the international context of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century; the global story of Yiddish language and culture; and, finally, the complicated story of the Soviet Jewish experience itself. Not all of these constitutive narratives align in Gessen’s effort to have them converge on the central axis of Birobidzhan.

The story of the Jewish Autonomous Region relies on stories of Jewish mobility both before and after the region’s addition to the Jewish map. As many Jews moved from the Pale of Settlement and were displaced by revolution and war, this distant enclave became a destination for some Jews from around the newly reconfigured Jewish world. “Where the Jews Aren’t” tells some parts of this story: for example, Gessen alludes to the many Jews who relocated from the Pale to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century but moved to Birobidzhan as American citizens in the 1920s and the 1930s. However, this part of the narrative lacks wider contextual details, such as the fact that the onset of the Great Depression led to increased interest in Soviet socialism among the Jewish working class.

Other geographic points on the map also get short shrift. The relationship between the Soviet project of Jewish settlement in Birobidzhan and Zionism in Palestine is mentioned only in passing despite the fact that many representations of the Jewish Autonomous Region deliberately coopted Zionist clichés, for example the extended cultural metaphor of the “land of milk and honey.” Birobidzhan was thus not merely thousands of miles from Tel Aviv: for the Soviet government, it was a kind of “Red Zion,” intentionally conceived as an alternative to the Jewish settlement in the Middle East, seen in the USSR as a branch of British colonialism.

While the Zionists were building their society with the help of a modernized and vernacularized Hebrew, the Soviet government designated Birobidzhan as a territory where Yiddish — the native tongue of the majority of Russian Jews in the 1920s — would enjoy the status of an official language. Though much of Gessen’s book focuses on Yiddish, it does not explain how Yiddish came to be viewed in the USSR as the national language of the Jewish proletariat and Hebrew a language of both retrograde religious practice and bourgeois nationalism.

However, Gessen is certainly aware of the fact of Yiddish’s international context at the time, and to tell this part of the story, she recruits the writer David Bergelson (1884-1952) as her book’s central protagonist. Bergelson’s peripatetic life exemplifies for Gessen the spirit of unsettledness and upheaval. She focuses on Berglson’s relocation to Berlin, from Kiev, via post-revolutionary Moscow, in 1921; his 1926 declaration of allegiance to Soviet socialism; and his subsequent return to the USSR in 1934. “When a man has no home but a great need of belonging, he must build his own world,” Gessen observes of Bergelson’s modernist prose, which revolutionized Yiddish literature. A key aspect of Bergelson’s world for Gessen is what she identifies as the writer’s well-developed survival instinct, which involved maintaining connections to multiple places in case historical developments demanded a quick escape. Sensing the dangerous turn of events in Germany in the 1930s and in advance of his eventual return to the Soviet Union, Bergelson visited Birobidzhan.

Bergelson’s visit inspired writings vastly different from his acknowledged Yiddish masterpieces “The End of Everything” and “Descent,” which Gessen reads in their Russian translation. His work on Birobidzhan mainly toed the Party line about the project of settling Jews in the Far East. Gessen speculates that Bergelson may have been motivated to write this material in exchange for securing another location where he could escape if the need arose. Recounting Bergelson’s 1932 encounter in Birobidzhan with the young Yiddish poet Emmanuil Kazakevich, Gessen concludes that, “Bergelson might have suspected that this was the only place in the world where young people, plural, were writing poetry in Yiddish.” This speculation is important because it suggests that Bergelson’s propagandistic writing about Birobidzhan may have been motivated by at least a partial belief that this faraway place offered a unique incubator of Yiddish literary talent. But this conjecture, however empathetic, offers a misleading narrative of the history of Yiddish in the twentieth century — particularly for a story with Bergelson as its subject.

By the early 1930s, Bergelson was an acknowledged figure in Yiddish letters. Bergelson knew this international scene well, and he knew that it stretched from America, where experimental poetry was being written in New York, to Poland, where a group of poets — including Avrom Sutzkever, who was the same age as Kazakevich — called themselves Young Vilna to emphasize the newness of their aspirations. While Kazakevich ceased writing in Yiddish in the 1940s and would go on to win the Stalin Prize as a Russian-language writer, Sutzkever continued actively writing in Yiddish for another seven decades. The interwar years were one of Yiddish literature’s most productive and experimental periods — Bergelson’s meeting with Kazakevich in Birobidzhan was hardly its representative encounter, nor was Birobidzhan a central point on the international map of Yiddish.

In fact, there is a misalignment evident throughout the book between the parts of the story that focus on Birobidzhan as a place “where the Jews aren’t” and an attempt to make it central to other narratives where the Jews actually were — and, indeed, are. Dubnow’s ideas about Jewish cultural autonomy, for example, were more often discussed in relation to regions where Jews already lived, than to Birobidzhan, as Gessen herself recounts. Birobidzhan was not the central site for Yiddish literature, nor did Yiddish come to die in the Soviet Far East, the way Gessen’s book suggests. Most crucially, Birobidzhan offers an inconvenient model for the story of Soviet Jewry. “I kept circling back to the story of Birobidzhan, which, in its concentrated tragic absurdity, seemed to tell it all,” Gessen writes regarding the questions about the Soviet Jewish experience that animate her book. While straining at times to spin the globe to focus on Birobidzhan, Gessen in fact offers a far more compelling narrative to illuminate the story of Soviet Jewry: her own.

Gessen’s two emigration stories frame the book: more recently from Putin’s Russia, fleeing in 2013 the anti-LGBTQ legislation that endangered her family, and her first departure as a Jewish teenager, from the Soviet Union in 1981. As she recounts two goodbye parties held three decades apart she ponders Bergelson’s repeated migrations through her “own experience of being a stranger in a strange land.” Employing her expertise reporting on contemporary Russian court trials, she contemplates the writer’s eventual trial and execution in Stalin’s USSR. She considers Jewish migrants’ vision of a new home in Birobidzhan in light of her own search for Jewish identity as a child coming of age in the USSR in the 1970s: “they had been very much like my friends and me, convinced that their mission in life was to find and secure the one place in the world that would make a true home for the Jews.”

Snippets of Gessen’s own biography as a Jewish Muscovite turn the book’s mistakes and omissions into a telling part of the larger story it tells. For example, while examining a single copy of Birobidzhan’s Yiddish newspaper, Birobidzhaner shtern, that ended up in her possession in the 1970s — without having the language skills to read it — Gessen assumes it to be the only Yiddish periodical in the USSR. She didn’t know at the time, nor does her book reveal any subsequent realization, that as she pondered the inscrutable text as a Soviet Jewish child, the editorial offices of Sovetish heymland — a Yiddish-language monthly — were located much closer to home, in Moscow. Gessen wonders how the Soviet Union—home to several million Jews after the Second World War — “rid itself of Jewish culture altogether,” without offering new ways of conceptualizing a great deal of its Jewish culture, which scholars including Anna Shternshis, David Shneer, Gennady Estraikh, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, and Harriet Murav have written about in the last decade. Gessen dedicates her book to her parents for having had “the courage to emigrate” and summarizes the main story of “Where the Jews Aren’t” as one “about Birobidzhan, the concept of home, and knowing when to leave.” Her book, however, succeeds not for its story about Birobidzhan, which doesn’t carry the weight of the far more interesting narrative at the heart of the book. That other story, of Gessen’s winding journey toward seeing herself as part of a people who were and are, offers the reader a rich primary source about a still ongoing process of post-Soviet Jews gaining awareness of the Soviet Jewish experience.

   German Europe or European Germany?

Hugo Drochon, Project Syndicate 9/9/16

The UK’s vote in June to leave the European Union not only changed the 

course of British history, but also underscored fundamental questions 

about Germany’s role in Europe and the world. With the migration crisis 

weakening German Chancellor Angela Merkel politically just when her 

authority in Europe is most needed, the new “German Question” can no 

longer be avoided.

CAMBRIDGE – Even before voters in the United Kingdom decided in June to 

“Brexit” the European Union, notes Anatole Kaletsky of Gavekal 

Dragonomics, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was widely credited with 

“finally answering Henry Kissinger’s famous question about the Western 

alliance: ‘What is the phone number for Europe?’”

Brexit merely confirmed the point: UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s first 

foreign trip after replacing David Cameron in July was to Berlin. If 

Merkel has the power to mold the relationship between the EU and the UK, 

as May appears to believe, she also has the power to shape the 

post-Brexit EU.

The question is what type of Europe Germany wants. For Princeton 

University’s Harold James, “Brexit means Germany can no longer rely on 

its liberal, more market-oriented ally around the discussion table.” But 

Kaletsky wonders whether Germany wants to discuss much of anything at 

all. “If Europe’s phone number has a German dialing code,” he quips, “it 

goes through to an automated answer: ‘Nein zu Allem.’”

But Europe can no longer afford what Kaletsky describes as “the standard 

German response to all economic initiatives aimed at strengthening 

Europe.” As many Project Syndicate commentators point out, Europe’s 

global influence depends on further integration. And that is impossible 

without determined German leadership, which may now be hard to find. 

Indeed, with “public support for the government…” having “fallen below 

50%,” Michael Br?ning of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung wonders if Merkel 

will even seek “reelection as her party’s candidate for another term.”

Europe’s Civilizing Mission

To understand what almost unchallenged German leadership in Europe could 

mean for the EU and the world requires a sober grasp of how Germans 

themselves view Europe and their role in it. And many Germans have come 

to consider the EU a burden, not a benefit; the other member states, 

they increasingly believe, want to squeeze ever more money out of them.

But the truth is that Germany has been one of the biggest winner over 

the past seven decades of European unification, both economically and 

politically. As Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister, put 

it in 2015, Germany restored its reputation after World War II by 

“embracing Western integration and Europeanization.” Because “Bismarck’s 

unification of Germany [occurred] in the nineteenth century,” he 

explains, “power became inextricably associated with nationalism and 

militarism.”

What Fischer calls “the foundation of the second, unified German 

nation-state in 1989” reflected and reinforced a very different mindset. 

For Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of New America and a former director 

of policy planning at the US State Department, today’s Germany accepts 

that increased power will require it to assume “greater responsibility 

to defend and extend” the international order from which it has 

benefited so greatly. She quotes German President Joachim Gauck: the 

post-World War II order gave rise to the “good Germany, the best we have 

ever known.”

Yet Fischer fears that the lessons of European integration are being 

lost in the avalanche of crises that has hit the EU, with the Greek debt 

crisis catalyzing German disillusionment. In the fraught negotiations at 

the height of the crisis, he says, Germany “announced its desire to 

transform the eurozone from a European project into a kind of sphere of 

influence.” Germany no longer wanted “more Europe; it wanted less.”

Of course, the contrast between a “European Germany” and a “German 

Europe” is not new. In 2013, after Merkel was reelected, James noted 

that “independent German political units” have been disappearing ever 

since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. “If Germany’s new government leads 

the charge toward a stronger, more federal Europe,” he suggested, “a 

century from now, there may well be no sovereign German political unit 

at all. Germany and its lovers die in the end, only to live happily ever 

after.”

Perhaps. In the meantime, Brexit, together with Merkel’s decision to 

admit more than a million migrants from Syria and elsewhere in the 

greater Middle East (partly to repair the reputational damage Germany 

suffered as a result of its stance toward Greece), has made Germany’s 

choice both clearer and more urgent. Germany can either regard Europe as 

a projection of German power politics, as it did in the first half of 

the twentieth century, or it can fulfill the post-1945 goal of 

self-dissolution into a truly European federal entity.

The Arrogance of Reform

Immediate political factors aside, the question of Germany’s role in 

Europe stems from its economic dominance. During the eurozone crisis, 

many decried Germany’s current-account surplus, not Greek profligacy, as 

the true cause of the Union’s problems. But, as Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff 

argues, “Germans view the maintenance of strong balance sheets as 

essential to their country’s stabilizing role in Europe.” Take one away, 

and you may be left without the other.

Ironically, as Daniel Gros, Director of the Brussels-based Centre for 

European Policy Studies, reminds us, at the start of the century, it was 

Germany that was the sick man of Europe. “Its economy was mired in 

recession, while the rest of Europe was recovering; its unemployment 

rate was higher than the eurozone average; it was violating the European 

budget rules by running excessive deficits; and its financial system was 

in crisis.” Through austerity and structural reforms, Germany 

transformed itself.

Little wonder, then, that Germans counsel others to follow their 

example. But, as Gros points out, this story is only half right. After 

all, Germany has gained little in terms of productivity. Marcel 

Fratzscher, formerly of the European Central Bank, together with Jürgen 

Fitschen of Deutsche Bank and Reiner Hoffmann of the Confederation of 

German Trade Unions, assert that a “key reason for this lackluster 

performance is Germany’s notoriously paltry investment rate, which is 

among the lowest in the OECD.” They note that, “since 1999, the largest 

German multinationals have doubled their employee headcounts abroad, 

while cutting jobs at home.”

The euro’s introduction certainly helped Germany regain some 

competitiveness, but Gros points to an often-overlooked factor: 

“persistently high unemployment forced workers to accept lower wages and 

longer working hours, while wages continued to increase by 2-3% per year 

in the eurozone’s booming peripheral countries.” German gains in 

competitiveness, then, are relative, and subsequently Germany has 

obliged Spain and Greece – but not Italy – to undertake reforms much 

harsher than those it ever imposed on itself.

Many economists now urge Germany to boost wages and demand to help 

exporters in Greece and other countries on the eurozone periphery. 

German firms might complain, but Dalia Marin, Chair of International 

Economics at the University of Munich, thinks that the “most important 

factor behind Germany’s success” is not price competitiveness, but 

quality. Because “German exporters are organized in a way that is less 

hierarchical and more decentralized than other European firms,” she 

argues, “employees at lower levels of the corporate hierarchy” can 

“devise and implement new ideas.” And, because “these employees are 

often closer to customers than those higher up, their collective 

knowledge about what the market is demanding is an important source of 

value.”

But it is unclear that periphery countries would benefit from higher 

German demand. As Gros argued in 2013, Germany is “just the tip of a 

Teutonic iceberg.” Beneath the surface, “the Netherlands, Switzerland, 

Sweden, and Norway are all running surpluses that are larger as a 

proportion of GDP.” Given that Germany imports relatively little from 

the eurozone periphery, higher German demand would mainly benefit 

countries that already have large external surpluses.

Does this mean that the German growth model should be ignored – in 

Europe and elsewhere? Harvard’s Dani Rodrik notes that countries such as 

India and Turkey (as well as many in Africa and in the former Soviet 

bloc) have proved that growth can also be debt-led. And, as Gros points 

out, the “Teutonic” surplus is currently balanced by “Anglo-Saxon” 

dissaving: “Together, the sum of the current-account deficits of the 

United States, the United Kingdom, and major Commonwealth countries 

amounts to more than $800 billion, or roughly 60% of the global total of 

all external deficits.” This helps to explain Merkel’s eagerness to 

maintain a close trading partnership with the UK.

The Ordoliberal Straitjacket

The University of California at Berkeley’s Barry Eichengreen traces 

Germany’s deep-seated “ideological aversion to budget deficits” to “the 

post-World War II doctrine of ‘ordoliberalism,’” championed most 

effectively by Ludwig Erhard as German finance minister in the 1950s and 

Chancellor in the mid-1960s. According to Eichengreen, ordoliberalism, 

which “counseled that government should enforce contracts and ensure 

adequate competition but otherwise avoid interfering in the economy,” 

succeeded in preventing “German policymakers from being tempted by 

excesses like those of Hitler and Stalin.” And yet its “emphasis on 

personal responsibility” ruled out “the idea that actions that are 

individually responsible do not automatically produce desirable 

aggregate outcomes.” As a result, “it rendered Germans allergic to 

macroeconomics.”

But, as James points out, ordoliberalism was a response to Germany’s 

need for “a complete change of its domestic regime to break out of its 

cycle of debt and default.” That experience, he argues, informs 

Germany’s approach to the eurozone in general, and to its highly 

indebted member countries in particular: “without a fundamental 

reorientation of a country’s politics, the thinking in Germany goes, 

debt forgiveness will always remain a futile exercise.”

Jürgen Jeske, a former publisher of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine 

Zeitung, questions the sincerity of that thinking. Germany’s “current 

economic dominance,” Jeske argues, “has been built on a policy framework 

that stands in direct opposition to” Erhard’s doctrine, which he 

adamantly defends. The truth, according to Jeske, is that Merkel’s 

government has abandoned ordoliberalism in favor of an economic strategy 

that “has been haphazard, driven more by political expediency than by 

any underlying philosophy.” As a result, “Germany’s policymakers seem to 

be stumbling from decision to decision” and “reacting with no clear 

sense of direction to the demands of the moment.”

Only non-Germans, it seems, need to stick to the rules.

Defending Europe

Some fear that Germany’s foreign policy has become similarly two-faced. 

Slaughter is convinced that Germany remains a pillar of the West in 

terms of its allegiance to NATO and European unity. She cites a 

high-level report, “the product of several months of debate within the 

German foreign-policy and security community,” which “identifies 

Germany’s current values and interests as a commitment to ‘human 

dignity, freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and to an international 

order that is based on universal norms.’”

But Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s newly elected Governor, is not so confident. 

She fears that the scale of Germany’s economic ties with Russia and 

China is injecting a form of “stealth neutralism” into the country’s 

diplomacy.

Indeed, Germany happily relied on the UK to take a tough stance against 

Russia after its annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern 

Ukraine. Now, the UK’s departure may clear the way for a new Ostpolitik 

with Russia. As German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier 

suggested recently, “we should heed the lesson of détente: however deep 

the rifts, we must try to build bridges.”

Nonetheless, Europe, Steinmeier wrote last year, “remains the foundation 

of Germany’s foreign policy,” and that “Germany is capable of acting 

effectively” to shape global developments “only within a solid European 

framework.” Likewise, Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador and 

current head of the Munich Security Conference, argued well before the 

Brexit vote that “Germany has an opportunity to provide a counterweight 

to long-standing British objections” against a more integrated European 

Foreign and Defense Policy. “By putting its considerable influence in 

the service of a cohesive, strategically focused foreign and security 

policy,” Ischinger argued, “Germany would simultaneously achieve two key 

objectives: a stronger and more capable EU and a more European Germany.”

Slaughter takes this view a step further. She calls for a “deepening” of 

the EU “through measures that would include democratizing EU financial 

decision-making by directly engaging national parliamentarians and 

exchanging tighter European fiscal constraints on member governments’ 

budgets for a European banking union, a eurozone budget, and Eurobonds.”

All of these ideas are of course currently anathema. But Volker Perthes, 

the chairman of Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (the German Institute 

for International and Security Affairs, which published the report cited 

by Slaughter), seems to understand that hostility to further European 

integration is incompatible with Germany’s own security.

Germany’s willingness to play a greater role in a common foreign and 

defense policy reflects a fundamental truth: the “dividing lines between 

domestic and international affairs,” as Perthes puts it, “have become 

increasingly blurred.” Exhibit A is the refugee crisis, which “demands 

policy interventions in areas as diverse as defense, development aid, 

European integration, domestic security, and social-welfare policy.”

However Jacek Rostowski, a former finance minister and deputy prime 

minister of Poland, is unimpressed. He goes even further than Koike, 

arguing that Germany’s “misguided imposition of austerity on the 

eurozone has undermined European political cohesion, thereby opening the 

door for Russian revanchism and aggression.”

In Rostowski’s view, US presidential candidate Donald Trump has a point 

in accusing European NATO members of free-riding on the US. Only four 

European NATO states meet the Alliance’s 2%-of-GDP target for defense 

spending. One of the four, ironically, is Greece. By contrast, Germany’s 

defense spending, at just 1.2% of GDP, falls far short of its 

obligation. Rostowski doesn’t mince words: “The US should tell Germany – 

in the same no-nonsense terms that Germany used with Greece – that it 

cannot defer to the US for its security while undermining Western unity 

to protect its taxpayers from possible intra-eurozone liabilities.”

Burden-Sharing German-Style

If Germany and the eurozone countries are serious about resolving the 

euro crisis and halting the EU’s unraveling, a more federal 

institutional structure is needed, so that internal trade imbalances can 

be corrected through obligatory transfers of resources from one part of 

the currency union to another. Of course, Germany would have to 

contribute the most to stabilization efforts, which is why it has 

resisted such moves in the past.

Last year, however, Otmar Issing, a founding ECB board member and chief 

economist, wrote that “Europe’s current crisis has convinced many that 

existing institutional arrangements are unsustainable,” and suggested 

that the absence of “progress toward political unification” since the 

euro’s introduction “may be about to change.” Brexit has certainly 

confirmed Issing’s diagnosis, if not his forecast.

Issing himself is highly skeptical of prospects for political 

integration: “voters are far from enthusiastic about the prospect of 

ceding more authority to Europe.” And, in the absence of “true political 

unification,” any “transfer of fiscal competencies to the European 

level” would imply “serious risks.” As a result, for the time being, 

“political responsibility for higher transfer payments among countries 

must remain with the national governments, controlled by national 

parliaments and electorates.”

Political unification, too, carries risks. “The danger”, argues 

Hans-Werner Sinn of Munich University and the Ifo Institute, is “that 

collective decision-making bodies not only provide services that are 

useful to everybody, but also may abuse their power to redistribute 

resources among the participating countries.”

For Sinn, this is not merely a matter of closing the EU’s infamous 

“democratic deficit” – the supposed lack of accountability that played a 

large part in the Brexit vote. (In fact, the most important decisions at 

the European level are made in the European Council, which comprises all