Two further points about German imperium that I wanted to discuss/elaborate on in today's column but fell by the wayside bc it was already too long:
nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opi…
nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opi…
First I only briefly mentioned France, but of course the "EU-as-German empire" is also a Germano-French partnership, and as such its fate will be heavily determined by the direction of French politics + statesmanship.
If France ever abandons the EU project it will fall; if France can curb Germany's most blinkered tendencies the project is more likely to succeed; if France wants to take more of a full leadership role in the imperium it ... will be interesting.
Second, I didn't discuss the German-Russian relationship, which is another reason why the story of a Putin-formulated illiberal bacillus spreading westward and resisted by Angela Merkel Leader of the Free World is way too simplistic.
The German elite is considerably more Russia-friendly than the Western liberals writing in anguish about Putin, and certainly more Russia-friendly than the populists in Poland.
This is another way in which the old lines of empire are as important as any liberal/authoritarian divide. The Germans still often seem to see eastern European nations as inconveniences, Moscow as a potential great-power partner.
And the more the Anglo-Americans become peripheral to the EU, the more powerful that impulse may become. Which will continue to make EU/Visegrad group politics much more complicated than a freedom/unfreedom dichotomy suggested by some observers. /finis
