LONDON – Whose fault is the Euro slipping? According to the German Finance Minister, it is the British government, which blocks its veto with the introduction of a tax on savings deposited in Eurobond, and which the other 14 European countries consider essential for tax harmonization. According to London, it would be precisely that tax, if introduced, that would make the Eurobond market capital flee to the United States or Switzerland, causing mass desertion from the single currency. The German government wants to get its hands, in the form of a 20% interest tax, on the savings of its citizens who emigrate to the City, because for the current laws the non-resident who invests in a European country other than his escapes to the tax authorities . The British oppose in the name of the City. It was a similar tax imposed in the United States in 1963 to destroy the foreign bond market of New York, and to make London the first financial center in this field. Blair does not want the reverse to happen now. And, maliciously, he remembers in Berlin that in the City there are more German banks than in Frankfurt. The battle of the “withholding tax” is becoming the Europeanist test on which the relationship between Blair’s Britain and Schroeder’s Germany is played. But it is not the only field of this challenge between the “Rhenish model” and the “Anglo – Saxon model”. Until yesterday, it was the British who blamed the fragility of the Euro to the protectionism of Schroeder, which forces the banks to save the Holzmann in crisis and stands as a chauvinistic defender of the Mannesmann attacked by Vodafone, forgetting all the German conquests on markets, with the same Mannesmann who takes the British mobile phones of Orange, the Deutsche Telekom that swallows those of One 2 One and the pharmaceutical giant Hoescht that absorbs the French Rhone Puolenc.
As if to say: when the British win, you cry out to the danger of Anglo Capitalism without a heart. When the Germans win, it is the good market economy that is affirmed. The misunderstanding between the German model and the English model is fatal. For London, a system is a blasphemy in which bankers sit on the boards of industry and vice versa, along with the trade unions and politicians. When Schroeder was governor of Lower Saxony, he was also director of Volkswagen. In Mannesmann itself there is a limit to the right to vote of the shares, so you can own 20% of the company but do not have a fifth of the votes. For Berlin, on the other hand, the system of the perfidious Albion is madness, based on hostile escalation and on the total subjugation of industrial policies to the logic of shareholder profit. Two cultures face each other. The British bet on everything, the Germans are assured of everything. In Germany the key word is security: “No to experiments”, was Adenauer’s electoral slogan. “Security does not risk”, that of Kohl. In Britain the key word, at least in business, is risk. It is no coincidence that the biggest industry in the country is the City. Elias Canetti said: “English loves to imagine himself on the sea, German in a forest”. Yet it is perhaps precisely because of its model, the social pact for which the employed are the best paid in the world, and the unemployed can not sell their labor at a lower price and therefore remain unemployed, that Germany needs the money of the “European tax” that London rejects. In an already high-tax country, tax authorities must hunt for capital. In a low-tax country like Britain, capital can be left more free to produce growth and jobs. It is emblematic that Blair and Schroeder, signatories of the same manifesto on the “Third Way”, are then so divided by the reality of their countries. After all, this is the heart of the European problem, and of the weakness of the Euro. From the outcome of the epic clash on Vodafone-Mannesmann and on the European tax we will perhaps know the future of the Union and its currency.