It's Right to Use Tax Money to Rescue Countries

There is historical precedent for the current crisis. That’s exactly why we Germans must be the source for funding and innovative ideas in the eurozone now and in the future.

This is a time when vacation days shrink to minutes; it’s a moment of European crisis in which Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy write history. It’s a time when those who think from one detail to the next will fail. The guiding light for team Merkel-Sarkozy shouldn’t be public opinion numbers, because those change on a daily basis. It’s not their job to pursue them; it’s their job to lift the European continent to new levels already in sight and which must be made even more visible.

The eurozone’s economy and finances are seamlessly joined, but policy has gotten bogged down in national principles — that’s the crux of the problem. Leadership consists of qualifying national principles while avoiding absurdity and bending persistence without breaking it. It comes down to reconciling the old familiar with a new reality that has been here for a good while but has not yet become the guiding principle.

Merkel and Sarkozy have a role model. The situation in 2011 is psychologically similar to the situation in 1947 with the Marshall Plan. The European depression saw a currency crisis (the British pound sterling), an economic crisis (dramatic price increases in the United States) and a foreign policy crisis (the collapse of the allied coalition).

U.S. President Harry Truman responded with the development of a new order, the core of which was an abandonment of the old ways of doing business. Paris and London had to reconsider their old global power ideas, while Western Europe and America needed to help support the Germany they had just defeated.

Do we have any idea today what Truman was asking and how much he was risking back then? To help the enemy — Germany — as well as foreign nations and continents using public monies? That met with an entrenched resistance, the breaking of which showed the true nature of leadership and which at first resulted in chaos. As today, ideas had a shelf life of two months or less, the numbers were in constant flux, there were numerous “executive committees” and “councils,” as well as ambitious politicians looking to create new fiefdoms — all this under the skeptical eye of those who still thought in terms of old, familiar concepts

A Greek euro fraud is dwarfed in comparison.

It was the right course of action, and today Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy face identical leadership duties. Money for Greece? Yes, because economically it’s as if Bavaria were helping Saxony; we’re all in the same economic boat. Money for the banks? Yes, because if they collapse, Europe comes to a standstill.

The EU economic government under Herman Van Rompuy, the financial umbrella and the future European Union treaty modifications are all steps in the right direction. Deriding the Greeks, Merkel’s touches or van Rompuy’s new agencies is wrong. What will emerge from the hardest reforms and after-hours work is necessary. Is the Greek euro a mistake? Prior to 1945, Germany made mistakes that make the Greek euro fraud pale in comparison. Today, Germany plays a leading role in this crisis, not unlike America’s in 1947, thanks to Harry Truman’s leadership capabilities. Today, Germany is the main source of capital and ideas in the eurozone. We can do it if we want to.