Are Germans really more ‘grown-up’ than Brits?

The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the EU, taken at the 2016 Referendum, was – as is well known – not accepted by a minority, who saw no reason to respect the largest democratic vote in the country’s history. Ignoring the vote became, indeed, the official policy of the Liberal Democrats, who were nearly obliterated at the last election as a result.

Once it became clear that the result would not be reversed, the aggrieved redoubled their vituperation; and several recent books portentously look at the imminent dark age into which Britain must inevitably slip – either with reference to the past, or to the success of other countries that have not been so allegedly foolish as Britain has been. It is a literary genre not unlike revenge porn.

John Kampfner’s book is one such. The provocation begins with the title. The “it” that the Germans do better is, apparently, more or less everything, but concerns principally running a country. Well, what rapidly becomes apparent is that the Germans are very good at running a country full of Germans: a people who, when the current state was formed in 1949, and expanded by reunification with East Germany in 1990, were so deeply ashamed of their recent past that they took a collective view of the need for atonement and rehabilitation, and it is Germany’s memory of its iniquity in the 1930s and 1940s that has driven it to its present state of success. Kampfner believes we in Britain are obsessed with the Second World War, but if we are, we are not so obsessed as the Germans appear to be. The difference is that we are able to look back on our history without profound shame.

The subtitle, Notes from a Grown-up Country, reflects another aspect of the provocation: Britain, by contrast, is not “grown-up”. The idea that we have been self-infantilised since the achievements of the Second World War (that Kampfner would rather we stopped remembering) has some merit to it. Welfarism has not been the universal good its advocates claim, and in his chapter on the German economic miracle, Kampfner illustrates a country not just with a work ethic, but with a sense of pride it in its work and greater intelligence in its post-war investment decisions. Britain, by contrast, engaged in the self-indulgence of the post-war consensus and, above all, amateur management.

However, infantilisation was also the effect – and Kampfner does not even begin to acknowledge this – of the democratic deficit we endured during membership of the EU, which took important decisions about trade, taxation, regulation and governance out of the hands of the British electorate: that is not the mark of a “grown-up country”. Germany, as the paymaster of the EU, has always ensured that the regime imposed on other member states is one with which it is happy. It is the only grown-up in the room. The fact that most European countries are in a currency union that damages their exports while enhancing Germany’s is just one proof of this.

Kampfner caricatures Britain the better to make his case about Germany. He talks about our “Rule Britannia [sic]” teaching of history, which, had he been anywhere near formal history teaching in recent decades, he would know is rubbish. If that represents his level of comprehension, it is no wonder this book is as tendentious as it is. He suggests our decision to leave the EU represented a “collective loss of nerve”, which is a matter of opinion. It might just also have been a decision taken, after 43 years of evidence of the disadvantages we had endured, economically and democratically, to reclaim our sovereignty. The author calls Brexit a symptom and not a cause of Britain’s “psychodrama”. But is there a psychodrama? Why should we share his assumption?

Of course he is right about certain things, such as that the present British Government is led by someone with a flexible relationship with the truth and other notable shortcomings. It is a stark comparison with the serious, experienced, ernst Angela Merkel. Not least thanks to her, Germany is a successful country but, as he says, it also has a rigid system of social rules, which its people are culturally conditioned to obey.

Kampfner is an old German hand, having been a foreign correspondent there, and he gives a good overview of the post-war rebuilding – indeed, the value of this book for the uninitiated is his concise, informative and largely agenda-free survey of Germany since 1945, not just of its domestic policy, but also in foreign affairs. He emphasises how good the Germans are at owning up to their past failings, not least in how they have moved from a nation practising genocidal racism to one welcoming immigrants and multikulti ideas; but the implication is that we are very bad at owning up to ours. Such relativism is specious – one cannot but look back to the war and reflect that we did not set up extermination camps – and is one of the book’s main flaws.

One of Kampfner’s bogeys is Thatcherism, and he sneers at what Germany has achieved without “untrammelled” free markets. One wonders what Germany might have achieved with them; and he does not examine too closely what might have been different had Germany not put itself at the centre of a protectionist organisation, reaping the benefits of selling to a captive market with what for many of its customers is a seriously overvalued currency. Without weaker economies in its currency union, a German currency would be so strong that its exports would be devastated.

Early in the book, Kampfner reflects on the excellence of the German post-war constitution (drawn up, he concedes, by the British) as a basis for the social cohesion to which he also attributes the nation’s superiority – a cohesion that is now less than it once was, not least because of Merkel’s heavy-handedness. (Kampfner acknowledges the rise of the populist AfD, but stops short of admitting that it might have something to do with Merkel’s more radical ideas, implemented without reference to the German public.)

Of our constitution, the author says that “Britain makes it up as it goes along”. But making it up we go along – having an unwritten constitution we amend by Acts of Parliament passed by our democratically elected representatives – is one of the luxuries our less turbulent history gives us, and nothing to be ashamed of.

Why the Germans Do It Better by John Kampfner is published by Atlantic at ￡16.99. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books to order your copy for ￡14.99