Germans, stop whining

If you have ever wondered how opportunism can be an ism, take a look at Germany and wonder no more. With leaders like theirs, it can go beyond semantics and become pure art.

Nokia has announced that it will close down its Bochum plant, laying off 2,300 workers directly and prompting the local subcontractors to dismiss about the same number. The production will be moved mainly to the new plant in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. (May it be mentioned, that your contributor has once bought a bottle of good Transylvanian palinka from a liquor store in Cluj-Napoca. It was tasty, and very cheap, and his friend Jaska back home drunk it all.) Ruhrgebiet, with its mining and heavy industries either fading away or gone for good, hasn't exactly been a cradle of good news recently, so these kind of things can't be expected to go down smoothly in there. But even still, when your top national politicians urge the public to boycott Nokia's products, it all seems very off-the-wall to me.

Think about it, really. The plant was in the first place located in Bochum because it made more business sense to supply Western European handset markets from Ruhrgebiet than from, for instance, Central Finland. It was opened in 1989 and grew in size as Nokia moved its operations from Finland to overseas. Public handouts played their role too, for sure - for some reason, the Germans have been amusingly keen on emphasising how much subsidies the factory in question has milked from them during its lifespan, and in my opinion 70 million euros of pork to a rich multinational corporation is disgustingly lot of tax money wasted in something where decent and responsibly governed societies shouldn't waste it.

So, now that you may have thought about it, let me say the same in contemporary German rhetorics - some corners are cut, admittedly, though I think that such is quite in line with the overall level of the debate.

Yes, YOU wooed MY assembly lines from MY recession-hit Finland to YOUR then-prospering Germany by shovelling shitloads of public money to a rich multinational corporation and now you're whining that it's playing dirty when it after all these years moves those same lines to the second poorest country in the European Union. You don't allow Romanians to practice their fundamental rights as EU citizens and move freely to live and work in Germany, and you obviously wouldn't allow any work to move from Germany to Romania either. Hah, just try and preach to me about Europe's missing social dimension next time, you pampered hypocritical dummkopfs.

(It's a bit like with those Italians who have explained to me that their economy is in shatters merely because their clothing industry can't compete with Chinese sweatshops and other forms of slave labour; true enough, but what they always failed to acknowledge is that in fact it's not a terribly long time ago when their own textile factories, then world-beaters, provided nearly similarly appalling working conditions - and this in time when Italy was already a wealthy country, much wealthier than today's China.)

The hard fact is that Ruhrgebiet is a centrally located, well connected and densely populated region with a world-class infrastructure in a country with strong rule of law and a remarkable number of export champions. If its economy can't employ the dismissed workers by - correspondingly with Transylvania's - moving up the value chain, it's simply because the leaders in both regional and federal level are doing something wrong. And because those same leaders fail to spell out what it is to the voters, they have to resort to agitating consumer boycotts and other populist red herrings.

Which as such must be a superb way to attract more assembly lines to your country, I am sure.