The far-right AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) won a sweeping election victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt last Sunday. I addressed the implications of and motivations for the AfD’s economic program.
In the interview, we spoke mostly about macroeconomic policies of the AfD, and its anti-immigrant social policies. However, the AfD seems to not have a fundamentally different economic orientation from other German parties over the past couple decades. It too is backward looking, full of nostalgia for “what worked” previously in the post-War German economic model. However, it also prioritizes going back to when there were fewer immigrants in Germany.
My work on the German economic model, however, especially my teaching and talks, has focused on the failure of Germany to embrace the tech, social-cultural organization, and research imperatives of the Third Industrial Revolution, the Information Age.
Germany, and the EU as well, have long failed to catch up with the USA, or for that matter Asian allies Japan and South Korea, in information technologies and the modernization of work organization-and-culture within the spheres of production, communication, commerce, research, education and business. This would have required reforms fostering a risk-tolerant culture of innovation, personal initiative, flexibility and entrepreneurialism, sweeping transformations away from the old, mid-20th-Century Fordist model “with German characteristics,” so to speak.
This strategy was both a theoretical and practical mistake – not because it addressed global warming, which indeed is a significant problem though, in my view, not the predominant global problem it is made to be in the last 15 years of German policy, but because it was offered as an alternative model of economic development to Europe embracing the “American” Information Revolution.
In reality, Europe had no option but to wholly embrace what it terms “digital technologies” and catch up to tje USA.
In addition to embracing its peculiar “green”, “clean” energy path to reindustrialization, the other German strategy, in parallel, was to double down on improving its renowned 1960-1980’s electro-mechanical technologies, which are typical of the previous Second Industrial Revolution, and massively export these into the Chinese market.
Nevertheless, Gerany did have a plan to move, at some point, beyond this hold-over tech. The strategy was to bank on development of “green” or, more recently, “clean” technologies.
It was widely claimed, for about 20 years (influenced by futurist green-energy theorists like US physicist Amory Lovens, that Europe could “spark a Fourth Industrial Revolution” by carrying out a “green energy transition” based on developing and deploying a “totally new” energy system” using only renewable sources such as windmills and solar panels along with all their required grid-expansion, -connection and energy storage technologies.
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