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What Germany could teach America about health-care reform and government's role


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France is not Germany

Then there is the second common mistake Americans make about Europe: They see a collective continent in place of a collection of countries. Britain is not Denmark; Denmark is not France; and France is not Germany. Eastern and southern European countries, though increasingly part of the same economic union, are in many ways a world apart from their western neighbors.

Failing to see differences within the eurozone is akin to drawing no contrast between New Hampshire (New England’s often Republican outcast) and Vermont (just across the border, yet one of the more socially liberal states in the union.)

Germany's federal system and unease with too-strong of a central government may actually put it closer to the United States than its European neighbors. The parts of both America's and Germany's contemporary whole were once autonomous entities. Germany enjoys a huge economy, a famed manufacturing base, and a love for Volkswagen on par with America's fealty to GM. It juggles a large, diverse population that in many regions is more conservative and religious than Europe is often generalized as being.

What ties these disparate threads together is the understanding that government exists to carry out certain responsibilities, and Germany’s state and federal governments have a definitive mandate to do so. Germans may debate how government conducts business, but not that it does.

America needs nation balancing at home

The absence of a similar mandate in the United States has become exponentially more acute. Preoccupied with nation building other countries, the United States is in dire need of nation balancing at home.

This is not a new challenge, of course, but one that has shaped American history since the beginning. The inability to define government's end of the social contract came close to halting the colonial independence movement before it began, later resulted in a constitution left wide open to interpretation, and culminated in civil war. Today, government can't keep lead out of toys, oil out of the Gulf, financial services out of the backroom, and put all Americans under private insurance policies not because it's too small or too big, as some would have us believe, but because we still haven't decided whether government should be small or big.

IN PICTURES: Germany sinkhole

It's the limbo that's wrecking us. Wrestling with policy is a normal, and necessary, component of any democracy, but an ideological standoff disconnected from evolving social and economic realities stymies progress and further polarizes and paralyzes the political system.

There needs to be some essential consensus that government has a specific role to play. America needs a framework within which the government can serve as a representative and protector of the individual against the overreach of market and global forces.

Until then, ambiguity will remain a fundamental obstacle to finding solutions for America’s mounting problems.

Bill Glucroft is an English trainer and consultant in Berlin. He blogs at mediabard.org.


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