Germany is an invented state. Or rather, Germany Mark X (patent 1990) is an invented state. It was invented to replace Germany Mark IX (i) and Germany Mark IX (ii – both patent 1949), because they, like Germany Marks VIII (1933), VII (1919), VI (1916), V (1890), IV (1871), III (1867), II (1848), and I (800-1806), had stopped working. Germanies – Mark I aside – have enjoyed an average life expectancy of about 20 years since the introduction of Mark II in 1848. Yes folks, if history is anything to go by, we are due another very shortly and for those living in Germany, that thought is equal parts worrying and alluring.
Enviably rich SPD-CDU, blue-banana, Made in Germany, “Wir schaffen das”, ‘Why the Germans do it Better’, “see you in Ischgl”, Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit Germany is where Mark X, the latest and current model, began life; but it is wilting quickly like a leak in warm weather. At the root of the problem is the fact that its economy has languished tepidly for a decade, displaying about the same amount of vitality as the Germans’ sense of national identity.
Rightly, many Germans have grown to dislike Germany Mark X, and many have turned to an alternative – Die Alternative no less. Indeed, an estimated one in four Germans supports the AfD. This is a party which held a meeting last year discussing, among other things, how to define a ‘biological German’ (permission to raise eyebrows granted). With a population so cleanly cleaved and deprived of a middle ground, the essential brittleness of the German state will be subjected to serious stress-testing in the next decade. If it fails, reinvention awaits.
Brittle, you say?
Brittle I say. Germany has a written constitution, and such constitutions are uncompromisingly bad ideas. Allow me to explain…
The western world has wedded itself to the notion of constitutions. This is likely because they tend to arise as inscribed expressions of democratic triumph from periods of tumult and revolution, and as assertions of peoplepower in the face of tyranny. Constitutions disguise themselves as bulwarks against the menace of totalitarianism, and have successfully entangled themselves with our concept of Westernness. Whether you like it or not, however, constitutions are always undemocratic and often dangerous.
A codified constitution is a device whereby dead voices from epochs passed wreak havoc on the lives of those that knew neither the men nor circumstances in which their state was forged. Most constitutional law cowers behind a firewall of only a two-thirds majority in the nation’s assembly, tainting ‘we the people’ with a hefty dose of irony. Alas, we have been taught to kneel at the altar of such clauses written because Mrs Von der Leyen, Mr Rutte, Mr Trudeau, Mr Scholz, Mr Tusk, and of course the fabulous, talented, and charming Mr Macron think that those of us without a seat in the [insert meaningless, timewasting global assembly here] is incapable of grappling anything more nuanced than a black and white moral narrative.
There can hardly be a better summation of this than the scene at my local U-Bahn station in Bonn. The escalator ejects you into a small shelter on street level upon whose sleek panes of glass the German Grundgesetz, or ‘constitution’, has been glazed. On the other side of the street a museum sports a large red image of a shattered swastika advertising the current exhibition, Nach Hitler, ‘After Hitler’. This kind of messaging seeks to indoctrinate passers-by that because the German constitution was written (fabricated) in the aftermath of the most gruesome state ever witnessed, it is sacred and must be protected. Not only that; it demands to be obeyed and worshipped. No ifs, no buts. Apparently, we buffoons are unable to condemn totalitarianism without embracing a kind of statehood which seems to have inadvertently adopted some of the same tropes of propagandistic justification which defined its predecessor.
When Germany Mark IX (i) was in its developmental phase, there was a determination to learn from the past. Sadly, the constitutioneers failed to consider that that the Weimar constitution, invented less than three decades previously, worked until times changed to the point that it collapsed, sparking the most consequential cataclysm of human history – and continued constitutioneering. Now that their constitution is aging, Germany is once more on the precipice of having to be melted down and forged anew.
The problem is that constitutions are dead law. Their implacability cause violence, hatred, and bloodshed we could well do without. Gun laws in the US are a prime example, which hardly needs further explanation here. The steady increase of mass shootings speak for themselves.
Oh, and did I mention that virtually no women were included in creating these dratted things? That’s just about most people in the west nowadays. Democratic? I think not. Perhaps Olaf should reconsider what he chisels on his tube station windows after all.
Thankfully, Britain does not have one of these blasted documents, and that is exactly why the English-come-British state is the most ancient of the world’s major economies – by a mile. It is comprised of the gradual accumulation of legislation over nearly 1000 years. Whilst the rest of the world attempts to ascertain a set of transcendent rights and values fit for their would-be eternal constitutions, we in Britain have found the answer, a kind of eternally flexible, self-renewing constitution which works much better than any of the nonsense across the Channel and Atlantic. He’s called Charles III.
He’s great because he tends not to suggest that we should give mentally unstable people automatic weapons and if he were to, we could happily say ‘shut up, Chaz, that’s a stupid idea, stick to running Aston-Martins on cheese and wine’. Luckily, because Charles is not a piece of centuries old paper etched with the ink of slave-owners but rather a sentient being with awareness of modern Britain, he has avoided spouting harmful nonsense to impose on his people and can thus enable democratic government, rather than inhibit it.
The British state boasts an innate malleability that has enabled it to adapt to shifting epochs; to swerve and evade fascism whilst Germany crumbled and let it flood the cracks for example. When British law withers in the gusts of change, the organism of our state disposes of it like a crustacean of aging shell. The system of the invented state of Germany has proven – every single blinking time – that Germanies rely on being stable and well off. Once they enter a period of hardship or, indeed, change of any kind, their rigid constitutional corset gives way, and our poor Teutonic friends have to start again. The vicious cycle of revolution is reignited, and the state is rewritten, reinvented.
So, whenever we do get Germany Mark XI, let’s pray they don’t write a sodding constitution.
And, if I may, God save king.