Maybe because I”m an American I pick it up right away. Jeremy Warner’s article in the UK Telegraph, “Angela Merkel: can she rescue the euro?” sounds so . . . well, British! He sounds like Humphreys talking about the European Union in the 1980’s show. In discussing the possible demise of the euro as the common European currency, he discusses the history of Germany in the twentieth century from the point of view of somebody in London.

Warner acts as if the European Union was the invention of the British for the sole purpose of preventing Germany from causing trouble after the war. Then in the 1990’s when Germany became reunified, Warner says they had to come up with the euro to keep Germany out of trouble again. He even calls Germany “the old enemy at the heart of Europe”.
You have to remember that in 1914 England was the top dog. The British Empire was King. Germany was on the rise, but it was a distant second. The First World War dealt the death knell to the British Empire, which managed to hang around until after the Second World War so it could finally dissolve itself — just long enough for Churchill to talk about it in his war speeches.

The British seem to blame their troubles on Germany. They act as if they exhausted all their resources fighting it and defeating it and like a hydra-headed beast they’re at it again. And the euro crisis is the third act in only one hundred years. He even mentions “war guilt” as a factor that might make Germany do the right thing, which means support its poorer southern neighbors by either bolstering the European bailout fund or by creating euro bonds, which Germany would also have to pay for.

What it comes down to is this: Germany is now the second biggest western economy next to the U.S. Great Britain is number 2.