Permanently Deleted
Neoliberals are all about merchantilism. Hell, that’s the whole reason those smelters exist in Germany to begin with. They’re entirely predicated on cheap energy imports from the Middle East and the Baltic/Slavic states.
Germans kept energy costs relatively low through the ECB’s financial shell game. But now that a big chunk of their energy market is cut off from European market traders, there’s no way to buy energy low and sell finished products high. You’ve got to do everything through the US (which has its own parasitic markets) or some black market in North Africa or Turkey (which adds a thousand layers of middle men no less parasitic).
They would have to abandon it if they sought to bring it back and I don’t see that happening.
They’d have to abandon efforts to continue balkinizing and digesting the former Soviet Bloc and come back to Clintonite capitalist realpolitik. That would mean treating Russia and China as international business partners rather than rogue states. So the Cold War die-hards can’t bring themselves to do it.
But in another decade or two, we’re going to have a new generation of German Pete Buttigiegs and Donald Trumps who are far more receptive to the allure of Russia cheap energy and Chinese tech. We’re already seeing this shit in Italy and Hungary. Even Germany and France are looking askance at Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” because of the way its just been exporting inflation into Europe.
There are plenty of Europeans who don’t hold any love for predatory American corporate imperalists. They just aren’t at the top of the political pyramid, atm. But if they can win a place back at the top of the pile, they absolutely could reverse course on fueling wars in the East and align with Moscow over DC.
That would bring back cheap energy and allow them to turn the machines back on at smaller but still healthy margins.
The problem with “turning the machines back on” is that when parts of the ecosystem disappear the knock on effects are enormous. Everyone that economically relied on being able to get something at x price within the country goes down with it, and everyone they supplied, and everyone they supplied. Segments of the chain disappear that were built over decades and decades. Without certain sections of the chain locally and with international competition it becomes impossible to rebuild economically without massive subsidy at an enormous scale over huge supply chains not just parts of the chain or nationalisation programs.
I think the reality is that they will simply never come back.
It’s never going to be like it was, because the flow of trade has fundamentally shifted.
But a lot of that is a function of choice. German banks could recapitalize the factory and rebuild the supply chain. That’s exactly what they did 70 years ago when Germany was bombed out the last time, and 90 years ago when it was bombed out the time before that.
The German state could nationalize the failed plants and do a little economic nationalism to re-cement them domestically.
That they likely won’t is a consequence of ideology far more than economic possibility.
