SPENGLER: Angela Merkel’s Feet of Clay.

A great deal of the present problem is the result of Merkel’s incompetence. Nearly 300,000 Bulgarians and Romanians entered Britain in 2015 right after their countries joined the European Community. That explains a great deal of the Brexit vote. The Germans suffer from a massive labor shortage, especially in the construction industry, and the Eastern Europeans might have helped. The Germans would not have objected to European immigrants who can assimilate into their society as much as they do to Muslims who cannot. The European Community’s blanket policy of free migration among its members makes it extremely difficult to manage immigration even when it might be beneficial rather than burdensome.

Now Germany is split between ordinary citizens who want to hold on to some notion of German-ness, even if they are not quite sure what that means, and those who want to liquidate German culture as a remedy for war guilt. A natural conservative majority exists in theory, but does not exist in practice because no German party can articulate a coherent, let alone an acceptable, message of German particularism.

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