{"id":6235,"date":"2015-02-11T07:45:50","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T13:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6235"},"modified":"2015-02-11T07:45:50","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T13:45:50","slug":"the-german-moment-in-a-fragile-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6235","title":{"rendered":"The German Moment in a Fragile World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"https:\/\/twq.elliott.gwu.edu\/sites\/twq.elliott.gwu.edu\/files\/downloads\/Bagger.pdf\">Thomas Bagger<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cGermany is Weltmeister,\u201d or world champion, wrote Roger Cohen in his July 2014 New York Times column1\u2014and he meant much more than just the immediate euphoria following Germany\u2019s first soccer world championship since the summer of unification in 1990. Fifteen years earlier, in the summer of 1999, the Economist magazine\u2019s title story depicted Germany as the \u201cSick Man of the Euro.\u201d2 Analysis after analysis piled onto the pessimism: supposedly sclerotic, its machines were of high quality but too expensive to sell in a world of multiplying competitors and low-wage manufacturing. Germany seemed a hopeless case, a country stuck in the 20th century with a blocked society that had not adapted to the new world of the 21st century, or worse, a society that was not even adaptable.<br \/>\nThings since then have changed significantly. In the summer of 2013, more than a year before the triumph in Rio de Janeiro, the Economist reversed its own verdict\u2014Germany now appeared on the front page as \u201cEurope\u2019s Reluctant Hegemon.\u201d3 In 2014, Germany came out on top for the second year in a row in the BBC\u2019s annual country rating poll as the country with \u201cthe most positive influence on the world.\u201d4 Simon Anholt\u2019s annual \u201cNation Brand Index\u201d also put Germany in the top spot in 2014.5<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Bagger: \u201cGermany is Weltmeister,\u201d or world champion, wrote Roger Cohen in his July 2014 New York Times column1\u2014and he meant much more than just the immediate euphoria following Germany\u2019s first soccer world championship since the summer of unification in 1990. Fifteen years earlier, in the summer of 1999, the Economist magazine\u2019s title story depicted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6236,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235\/revisions\/6236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}