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In 1930 Germany's vast and diverse network of agricultural cooperatives was unified in the world's largest cooperative organization. Unification was underwritten by the state in support of an agrarian sector in deep crisis. It was achieved under the banner of rationalization, the elimination of wasteful duplication of rural cooperatives. The focus of this article is how the Raiffeisen General Association, Germany's second-largest cooperative organization, exploited state interest in cooperative merger and the contemporary mantra of rationalization to leverage public aid to overcome a financial crisis in its central credit union, the Raiffeisen Bank. While asserting cooperative principles of mutual assistance and self-help, Raiffeisen pursued unification as a means to state rescue. It thereby re-framed the relationship between self-help and state aid that has been a central theme of scholarship on the German cooperative movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, focusing on the role of Germany in responding to the crisis in relation to the country's politics, government, and history. The author presents a case for the view that the crisis is not likely to lead to the collapse of the euro monetary union and that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's policies in handling the crisis reflect continuity with Germany's ordoliberal economic policy tradition. Topics include Germany's economic power within Europe, financial bailouts and the eventual requirement for private creditors to pay part of the cost of bailout, austerity economic policies, how ordoliberalism differs from neoliberalism, monetary policy and inflation, and German public opinion.

This article looks critically at the widely held view that Germany has not done enough to help overcome the Eurozone crisis. According to this line of argument, Germany has refused to comprehensively bail out crisis countries, offer mutual support in order to counter speculative attacks or endorse demand-side growth policies. This is allegedly because of a more narrowly defined national self-interest, increased EU-skepticism, and hegemonic ambitions. This article takes the perspective that such criticisms are primarily rooted in a Keynesian reading of the Eurozone troubles, whereas German policies are informed by another rationale: the ideas of so-called ordoliberalism. Generally, this traditional German school emphasizes the importance of principles, rule-based behavior, and long-term goals-and it believes in the (microeconomic) functioning of markets. Consequently, ordoliberals perceive the crisis as resulting from unsustainable debt levels and a lack of competitiveness in southern Europe, concomitant with a failure of Eurozone institutions. Based on this diagnosis, policy proposals are primarily targeted at debt reduction, as well as structural and EU institutional reforms. While Germany's crisis policy thus appears rational from an ordoliberal perspective, it is considered to be at variance with, and inadequate from the viewpoint of a Keynesian approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries? Despite the prominence of public opinion in the ongoing debate over the eurozone bailouts, voters' preferences on the topic are poorly understood. We conduct the first systematic analysis of this issue using observational and experimental survey data from Germany, the country shouldering the largest share of the EU's financial rescue fund. Testing a range of theoretical explanations, we find that individuals' own economic standing has limited explanatory power in accounting for their position on the bailouts. In contrast, social dispositions such as altruism and cosmopolitanism robustly correlate with support for the bailouts. The results indicate that the divide in public opinion over the bailouts does not reflect distributive lines separating domestic winners and losers. Instead, the bailout debate is better understood as a foreign policy issue that pits economic nationalist sentiments versus greater cosmopolitan affinity and other-regarding concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]