1st of May, the Same Mess as Every Year

In the night from 30th of April to 1st of May there is Walpurgis Night a festival to dance and celebrate together while putting up the Maypole. The 1st of May then is celebrated mostly by labour parties as being an international day of workers.

Children Going Crazy

I do not know when or how it began that young children go around at night and mess other people’s property up. However, some people say that in the past it was rather thought as playing tricks on people. Nowadays children are only throwing paper and and spray shaving foam around. I never really understood this procedure and do not understand it yet.

Reading the news of our village today, I found out that this year the children used even eggs and flour to damage walls of houses and cars. The eggshells caused scratches on the car and the wall could not be cleaned again totally. The children were also said to have thrown fireworks into a crown of people obviously showing a lack of even the slightest reasonable behaviour. It must have been small firecrackers, because nobody actually got injured, but these kids must be really mindless. I could say that today’s youth does not have any moral anymore, but this has also been said by Greek philosophers. Yet, it might not be that wrong. I guess that there are two possibilities to make children go mad:

1. no future at all
2. too much of everything without having to work for it

We in Germany live in state 2 while e.g. in African slums, where there is also a lot of violence, people live in state 1. Furthermore, parents do not want to care for their children anymore (they said that 10 year old children were outside at 1am), instead—as I already mentioned on Dorji Wangchuk’s blog—they hope that the state does their work which will lead to more problems instead of solutions in my opinion. Yet, I also have to admit that exactly this system is proposed and installed by the state: They want mothers to send their children to a crèche instead of stopping work for some years and caring for the children.

Demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg

In Berlin, the police must think the same about the demonstrants of Berlin-Kreuzberg. In 1987 demonstrations of left-wing extremists and antifa (antifascism, yet extremists too) became to severe and police had to retrieve for a while from Berlin-Kreuzberg. Since then left-wing extremists are coming to Kreuzberg each year and cause street fights with the police.

Each year there are injured policemen and injured demonstrants. I do not want to judge about either of them here, because both of them can be very friendly and also very rude, but I think it must suck for some policemen to work there. They have to fight against people they might even support, because police service hasn’t become better within the past few years. Government puts trust in surveillance cameras instead of people and thus does not hire so many policemen anymore (they cannot be dismissed, because they are public officials). Thus, policemen have to face a lot of work and might get overworked easily, which also leads to overreaction in some cases.

Why China is not Worse than Germany

At first, I guess I have to say that I do not want to put Germany down, but instead try to rise China’s image in our Western culture a bit. You will see that I can only do this with regards to you the people, because the German government will still consider my assumptions totally wrong.

The State Defending Itself

We have to consider what the state’s own aim is and come to the conclusion that it always means self-defension and self-preservation. This is usually written in constitutions in such words as that the consitution might not be abolished or similar.

The Basic Law for Germany (our constitution) mentions that each step against the liberal democratic order is to be considered illegal and must be punished. Thus, the communist party was called illegal in 1956, mainly because of the conflicts with the GDR. The GDR was a socialistic state and like a child of the UdSSR. This socialistic approach was too much for West Germany and they wanted to prevent themselves from a putsch as seen in other countries around the world, e.g. Afghanistan some years later (1978) which was supported by the UdSSR then.

We know that the prohibition of something always has to do with fear. Government is afraid of a takeover and wants to strike down each chance of hostile win. This approach cannot only be seen in—as our media always mentions—“evil countries”, but also in Germany as soon as something seems dangerous enough to harm the state.

Sovereign States

Of course, there are differences between Germany and China on how much people are allowed to say against the state, but we have to go one step backwards to see the whole incident more general.

Both China and Germany are sovereign states and thus have full rights to act on their own territory as they want to do, however since they both joined the United Nations they have to adapt to some rules and guidelines of the United Nations. Yet, I do not want to discuss the pros and cons of United Nations and its rules here, but instead I want to follow the image of sovereign states.

As a sovereign state each state wants to impose its rules on the people and also continue these rules, especially the form of government. This means that Germany is willing to maintain its pluralistic democracy with many parties while China is willing to hold a one-party-system.

Perspective on Democracy

Germany and China have their own methods to do this, but both of them are forbidding communcation with the enemy or criticism. Germany allows more criticism, but becomes strict when it comes to terrorism. There are some cases nowadays in which people are accussed for having supported terroristic organisations. This is in my eyes not different from the Chinese point-of-view of supporting the opposition, just because of the different views on politics.

Germany wants—as already mentioned—different parties and thus also opposition, while China needs only one party. Therefore, Germany is not able to forbid opposition, but they can forbid other opposing organisations who are against the democratic order. This is pretty much the same as China’s prohibition of opposition. While in Germany we need the opposition, but we do not need people who are against our form of democracy, China does not need groups who are against their form of democracy either (and since they have only one party, they also do not need other parties).

We can see that from the perspective of each state’s comprehension of democracy (Germany: a posteriori; China: a priori) we can understand the prohibition of other opinions and see that both states have their reasons for forbidding other opinions and especially why China is not as evil as it is shown in Germany. They just have another comprehension of demcracy and German media or politics only analyzes China’s acting from our point-of-view.

German Edcution System

The German eduction system is highly differentiated with regards to the 16 Länder—at least on school level. University level is country-wide the same and thus not so difficult, even though there are several institutions for tertiary education.

School System: Primary and Secondary Education

German students begin going to elementary school at an age of 6 or 7 having spent about 3 years at an optional kindergarten before. They will learn according to study plans which have been made by the government of each Land. However, there often are mandatory topics and optional topics which the teacher can choose from.

This is very the complicated aspects begin. Each Land has its own rules on how school will go on and how students will learn further. While there are some Länder where students learn together six years other already separate them after four years. Furthermore, in some Länder the teacher’s opinion on which school a student will be allowed to visit is mandatory, in some it is only an advice.

When you are attending a new school after fourth or sixth grade, there are three different possibilites:

• Hauptschule (9 years)
• Realschule (10 years)
• Gymnasium (12 / 13 years)

Thus, the students are highly separated according to their knowledge and behaviour which in my opinion leads to an amplification of effects, meaning that the bad students will become worse for they have no contact to good students and the good students will lose sight for the not so intelligent people’s views.

Hauptschule is the lowest level of German school system and often considered very poor. Especially in cities the people there are pretty underbred not knowing German values, because already their parents—and of course also their other class mates in school—do not care about them. Different people already wanted to abolish Hauptschule in order to send all these students to Realschule, but at least in Baden-Württemberg (where I live) these attempts have been stopped by the government. After having finished Hauptschule you can go to a Werkrealschule to get the same degree you would get at Realschule.

In the past Realschule has been seen as the normal way of eduction, but I guess with increasing education and the need for university degree it has changed a bit towards people wanting their children to go to Gymnasium. However, even if you have only been on Realschule, you can always attend a non-general-education Gymnasium afterwards for three years. Moreover, there are other schools you can attend which will give you an advanced technical college entrance qualification (you cannot enter universites with this) or a general qualification for university entrance.

Gymnasium is the highest level of these three school systems and it always lasted 13 years altogether, but for younger it’s only 12 years. Of course, they have more lessons per week instead. In 10th class you will get the same degree you would get with Realschule and you might change to a non-general-education Gymnasium (e.g. an economy-specialized Gymnasium). After 12/13 years students will get the general qualification for university entrance.

Advanced Technical College (Fachhochschule) / University: Tertiary Education

Once you got the approriate degree of either advanced technical college entrance qualification or general qualification for university entrance you can enter a Fachhochschule or university. However, we do not only have normal university education here, but also academdia (I think especially in arts), so called Berufsakademie or combined studies (Duales Studium).

In Berufsakademie and combined studies you learn at university and go to a company together. Of course not at exactly the same time, but combined studies can switch between both forms of education within one week or even one day. Berufsakademie usually uses intervals of several months of theory followed by several months of internships in a company.

With regard to the distinction between Fachhochschule and university I can only say that Fachhochschule is said to be more practical while university is said to be more theoretical. Therefore, some people told me that at university you rather focus on how something works (e.g. algorithms) while Fachhochschule focuses more on how you can use it. Actually, you  can not distringuish it so easily, because of course everything is part of each of the systems. Yet, I think that universities really do not have mandatory internships as often as Fachhochschule, which supports the argument that Fachhochschule is more oriented on practice.

And now everything in Graphics

Since the whole system is not really easy to understand, I will show you a good figure found on bildungsserver.de.

PS: Excuse-me for not having written so long, but being part of the German education system I had to participate in some exams on July 15th–21st.

La revolución digital

I always wondered why each generation had some historical point of change when they had to fight for the new age, not having been able to recognize that we also have such a situation in our current world. Either being to young or only seeing daily politics, I was not able to see the deeper events in our current world and connect them to a whole string of conflicts.

It is not only about a world between free speech and censorship, between big trust companies and individuals, between national identity and globalization, but rather the fight between isolation and participation. I do not speak of US’s interventionism (you could call it “participation”) and isolation policy which changes each few decades, I am talking about the participation of individual persons in different processes.

These processes do influence both economcy and politics, which includes two different processes in current world who also affect each other.

From Hierarchy to Diversity

In the former world, there have been clear hierarchies: On the top there was a company owner, a politician or somebody else who made his way up. He gave the instructions and the people followed his orders, liking or not liking them. There were discussions, but due to the one-way structure of communication back then it was not possible for normal people to influence the processes.

With the introduction of Internet into daily world, it became possible to post one’s own opinion online and to discuss with other people. The citizens become more self-assured and want to influence political discussions. This can clearly be seen at the young generation, often refered to as digital natives, because they grew up with the Internet.

What we see now in both economical and political conversations is the collision of these two different worlds. On the one side there are the older people who are used to one-way structures from top down, which enabled them to make people follow their wills when they had some new ideas. These people are not used to discussions with their voters or customers and they cannot adapt to the new order very well.

OpenGovernment / eGovernment

While some of these digital natives are claiming for eGovernment the German government is preparing its own definition. This definition does not include public information as demanded by OpenGovernment, but only APIs for application forms. The government does not care about privacy either, as ELENA shows.

ELENA is a project to force companies to use an electronical system to submit information about employees to the state. This system stores much more information than needed and it is a pressure for many company owners. Instead of removing the whole law again, our government now wants to discuss if it is possible to continue the old system for small and medium-sized businesses which would make the whole process even more complicated.

If you ask politicians about eGovernment they think it is just about enabling people to fill out a form via Internet. Most of them never thought about providing data in machine readable format via the Internet. You have to be happy in Germany if information is even available in human-readable format and you can find it. US’s data.gov and UK’s data.gov.uk are first attempts to create such databases with governmental data, but they are not as much readable by machines as possible.

Why Freedom is Not Certain

Censorship vs. Freedom of Information

We also face the conflict between censorship and freedom of information once again—or rather as always. Government has to decide whether it wants to stop the liberal and anarchical structure of the internet and establish a control organisation. Of course, each sovereign state’s laws are already valid on the Internet, but since the Internet is global it sometimes is really difficult to enforce these laws.

The in Germany and Europe over and over repeated argument that child pornography should be blocked is a very poor example, because almost every state where servers contain child pornography has laws against it. It’s thus obviously only an argument used to disable any criticism. Better examples could include the hosting of nazi websites in the US, even though I do not know any numbers there, but I guess you know what I mean. While Germany forbids nazi propaganda, it is part of free speech in the US. There are different laws in different states and this could be a reason to destroy the Internet’s international architecure.

However, it is probable that—just like in the past on the way from absolitism to democracy—we will face other structures in the future. The world is becoming more and more complex and we have to begin understanding that not everything can be described unidirectional. Considering that we also rule more on a supra-national level it would be logical that also some laws concerning international communcation and interaction will reach such a level (e.g. photography laws and distribution).

We also see discussion about freedom of information within each single state. Wikileaks has published a video of the US army which showed the death of two journalists in Iraq. Reuters, who they worked for, was not able to get access to the video even though there is a Freedom of Information Act in the US. Officials often argue that specific pieces of information were classified and important for national security. We also see such reasoning when asking German institutions about data: they often claim that this information was not for the public.

Copyright infringements

You might also recognize that copyright owners are suing as many people as they can and they always complain about their decrease of income. They are demanding stricter rules which are currently discussed by many states—totally intransparently—in ACTA. Even the European Parliament having the right to get informed about all discussions of the European Commission has not seen the draft, yet.

On this field we have the choice between strengthening the major companies or making knowledge public and allowing everybody to use it. Some people say that copyright should be the exception and public domain normal arguing that copyright is a unnateral state stopping people from working together. The flood of patents and patent claims (often by companies who do nothing else but owning patents and suing other companies ten years later), by the way, belongs to the same category.

Will We All Become Transparent?

Moreover, we are facing the discussion between privacy and transparency. While the Internet creates the chance of gathering much information and restructuring and analysing it, there are warnings arising that we will become too transparent.

Still, we have to see that there are also a lot of advantages we get from these services. Ibrahim Evsan of sevenload separates the web services according to their size and their desire for highness of information and calls some of them digital superpowers. Seeing the problem that Germany was too shy in the new field of Internet and politics was too slow, he also explains why all of these digital superpowers come from the US. He also mentions that our current copyright laws do not fit the internet which is part of the conflict between censorship and freedom.

Of course, you can help yourself by altering between search engines instead of only using Google (which is also valid for other services) and watching out which services belong to the same company (e.g. flickr to Yahoo). We cannot achieve full privacy—just as in real life where we communicate with other people—but we can solve the problem on our own without the influence of the state, I guess.

This also shows again that the web will just contain diversified contents and we will have to learn how to deal with it ourselves. We cannot rely on the state and hope that it will show us which one is the right way, otherwise we have to return to absolutism.

Bundeswehr and Grundgesetz

Since a document from the CIA giving information on how to convince the German people of the mission in Afghanistan has been leaked I want to dive further into the German consitution, called Grundgesetz and its effects on the German army.

We will read several articles concerning the Bundeswehr and its rights and duties.

Bundeswehr as Defense Army

The German army is defined as a defense army in the Grundgesetz. The beginning of article 87a says:

(1) The Federation shall establish Armed Forces for purposes of defense. Their numerical strength and general organizational structure must be shown in the budget.

(2) Apart from defense, the Armed Forces may be employed only to the extent expressly permitted by this Basic Law.

We will have a closer look on these exceptions later, but at first let’s concentrate on the defensive aspects.

Due to the deeds of Germany in the past, we have an article forbidding each attempt to start an attack on another state. Each attempt to plan a war of aggression is unconstitutional and illegal. This is stated in article 26:

(1) Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense.

(2) Weapons designed for warfare may be manufactured, transported, or marketed only with the permission of the Federal Government. Details shall be regulated by a federal law.

Thus, Germany army is not allowed to attack at first, but these statements seeming so easy are complicated and can be eroded easily. The German army takes part in international interventions if specific regions are said to be a danger for world peace and the missions are considered to have positive influence on peace.

Germany as Part of International Organizations

Article 24 deals with international organizations and contains the following sentence:

(2) With a view to maintaining peace, the Federation may enter into a system of mutual collective security; in doing so it shall consent to such limitations upon its sovereign powers as will bring about and secure a lasting peace in Europe and among the nations of the world.

This means Germany’s army will not act only upon the German will, but also as part of international organizations like NATO. An example for such an incident was the terrorist attack on the USA. As soon as the UN Security Council confirmed the collapse of the US twin towers as being an attack on a member state, Germany was supposed to support the NATO.

Germany does not necessarily have to send troops, but it should help in a way the state finds suitable. Not helping could lead to the problem that, if there is an attack on Germany, other states will not act, either.

Since the UN Security Council claimed there was danger for world peace, the Bundeswehr was able to act based upon a state of defense (even though the whole mission is an out of area operation).

However, Germany is not only part of the NATO, but also—as member of the European Union—member of Europe’s Common Defense and Security Policy (CDSP). Even though it works closely together with the NATO, there still are distinctions and separated work groups. The CDSP is mainly focused on war prevention and peace keeping operations.

The German army also supports the so called UN standby-arrangment-system (UNSAS): a list with states deploying soldiers who can be sent to operational areas within 30 to 90 days.

Usage of Army within Germany

Article 35 and article 87a allow the state to use the army within Germany, but only very rarely. You can usually say that army is only allowed to become active within Germany if all other groups have failed.

Article 35 deals with natural catastrophes and allows the army to help if wider regions are influenced and non-military institutions (like police and fire brigade) cannot solve it on their own.

(3) If the natural disaster or accident endangers the territory of more than one Land, the Federal Government, insofar as is necessary to combat the danger, may instruct the Land governments to place police forces at the disposal of other Länder, and may deploy units of the Federal Border Police or the Armed Forces to support the police. Measures taken by the Federal Government pursuant to the first sentence of this paragraph shall be rescinded at any time at the demand of the Bundesrat, and in any event as soon as the danger is removed.

In Germany, such catastrophes usually mean floods. I have a picture in mind where Bundeswehr piled up sandbags to stop the water, but I cannot remember which flood that was.

Article 87a allows the usage of army in states of defense and danger for democracy. However, all these operations are only allowed as long as both Bundestag and Bundesrat tolerate them and if police and Federal Border Police were not able to solve the problem on their own:

(3) During a state of defense or a state of tension the Armed Forces shall have the power to protect civilian property and to perform traffic control functions to the extent necessary to accomplish their defense mission. Moreover, during a state of defense or a state of tension, the Armed Forces may also be authorized to support police measures for the protection of civilian property; in this event the Armed Forces shall cooperate with the competent authorities.

(4) In order to avert an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order of the Federation or of a Land, the Federal Government, if the conditions referred to in paragraph (2) of Article 91 obtain and the police forces and the Federal Border Police prove inadequate, may employ the Armed Forces to support the police and the Federal Border Police in protecting civilian property and in combating organized armed insurgents. Any such employment of the Armed Forces shall be discontinued if the Bundestag or the Bundesrat so demands.

In 2008 or 2009, there have been plans of our former Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble to extend the rights of the army within the state, but these have been stopped by demonstrants and probably also oppositional politicians.