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Griechenland und Deutschland -eine Geschichte der Entfremdung
.....German officials, many speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue before Sunday's vote, speak of a broken Greek bureaucracy incapable of implementing decisions taken at the top. A drive to root out corruption and tax-dodging has largely failed, they say.....
...Greeks placed huge importance on face-to-face meetings, while the Germans felt most issues could be resolved remotely by phone or email.
Some Germans also point to the model of the Prussian bureaucrat, whose sense of pride in ensuring decisions taken at the highest levels of government are implemented speedily and to the letter, still runs deep in German ministries. It took a while for Berlin and Brussels to realise that a similar ethos did not exist in Greece. Far from it.
Often, civil servants, whose wages and benefits were being slashed to meet austerity goals imposed by the country's international lenders, actively undermined the ministers they worked for, or operated at cross-purposes with other ministries, with whom they had little or no contact, several German officials said.
Under the guidance of EU and IMF bailout inspectors, the government also made the mistake, the Germans said, of cutting the salaries of civil servants across the board and then later firing a portion of them, when it should have fired first and raised wages for those that remained to keep them motivated.
"They did everything in the wrong order," a senior ministry official in Berlin said.
The result was gridlock that often seemed inexplicable to the Germans.
"There is a wonderful tendency in Greece to wait until the last minute to do anything," an EU official, who is a German national, said. "Five minutes before 12 is too early. It has to be 30 seconds before 12 before they step into action."
www.athensnews.gr/portal/8/56286
.....German officials, many speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue before Sunday's vote, speak of a broken Greek bureaucracy incapable of implementing decisions taken at the top. A drive to root out corruption and tax-dodging has largely failed, they say.....
...Greeks placed huge importance on face-to-face meetings, while the Germans felt most issues could be resolved remotely by phone or email.
Some Germans also point to the model of the Prussian bureaucrat, whose sense of pride in ensuring decisions taken at the highest levels of government are implemented speedily and to the letter, still runs deep in German ministries. It took a while for Berlin and Brussels to realise that a similar ethos did not exist in Greece. Far from it.
Often, civil servants, whose wages and benefits were being slashed to meet austerity goals imposed by the country's international lenders, actively undermined the ministers they worked for, or operated at cross-purposes with other ministries, with whom they had little or no contact, several German officials said.
Under the guidance of EU and IMF bailout inspectors, the government also made the mistake, the Germans said, of cutting the salaries of civil servants across the board and then later firing a portion of them, when it should have fired first and raised wages for those that remained to keep them motivated.
"They did everything in the wrong order," a senior ministry official in Berlin said.
The result was gridlock that often seemed inexplicable to the Germans.
"There is a wonderful tendency in Greece to wait until the last minute to do anything," an EU official, who is a German national, said. "Five minutes before 12 is too early. It has to be 30 seconds before 12 before they step into action."
www.athensnews.gr/portal/8/56286
