Cultural Differences Drive European Response to Greek Crisis.

The Greek saga has brought back to the boil the long-simmering culture clash between the European Union’s traditional drivers: federal Germany with its Prussian attachment to rules and an instinctive frugality rooted in past economic traumas, and republican France with a tradition of state intervention and a more Mediterranean attitude to public debt.

Paris and Berlin have had many disagreements post-1945, but few are as deep-rooted as those on economic governance, said John Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany.

“This comes from the gut, it’s emotional,” said Mr. Kornblum, who as assistant secretary of state for Europe in the 1990s watched successive French and German leaders spar over how to govern the future single currency.

If there is no political structure in place to safeguard the euro — a vacuum exposed in the current debt crisis — it is because Germany and France could never agree on one, he said. “There are profound philosophical differences between the two sides,” he said.

These differences are in many ways personified by Mrs. Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and two flamboyant Frenchmen: President Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, and Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/global/04iht-euro.html?hpw

Sounds like, as Germans, not keen on bankrolling much of any thing. Seems that they've weathered swallowing FDR pretty well, tho they're certainly a lot left to be done.

like Greece

to absorb the fdr?

really isn't all that useful a model for the Euromess. Kind of like saying War and Peace was about Russia.