GERMANY

I. Inventory

Germany cannot build an airport. Nine years of delay, six and a half billion euros in cost overruns, a terminal that was already too small at opening. BER is not an exception. BER is the rule.

Germany cannot modernise a railway line. Stuttgart 21: seventeen years of construction, eleven billion instead of three. The Riedbahn refurbishment between Frankfurt and Mannheim — a stretch of 70 kilometres — takes five months and is treated as a once-in-a-century event, which Deutsche Bahn proudly reports as though it had reached the moon.

Germany cannot maintain its bridges. Four thousand bridges on the federal motorway network are in critical condition. The Rahmedetalbrücke on the A45 was known to be crumbling for seven years before it was closed. Over two hundred thousand commuters and businesses in south Westphalia have been paying the price ever since.

Germany cannot equip its army. The Bundeswehr has helicopters that do not fly, tanks that do not drive, ships that do not sail. The special fund of one hundred billion euros is seeping away into procurement processes so complex that nobody understands where the money goes.

Germany cannot digitise itself. Fax machines in public health offices during a pandemic. Schools without Wi-Fi. Government agencies that send forms by post and demand them back by post. The Online Access Act — passed in 2017, 575 administrative services were supposed to be digital by 2022 — was spectacularly missed.

Germany cannot build housing. Four hundred thousand units per year was the target. Two hundred and fifty thousand was the reality. Approval processes take years. Construction costs explode. Building regulations fill libraries.

This is not a list of individual failures. It is a pattern. And the pattern has a name: systematic loss of competence.

II. What the State Once Could Do

It was not always like this. One must remember this, because the present is so overwhelming that one forgets what was possible.

Germany built the motorway network — in the 1930s and then massively in the 1950s and 60s. Thousands of kilometres, at a pace that would be unthinkable today. Germany operated the Bundespost — one of the most reliable communications infrastructures in the world. Germany operated the Bundesbahn — punctual, nationwide, affordable. Germany built an education system that produced engineers, scientists, and skilled workers who were in demand worldwide. Germany managed reunification — logistically, infrastructurally, administratively a feat without equal.

All of this was state competence. Not private-sector efficiency, not market logic — state competence. Civil servants who knew how to plan, build, and operate things. Institutions that accumulated and passed on knowledge. Ministries that were technically capable of judgement.

This knowledge no longer exists. It was not forgotten. It was amputated.

III. The Dogma

In the 1980s, an idea began its triumphal march that would change everything: The state is the problem, not the solution.

Margaret Thatcher privatised British Rail, British Telecom, British Gas, British Steel, the water companies, the electricity companies. Ronald Reagan deregulated the airlines, telecommunications, the banks. Both proclaimed the same message: the private sector can fundamentally do everything better, more efficiently, and more cheaply.

Germany followed — more slowly, more thoroughly, and with the conviction that it would do it better than the Anglo-Saxons.

1994: The Deutsche Bundespost is broken up. One institution becomes three companies: Deutsche Post AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, Postbank AG. All go public on the stock exchange.

1994: The Deutsche Bundesbahn becomes Deutsche Bahn AG. State-owned, but "managed along private-sector lines." Profit orientation instead of public service.

1990s–2000s: Municipalities sell their utilities, their housing companies, their hospitals. Dresden sells its entire municipal housing stock — 48,000 apartments — to an American investor. Debt-free, they said. Homeless would have been more accurate.

2000s: PPP projects — Public Private Partnerships — become the universal remedy. Schools, motorways, prisons, town halls — everything is packaged into partnerships with private investors who supposedly relieve the state of its burden.

The dogma was always the same: the state is too stupid, too slow, too bureaucratic. The private sector is lean, fast, efficient. Whoever doubts this is a socialist.

IV. The Amputation

What was never discussed during privatisation: when the tasks go, the knowledge goes with them.

This is not a metaphor. It is a concrete process. When a ministry plans bridges for thirty years, then that ministry contains people who know how to plan bridges. They know the materials, the standards, the pitfalls, the suppliers. They have experience. They have networks. They have institutional memory.

When bridge planning is outsourced to an engineering firm, those people leave. And with them goes the knowledge. Not into a filing cabinet where it can be retrieved — but away. Into retirement. Into the private sector. Into oblivion.

What remains is a ministry that can award contracts but can no longer judge whether the result is good. A ministry that depends on consultants because it no longer understands its own subject matter. A ministry that writes tenders without knowing what it is actually tendering for.

This is not atrophy — a gradual weakening through disuse. This is amputation. The arm was cut off. You cannot retrain it. You must regrow it — and that takes a generation, if it succeeds at all.

In every one of these cases, not just a task was handed over — the ability to understand the task was handed over. The state became a client that no longer knows what it is ordering. A customer that does not notice when it is being cheated. An examiner that no longer understands the exam.

V. The Consultant Republic

The most visible symptom of the amputation is the consultant republic.

Germany spends billions annually on external consulting. McKinsey advises the Defence Ministry. Accenture builds the IT for the Federal Employment Agency. PwC audits what PwC recommended. Roland Berger writes strategies that nobody implements, because implementation would have to be awarded to Roland Berger again.

This is not help. It is a prosthesis. And like any prosthesis, it replaces what was amputated — but it does not truly replace it. It works as long as you pay for it. It learns nothing. It leaves no knowledge in the organisation. When the consultant leaves, the knowledge leaves with him — until the next contract.

The consulting scandal in the Defence Ministry under Ursula von der Leyen was not an anomaly. It was the system. Hundreds of millions of euros for external consultants — not because the ministry was particularly bad, but because it no longer possessed the competence to answer its own questions.

And the consultants? The consultants have no interest in the state becoming competent again. A competent state does not need consultants. The business model of the consulting industry is based on the incompetence of the client. The less the state knows, the more it needs McKinsey. The more McKinsey it needs, the less it learns.

VI. The Hybrid Monsters

There is something worse than privatisation: half-privatisation.

The most toxic products of the privatisation wave are the hybrid monsters — organisations that are neither state nor market, that are subject to neither democratic control nor market discipline, that combine the worst of both worlds.

Deutsche Bahn AG. One hundred per cent state-owned. But "managed along private-sector lines" — meaning profit-oriented. The result: a company that closes branch lines because they are not profitable (market logic), but faces no competition because it holds a quasi-monopoly (state logic). No returns for shareholders — there are none. No service for citizens — that is not the mandate. Punctuality rate: below seventy per cent in long-distance services. Infrastructure: so decrepit that the entire network must be closed in sections to be repaired. Neither has the market made the railway efficient, nor has the state kept it reliable.

The hospitals. In the 1990s, the privatisation of municipal clinics began. Today, corporations like Helios (Fresenius), Asklepios, and Sana operate hundreds of hospitals — with profit expectations. Public mandate: universal care, serving the population. Private-sector logic: maximise case-based fees, minimise staff, expand profitable departments, close unprofitable ones. The result: nursing staff at breaking point, maternity wards closed, emergency rooms overcrowded — but the returns are right. For the shareholders.

The Autobahn GmbH. Founded in 2021 to transfer responsibility for motorways from the states to the federal level. Sounds reasonable. In practice: a bureaucratic monstrosity that does not solve the problems but adds an administrative layer. Neither the efficiency of a private company nor the controllability of a government agency.

Toll Collect. A consortium of DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Telekom, and Cofiroute was supposed to introduce the lorry toll. Delay: one and a half years. Damage to the federal government: billions. The arbitration ruling — seventeen years after the disaster — remained secret. Private-sector efficiency.

Public-Private Partnerships. Schools built by private investors and leased back to the state — more expensive than any self-build, but "budget-neutral" because the debts do not appear on the books. Motorway sections where the state bears the traffic risk and the investor collects the returns. PPP: three letters for the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of losses.

VII. The Knowledge Desert

The amputated state is not merely unable to act. It is also blind.

Germany does not know how many of its bridges are at risk of collapse — it estimates. Germany does not know how many schools need renovation — the KfW estimates the investment backlog at fifty billion euros, but nobody knows the exact figure. Germany does not know how many homes are missing — estimates range between seven hundred thousand and one million.

Germany does not even know how many civil servants it has. The last reliable personnel statistic of the public sector is a patchwork of federal, state, and municipal data that are not compatible.

A state that does not know its own inventories cannot set priorities. It cannot plan. It cannot govern. It reacts — always too late, always surprised, always in crisis mode.

The pandemic laid this bare without mercy. Public health offices reporting infection numbers by fax — not out of stubbornness, but because no digital system existed. Hospitals whose bed occupancy nobody knew centrally. Vaccine logistics that had to be improvised because there was no longer any state logistics competence.

China built a hospital in ten days. Germany needed ten months to programme a contact-tracing app — which then did not work.

This is not the failure of individuals. It is the result of thirty years of systematic self-hollowing.

VIII. The Three Phases of Hollowing

In retrospect, three phases can be distinguished:

Phase 1 — The Dogma (1985–2000): The state is declared inefficient. Privatisation becomes an article of faith. The Bundespost is broken up, the railway becomes an AG, municipalities sell the family silver. The justification is always the same: the private sector can do it better. Proof is not demanded.

Phase 2 — The Amputation (2000–2015): With the tasks goes the knowledge. Ministries lose their technical competence. Municipalities lose their planning capacity. Consultants fill the gap — temporarily, expensively, without knowledge transfer. The state becomes an ignorant client. It does not notice immediately, because the old structures still linger. The bridges built in the 1960s still hold. The engineers trained in the 1980s are still working. But the successors are missing. The knowledge is not being passed on. The pipeline is empty.

Phase 3 — The Crisis (2015–present): The old structures collapse. The bridges no longer hold. The tracks no longer hold. The IT no longer holds. And the state discovers that the competence it would need to solve the problems was handed over twenty years ago. It cannot buy it back. It cannot order it from McKinsey. It must rebuild it — but that takes a generation, and the problems are here now.

IX. Why Money Does Not Help

The reflexive answer to every problem in Germany is: more money. Special funds. Stimulus packages. Investment programmes.

One hundred billion for the Bundeswehr. Billions for digitisation. Billions for infrastructure. Billions for housing.

The money does not help. Not because there is too little of it, but because the apparatus that is supposed to spend it no longer knows how.

The Bundeswehr cannot spend its hundred billion because the procurement office BAAINBw is so over-complex that years pass between need identification and delivery. Municipalities cannot draw down their investment funds because they lack planning capacity — they do not have enough engineers, enough architects, enough project managers. The construction industry cannot deliver faster because approval processes take years and every bat can halt a motorway project.

Pumping money into a system that no longer works does not produce results. It produces inflation, bureaucracy, and consulting contracts.

It is as though you laid a suitcase full of money on the lap of a patient whose arms have been amputated and said: "Here, treat yourself to something nice."

X. The Ideology That Disguised Itself as Pragmatism

The insidious thing about the privatisation wave was that it did not present itself as ideology but as necessity.

"The state can't do this" — as though that were a law of nature and not a political decision. "The private sector is more efficient" — as though efficiency were the only criterion and not one among many. "We must modernise" — as though privatisation were modernisation and not simply a change of ownership.

In truth it was an ideology — imported from the Anglo-Saxon countries, spread by economists, consultants, and politicians who did not believe in the state and therefore did everything to weaken it, and then pointed to its weakness as proof that they had been right.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy in its purest form: whoever claims long enough that the state cannot do anything, and then takes away its capabilities, will eventually be right. But not because the claim was true — but because they made it true.

The irony: the very countries that invented the dogma have long since begun to correct it. Britain has effectively re-nationalised its railways after the privatised system collapsed. The United States never privatised its military, abolished its space agency, or abandoned its nuclear research. Even America knew: there are things only the state can do.

Germany followed the dogma more thoroughly than its inventors. Typically German: if you are going to have ideology, do it properly.

XI. What Would Need to Regrow

The honest diagnosis is uncomfortable: there is no quick fix.

You cannot build competence overnight in ministries that have been hollowed out for thirty years. You cannot produce engineers overnight who can plan bridges. You cannot build IT systems overnight when nobody in the administration understands what an IT system is actually supposed to do.

What would need to regrow — and what will take a generation:

Technical competence in ministries. Every ministry needs people who understand the subject matter they decide on. No defence ministry without engineers who can evaluate weapons. No transport ministry without civil engineers who can evaluate bridges. No digital ministry without computer scientists who can evaluate software.

Institutional memory. Knowledge must stay in organisations, not in the heads of consultants. Documentation, training, transfer — the boring, unspectacular things that make functioning states function.

The end of consultant dependency. Not no consultants — but consultants as supplement, not substitute. The rule must be: what a consultant knows must also be known by the organisation after the engagement. Knowledge transfer as a contractual condition.

The dissolution of the hybrid monsters. Either state or market. Either democratic control or market discipline. Deutsche Bahn must either be a state enterprise with a public-service mandate or a private company with genuine competition. The in-between is the worst.

Honesty. Above all, honesty. The honesty to admit that thirty years of privatisation policy have produced not merely individual mistakes but a state that has forgotten how to be a state. That money does not help as long as competence is lacking. That competence does not come overnight. That a generation of reconstruction is needed — and that nobody can promise this generation, because the next election is in four years.

XII. The Bitter Punchline

Germany is not poor. Germany is not stupid. Germany has engineers, scientists, skilled workers, entrepreneurs — people who know things and can do things.

But the German state is poor in knowledge and poor in ability. It has privatised, outsourced, and consultant-financed away its competence — and now faces problems that only a competent state can solve, with the toolbox of an incompetent state.

The bridges crumble, the tracks rust, the schools decay, the barracks rot, the servers crash — and the state stands beside them, amputation stumps raised helplessly, calling for consultants.

The bitter punchline: Germany did not stop being able to do things because the state was incompetent. The state became incompetent because Germany took away its ability — on the basis of an ideology that disguised itself as pragmatism and promised that everything would become better, cheaper, and more efficient.

It became none of those things.

It just became less state.

And now that the state is needed, it is no longer there.