Small Sausages and Fat Sausages

It is all about the sausage. The only question is which one.

I. A Short Guide to Sausages

Anyone who lives in Nuremberg learns early that size means nothing where sausages are concerned. The Nuremberg Rostbratwurst is barely longer than a finger, yet it carries a protected designation of origin and is more strongly seasoned than many a sausage twice its length. On its own it fills nobody. That is why it comes three at a time in a bread roll, the Weggla.

This is how small states work. Luxembourg, the Baltic countries or Singapore are overlooked one by one; together they have a say. The European Union is basically a very large Weggla with twenty-seven sausages, and its problem is well known: every sausage wants to lie in the middle.

Then there are the other kinds. The Bavarian white sausage must never hear the noon bells; it is the politician with a sell-by date, freshly elected in the morning and no longer edible by the afternoon. The sausage in a dressing gown, wrapped in pastry, is the diplomat: soft dough outside, the same meat as everyone else inside. And the ring of Fleischwurst is the summit, where everyone sits in a circle and ends up back where they started.

Two kinds, however, shape the world politics of these years: the small sausage that thinks it is a fillet, and the fat sausage that bursts in the pan.

II. The Small Sausage That Thinks It Is a Fillet

In December 1989 a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet secret service sat in Dresden burning files. When the crowd stood outside the building, he called the army and asked for protection. The answer, as he later told it himself: nothing could be done without orders from Moscow, and Moscow was silent. Vladimir Putin was at that time what one calls a small sausage, a middle-ranking official in a provincial town of an empire that was falling apart and did not even deign to answer him.

He never got over this experience. Everything that came afterwards can be read as an attempt never again to be the small sausage who calls Moscow and reaches no one. He became the one everybody has to call.

Measured by economic output, Russia today is roughly the size of Italy. That is not a small country, but it is no fillet either. What keeps Russia at the table of the great is the seasoning: some 5,500 nuclear warheads. Without them Russia would be a raw-materials supplier with an army. With them it is a great power that has to be feared.

How a small sausage presents itself when it wants to play fillet could be seen in February 2022. Putin received the French president and the German chancellor at a table so long that they almost had to shout to each other. The table was meant to show greatness. It showed distance, and a man who needs distance to look great is not great. A few days later the war against Ukraine began.

The small sausage is the most dangerous kind, not because it is strong but because it has to prove that it is strong. How it treats the state in the process we described in “Plunder, Lease and Inheritance”: the country becomes booty, the followers get their share, and whoever does not play along lives dangerously.

III. The Fat Sausage

The family of the American president comes from Kallstadt in the Palatinate, in the heart of Saumagen country, the stuffed pig’s stomach with which Helmut Kohl regaled his state guests, from Gorbachev to Thatcher. The people of the Palatinate are thus experienced with large portions. What went from Kallstadt to America evidently took this experience along.

The fat sausage can be recognised by two things: a lot of filling and a thin skin. The filling is the ego, and the gold on the walls is only the seasoning. The skin is everything that is supposed to hold it together: institutions, allies, rules, courts. The more is stuffed in, the thinner it becomes.

Donald Trump once sold steaks under his name, in 2007 through a mail-order retailer, with modest success. When a football team was received at the White House in 2019, he had hamburgers and fries served on silver platters. That is the aesthetic of the fat sausage: mass instead of measure, and everything on silver.

Fat sausages burst in the pan, and this man has turned bursting into a business model. His casinos went bankrupt several times; he himself always stayed on top. In politics it works much the same way. Tariffs are announced, suspended, doubled and withdrawn again; allies are threatened and then embraced. The sausage bursts, and the broth runs over everyone else’s plate.

The fat sausage also likes to be seen with a book in its hand, without opening it. We described this in “The God-Show-Off”.

IV. Who Pays for the Sausages

Small and fat sausages have more in common than they would like. Both consider themselves the main course. Both need an audience watching them wanting to be eaten. And neither ever pays.

Others foot the bill. With the small sausage it is the young men sent to the front and the cities lying in ruins. With the fat sausage it is the farmers whose exports founder on tariffs, the workers who were promised the factories would come back, and the allies who have to learn that friendship comes with an invoice.

The Weggla Europe has only one chance in this game: to stick together. Three sausages in a roll make a meal. A single one falls through the grill.

Bavaria, by the way, also knows a sausage that for years bit into a bratwurst in front of every camera, took itself for the ultimate white sausage and lately plays the statesman. We portrayed it in “In Bavaria, Everything is Wurscht”. It is a rather harmless, jovial kind, more barbecue than world politics.

V. The Mustard

In the end it does not matter how fat the sausage is. What matters is who adds the mustard, and of that there is more than enough in world politics: on the talk shows, in the comment columns and, we admit it, on this website too.

The Rhinelander knows it anyway: everything has an end, only the sausage has two. That is the consolation for every claim to world power. Even the greatest empire has an end, and the small sausage in Dresden experienced it himself in 1989. The fat sausage will experience it too. The only question is how much fat drips into the embers along the way.