Without winning the final prize - Germany has already won the world cup
The army of British journalists and English fans pay daily homage to the Germany they have discovered during the World Cup. This is Germany’s historic victory. The reporting of the football is interspersed with spontaneous praise from fans and journalists about the ease of travel from city to city, the cleanliness of the towns, the class of the accommodation, the cycle-friendly paths that compete with the best in Holland, and the ability of cities to stage late-night festivals without them ending in a drunken brawl.
Those visiting Germany from Britain are therefore the equivalent of Soviet travellers in the 1960s and 1970s, discovering to their bewilderment that there were attractive alternatives in the West. As they leave the football stadiums with efficient ease, sit back in the trains that take them to their next venue at affordable prices, the English fans wonder whether Europe is quite so bad after all.
So next time a deluded British leader lectures you about the failings of "Europe", think of the elegant bilingual manager of Germany, Jurgen Klinsmann; the modern trains running on time, compared with our British privatised monstrosities and their 200 different ticket options, nearly all of them absurdly expensive; the sustained investment in public services compared with ours, starved of cash for three decades, showered with money for three years, and about to be starved again; and a foreign policy that saw through the dangers of forming a subservient relationship with the divided Bush administration as it bombed Iraq. When we are told that Britain’s primary duty is to follow the US in its foreign adventures and adopt its economic liberalism in all manifestations, remember what you saw happened when Germany staged the World Cup." Note EU-Digest: Lets hear it for Germany! Bravo!
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