for Gerhard Schroeder’s Red-Green coalition.24 Merkel was nothing if not an Atlanticist. But if there was a common agenda, there were common blind spots too. For all the focus in the eurozone on the need to make labor responsive to the demands of global competition, for all the calls for common fiscal discipline, there was an almost total lack of recognition of the destabilizing forces unleashed by global finance. In Europe, as in the United States, it was politicians, workers and welfare recipients who were seen as the problem, not banks or financial markets.
