Saying Something Nice about Germany's Chancellor

I've been pretty hard on Germany and its Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the past few blogs. So, I think it's time to balance the story of the European Union and the Eurozone a little.
Germany had a very strong currency, the Deutsche Mark, before the Euro was created. The DM was in the same league as the then strong US Dollar, the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen.
It used its financial and industrial superiority to help the European Union find its way as the Euro was created in 1999. The Eurozone benefitted from Germany's financial market strength and from its determination to keep the European Union going, at a time when many of its member states were considering rejecting the EU's governing document.
It had already partnered with France to bind the wounds caused by World War II and their solidarity made the EU as we know it today, possible. It also made the likelihood of another European war much less likely.
During the same period, in 1990, what was then West Germany agreed to take East Germany back as a fully integrated part of what had been Germany before it was divided during the period after WWII. This "reunification" as it is called by Germans, cost Germany (read that West Germany) billions of DM and Germany is still supporting the former East Germany because its Soviet legacy has made it very difficult to revive its entrepreneurial talents. Today, the unemployment rate in the east of Germany is still approximately double that of the western part of Germany. This effort is still very costly for German taxpayers.
Add to those burdens, the problem of the defaulting Eurozone countries, who either fudged their government accounts in order to meet the fiscal standards needed to get into the Eurozone or lost their way in managing their fiscal house. One can argue that Germany should have done a much better job of due diligence before agreeing to admit Greece or Portugal or Spain or Ireland into the Eurozone, but the euphoria of the new currency that would bind the EU into a real union was an overwhelming temptation for all the countries involved.
Those less-than-honest Eurozone countries have more recently fallen prey to their own fiscal policies and to their banks who, much like the rest of Europe and the USA, bought into the idea that they could buy and sell sliced-up and rebundled pieces of valueless mortgages forever. Granted, their banks were not properly supervised, but neither were the banks in America or the most of Europe.
An exception is France, whose very conservative banking system did not fall so deeply into the same trap and so were not badly hit by the 2008 financial crisis. However, it should be said that France has debt problems for other reasons, namely because it is paying for a social welfare system that is far above its means, and this may yet cause problems unless President Sarkozy can convince French citizens to abandon some of their perks.
Germany could be considered a victim of its success. Success in rebuilding itself after WWII. Success in developing a national conscience that is determined never again to be a cause of war. Success in integrating East Germany into the democratic West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Success in powering the EU into a commercial prominence built on unity.
Today, it is desperately trying to hold the Eurozone and the European Union together. France is its unfaltering partner in this. And, despite all the negatives and the siren call of some Germans to abandon the EU and the Euro for the comfort of the Deutsche Mark and complete independence, Germany seems determined to win, even at the cost of depleting its treasury in the name of European unity.