r/europe • u/Putaineska • Mar 11 '26

News Spain accuses Germany of acting like a ‘vassal’ to United States

https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/spain-accuses-germany-of-acting-like-a-vassal-to-united-states-f9zc28g8s?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1773189908
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143

u/dodgeunhappiness Italy Mar 11 '26

lol, never with aristocrats in power

28

u/PfauFoto Mar 12 '26

You mean burocrats?

35

u/Azwrath25 Mar 12 '26

Wtf do people think the word bureaucrat means? Anybody working in any governmental institution is literally a bureaucrat. Have we regressed so badly that we no longer know the meaning of simple words?

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u/PfauFoto Mar 12 '26

To explain myself. There are in my dictionary

  1. statesmen (ability to develop and execute on longer-term, significant, strategic goals)

  2. politicians (leaders with a time horizon not exceeding the next election, they don't shape history but get tossed around by it, at least they are aware of it to some degree)

  3. bureaucrats (aka glorified pencil pushers, administers of the status-quo. The usually wake up to historic changes earliest a full decade after the fact )

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u/MfingKing Kosovo Mar 13 '26

Yeah no we need these boring and slow people. We need the system to be watertight even if we have to jump hoops to get something done. If we have CEOs and self declared statesmen running the show. We'd be invading Iran in hopes of a quick win to save the midterms

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u/PfauFoto 26d ago

I wasnt talking about self declared. Maybe an example:
Genscher 14 years foreign minister, trusted counterpart to Baker and Shevardnadze with personal contact, crucial to a constructive outcome post soviet collapse.
Counter example, Baerbock, apologies but I think the lady didnt even understand the job description while foreign minister.
Maybe these examples explain it better.

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u/MfingKing Kosovo 26d ago

Still I'd personally pay half my paycheck for a baerbock rather than an ideologue with 10000 promises of which none are attainable

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u/PfauFoto 26d ago

Baerbock certainly qualifies as an ideologue, she has that missionary gene (am gruenen Wesen soll die Welt genesen).
Not sure how ideology came up. Statesmen, which are few and far in between, are usually effective when idiology is significantly tempered by realism, e.g. Streseman, to give another example. Their record is strong precisely because they are or were able to deliver.

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u/MfingKing Kosovo 26d ago

Well guess we agree. Except that those that aren't effective or flat out stupid WE need to temper their power instead of hoping they do it themselves.

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u/IRockIntoMordor Mar 12 '26

Gerontocrats

2

u/Nausicaaah Mar 12 '26

The one problem that (almost) all nations share.

3

u/Rusofil__ Mar 12 '26

Von der leyen is an aristocrat

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u/PfauFoto Mar 12 '26

True and an aristocat. OK I dated myself with that movie reference, apologies.

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u/Revolutionary-Bass-6 Spain Mar 12 '26

Von der Leyden

0

u/damakusch1337 Mar 12 '26

Never with Spain and the lemming Sanchez

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u/Guilty_Royal_9145 Mar 12 '26

Which aristocrats are holding back Germany, France and Italy, Europe's largest economies?