Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has caught a severe case of Net fever. He wants the coming ten years to be known as the "Germany goes online" decade, he said on German television Thursday evening. The world's fourth largest economy must not pass up the opportunity to catch a ride on the boom in information technology, but the country has some catching up to do.
"Everyone was caught sleeping," he said of both German industry and the government under former chancellor Helmut Kohl. Opening CeBIT, the world's largest tech fair (see Wednesday's "Digest"), Schröder announced his first proposal aimed at getting Germany up to speed, and it's proven to be immediately controversial.
The idea is to essentially import 30,000 "computer experts" from abroad and allow them to work in Germany on limited visas based on the US "Green Card" model. The problem, according to critics, is that 30,000 also happens to be the number of unemployed information technology specialists in Germany, nevermind the national total of four million unemployed overall.
Union leaders are naturally up in arms. "You can't just open the floodgates," Roland Issen, head of the German Employees Union, tells the "Berliner Zeitung". Even Schröder's own labor minister, Walter Riester, has expressed his reservations. But Schröder counters that sparking the IT sector will lead to the creation of 300,000 jobs in the next three years.
Education and Research Minister Edelgard Bulmahn, sometimes referred to as the "Minister of the Future", concurs. "We're starting a qualification offensive," she tells SPIEGEL ONLINE's Markus Deggerich. She echoes Schröder's criticism of the Kohl government for cutting back on education and research and German companies for failing to recognize and take advantage of the opportunity to "go on the offensive" and hire - rather than fire - engineers in the early 90s.
But she's confident that 40,000 internship positions will be created by the end of the year. The governing "red-green" coalition of Social Democrats and Greens is increasing spending on education and research and, within four to six years, Bulmahn expects to see the gaps in Germany's IT economy noticeably narrowed. Still, "the striking deficiency in expertise we have now will have to be fought with short-term remedies such as the hiring of foreign experts."
Computer experts of a different sort have been called upon to retrieve data erased immediately after the national election in 1998 that put an end to Kohl's reign as chancellor after 16 years. What was on these files, who erased them and who gave the order to press "Delete" have been wide open, headline-grabbing questions over the past few days, and so far, they remain unanswered.
The files were kept on computers in the Chancellor's Office. They may have held data on the Christian Democrats' (CDU) election strategies, in which case, many would consider it only natural that they were erased, or they may have held information related to the months-old party-funding scandal that has crippled the CDU. If so, that would only compound the party's troubles on the eve of state elections in Schleswig-Holstein which many view as the first direct verdict from the voters on the future of the CDU.
But recovering the data may take a while. The recently discovered backup copies are evidently protected by a security program which is barely used anymore. Further, these "experts" don't expect to find the actual files, but instead, working drafts of them.
One final German computer story. Heinrich von Pierer, head of Siemens, once known primarily as a computer manufacturer, spoke to 13,000 very happy shareholders in Munich on Thursday. Shares in Siemens are currently valued at around 190 euros, a record, following a restructuring of the company. Siemens is becoming a mobile telephony company.
Von Pierer aims to pull in a quarter of Siemens's income online, sell 60 million mobile phones and become the big Number 3 in the industry. The German papers note the enthusiastic applause from the shareholders but no reaction from the 60,000 employees whose jobs have been or will be cut in the restructuring program.
Germany and Europe on the Web today:
An 18-page report released Wednesday on Echelon, a worldwide eavesdropping system developed in the 70s by the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, "kept the European Parliament in Brussels entranced for hours and drew banner headlines across the continent," writes Suzanne Daley in the "New York Times". Elizabeth Becker sketches the history of the system in which "computers watch and listen for key words in telephone, fax and Internet communications and route intercepted messages on a topic requested by a country." The US and British governments have naturally denied that the old Cold War holdover is currently being used for industrial espionage, but many Europeans - French Justice Minister Élisabeth Guigou, for example - just plain don't believe them. Free registration required
More on Echelon and the current flair-up between the continent and the US and Britain from Charles Trueheart in the "Washington Post".
"CeBIT 2000 marks our entry into the online century." That's Chancellor Schröder, as quoted by Steve Kettmann in "Wired News". Also: Wireless fever at the fair and Ayla Jean Yackley on the European Union's investigation of Microsoft for possible antitrust violations.
More on Schröder's high tech plans from the AP's Hans Greimel.
John Burgess in the "International Herald Tribune" on a possible "breakthrough" in negotiations between the US and the EU on privacy on the Net: "If implemented, the deal could go a long way toward establishing rules of privacy in a world in which electronic information can flow effortlessly but where every country has a different approach as to what should be protected." Also: John Schmid rounds up the latest from CeBIT, Colman McCarthy on "Einstein's Militant Pacifism" and Robert A. Levine on what Europe could learn from US history as it struggles to deal with right-winger Jörg Haider.
In the "Times" of London, Roger Boyes calls Schröder's 30k-green-card proposal "a modern echo of the 1950s, when Germany hired the population of whole villages in Italy and Turkey to plug chronic manpower shortages created by the Second World War."
In the "Financial Times", James Harding chats with Bertelsmann's Thomas Middelhof and AOL's Steve Case: "The personal rapport between the man who has since become chief executive of Europe's biggest media business and the chief executive of America's largest internet company has had repercussions for both the businessmen and their businesses." Also: The EU will likely back Caio Koch-Weser as its candidate to head the International Monetary Fund, and Ralph Atkins and Tony Barber report that "German business confidence has hit a five-year high." Free registration required
"Finland is the rather unlikely birthplace of the worldwide mobile phone revolution," reports Rory Cellan-Jones for the BBC.
John Hooper sets the stage for Sunday's election in the state of Schleswig-Holstein in the "Guardian". Also: "The queen of less, the mistress of minimalism, the control freak who seduced millions, will be cleaved from her own fashion house, Jil Sander AG." Rory Carroll and Esther Addley on what "was not supposed to happen" after "Germany's most prestigious designer" allied with Italy's Prada. And Randeep Ramesh on CeBIT . Free registration required
Imre Karacs in the "Independent" on what the election in Schleswig-Holstein will mean for the future of the CDU.
"Haider has shown a canny ability to stir up sentiment not just in Austria, but also in Germany." Maurice Frank and Steve Kettmann in "Mother Jones" on worries that Austria's Freedom Party leader could become, as Chancellor Schröder has put it, "a German problem."
"What did I think of my first foray into the world of the Berlinale?" asks Mark Rabinowitz in "indieWIRE": "Well, to be perfectly honest, it was rather a mixed bag."
"Variety's" Derek Elley reviews director Volker Schlöndorff's "Rita's Legends", "a dramatically gripping study of a West German '70s political terrorist who ends up on the scrap heap of history."
Don't miss SPIEGEL ONLINE's interview with Schlöndorff, part of the Berlinale package in English with reviews, interviews and photos from the film festival.
Auf anderen Social Networks posten:
HilfeLassen Sie sich mit kostenlosen Diensten auf dem Laufenden halten:
| alles aus der Rubrik Politik | Twitter | RSS |
| alles aus der Rubrik Deutschland | RSS |
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2000
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung der SPIEGELnet GmbH
Wetter
