The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, was one of history’s truly epochal moments. During what became a revolutionary wave sweeping across the former Eastern Bloc countries, the announcement by the then-East German Government that its citizens could visit West Germany set in train a series of events that led, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years on, what is most striking to me are the massive, enduring ramifications of the events of November 1989. Only several decades ago, the Cold War meant that the borders of the Eastern Bloc were largely inviolate; extremist religious groups and ethnic tensions were suppressed, there was no internet (at least as we know it today) and travel between East and West was difficult. The two great Glaciers of the Cold War produced a frozen hinterland characterised by immobility.

Today’s world is a vastly different place. When one of the great Glaciers - the former Soviet Union – melted it helped unleash a potential torrent of security problems. We now live in an era characterised by huge mobility and instability, in which issues such as mass migration, international crime and international terrorism have a much higher prominence.

The end of the Cold War, together with subsequent conflicts across Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for instance, has led to many millions of people migrating the globe in hope or fear. In the West, this has given rise to pressure on jobs, healthcare, education, housing and cultural identity, causing local populations to feel threatened.

While international migration has generally been culturally enriching and beneficial, it has nonetheless also increased the range of threats to our societies. For instance, the 48 radical Islamicists implicated in terror plots in the United States between 1993 and 2001, including the 9/11 hijackers, all used legitimate immigration devices (e.g. "green cards", student/tourism/business visas, and amnesty and asylum) to get into the country.

Getting to grips with this specific threat is a major challenge and the reason why, as UK Home Secretary, I placed so much emphasis on the need to overhaul our immigration system. Key elements of the changes I championed include a new points-based system -- which represents the biggest reform of UK immigration procedures for more than half a century; electronic border controls (all UK entry visas, for instance, are now based on finger prints); and the National Identity Scheme which features compulsory fingerprint biometric identity cards for foreign nationals.

It is globalisation that lies at the heart of our transformational post-Cold War World. This inexorable process has extended the opportunities of world-wide interchange. Driven by technological advances in transport, communications, and electronic networks, globalisation has delivered massive opportunities in terms of mobility, movement and exchange of people, ideas, values, resources, commodities and finance.

But this same globalisation process and associated technology has also brought major new threats, or intensified existing ones, rendering everyone increasingly inter-dependent and vulnerable. The threat we face is seamless, running across the boundaries of defence, foreign affairs, domestic and social life. For instance, it has left nations and peoples ever more vulnerable to phenomena ranging from international crime and terrorism through to cyber-attack, health pandemics, energy-politics, resource shortage and financial crises.

The net result is that there are far more sources of insecurity than during the Cold War. The uncertainty this generates means that crises (defined as crucial turning points in events rather than as catastrophes) are more recurrent. Moreover, this bias towards instability is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of the potential crises we face is constantly evolving. In the context of international migration, for instance, terrorists and other international criminals are constantly trying to find new ways to evade our security safeguards.

Given the complexity of the threats we face, it is essential as a nation that we continually upgrade our capacity to deal with them by identifying, exposing and remedying our deficiencies. If we are to be able to keep up, and potentially be one step ahead of our adversaries, we will increasingly need to pool our ingenuity to innovate and deliver solutions.

This is a relatively uncontroversial ambition, shared by many. But I believe it requires nothing less than new thinking, new urgency and a new approach to studying tomorrow’s security problems today.

That’s partly why we are establishing the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London. The new Centre will address projects of vital importance to national and international security arising from globalisation in the post-Cold War World. The goal is to assess and embed resilience as well as analysing threats; and to extend this analysis into action in outlining policy options to shape our preparation, response and recovery to crises.

This insistence on “embedding” resilience throughout organisational structures and culture is essential given the nature of contemporary society. Where there is, for instance, now a global availability of information through the internet, satellite and mobile communications, resilience to threats must be embedded in a decentralised way (rather than top-down). To the degree that resilience can ever be said to have depended on an elite management at the top of organisations, this is no longer the case -- hence the need to bring together practitioners from the public, private and third sectors with academics in order to combine theory and practice in targeted projects.

The goal must be nothing less that ensuring that government, business and society can not only cope with, but flourish, in the increasingly uncertain times in which we live. The fall of that wall symbolised the emergence of a world offering both unparalleled opportunities and unprecedented insecurities. The challenge of maximising the first and countering the latter is a legacy demanding an ingenuity and endurance from the next and subsequent generations to match that of their predecessors.

- Erik Kirschbaum is a Reuters correspondent in Berlin. -

Has this been dullest German election campaign in decades or the most exciting?  Has the battle for power in Berlin between Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that concludes with Sunday's election been a memorable showdown or a forgettably boring contest?

Many journalists, pundits and voters have complained it's all been a merciless bore compared to the high-octane battles of the past with little action and precious few highlights.

But I would argue that in many ways it has been one of the most interesting campaigns in decades. Why? Because the outcome is so uncertain and there are more different government possibilities that could result from it than at any time in Germany's post-war history.

Instead of the usual centre-right or centre-left choice that German voters had for the last 60 years, there are options galore this time -- at least in theory.

There could be a centre-right government, another grand coalition or several three-way coalitions that could include the Free Democrats, the Greens and from a purely  mathematical point of view even the Left party that have never been tried before at the federal level.

On top of that, the opinion polls have once again tracked a dramatic narrowing in the lead that Merkel's preferred centre-right coalition (Conservative  Christian Democrats  and Free Democrats) have over the three other parties -- Social Democrats, Greens and Left party .

In late August Merkel's centre-right had a 6-7 point lead and now, three days before the election, the final published polls on Wednesday showed their lead all but evaporated to just 1-2 points. Pollsters estimate that about 20 percent of the electorate has not yet made up their minds who they'll vote for -- how can  a completely uncertain outcome on Sunday not be considered exciting?

And yet Sunday's election could also be historic for another reason -- it might be the first time two parties take power despite failing to win a majority of regular seats in parliament.

Thanks to a quirk in the German election law, the conservatives could possibly win up as many as 20 extra "overhang" seats that could help them turn a deficit as wide as three percentage points into a parliamentary majority.

Whether such a government would be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the opposition and public remains to be seen.

Admittedly, there's been few memorable verbal clashes between the main candidates this time around. This is the sixth election I've covered in Germany and I can't remember seeing rivals for the chancellery ever behave with so much civility towards each other as his time around. But

I guess that should have been expected -- they've shared power as Chancellor and Vice Chancellor in the grand coalition for the last four years. To suddenly start bashing each other probably would not have gone down well with voters and in the midst of the country's worst post-war crisis I doubt there is much appetite  among the German Buerger  for mudslinging.

Both parties also warned us all along that the race would be concentrated into the final weeks  due to the growing number of late-deciders and undecideds -- especially after the conservatives saw big leads disappear at the very end of the campaign in 2002 and 2005.

Der Spiegel nevertheless had an unusual theory -- Merkel is deliberately trying to bore the voters to hold voter turnout down because she thinks it will help her. Few would disagree that she is not the most gifted campaigner Germany has ever had.

Certainly, there's been none of the great "war and peace" battles of past elections that stirred voters against the backdrop of a Cold War, a Berlin Wall, and then a looming war in Iraq. In 2002 then-SPD chancellor Gerhard Schroeder shrewdly managed to turn his doomed campaign around by running against German involvement in the looming U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Frightened Germans turned to him in huge numbers and he pulled off an improbable comeback after being given up for dead just a month before. And who could forget the SPD's next comeback in 2005 when Schroeder turned a humble professor from the University of Heidelberg into an unlikely villian after Merkel picked him as her shadow Finance Minister for his academic-sounding ideas on simplifying the tax code.  But turnout will nevertheless still be close to 80 percent.

This year's election has also had its lighter moments.

One CDU candidate with little hope of winning her constituency in Berlin tried out the slogan "sex sells" by putting out a poster of herself and Angela Merkel highlighting their cleavage, a SPD minister had her official limousine stolen while she was on a holiday in Spain and it watched in horror as it erupted into a major issue, and a comedian who instantly became more popular than some of the smaller parties.

So who will win Sunday's election? We couldn't even venture a guess here. But we will keep you well informed of all the twists and turns on Sunday.

It will likely be a cliffhanger right up until moment the first exit polls are announced at 6 p.m. on Sunday and perhaps beyond. We'll be posting live updates right here on the Global News blog all day and all night Sunday.

- Erik Kirschbaum is a Reuters correspondent in Berlin. -

Will the party that traces its roots to Communist East Germany's SED party that built the Berlin Wall soon be in power in a west German state?

Or is the rise of the far-left "Linke" (Left party) in western Germany to the brink of its first role as a coalition partner in a state government with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) simply a political fact-of-life now so many years after the Wall fell and the two Germanys were reunited?

Will a "red" government in Saarland scare away investors and doom the state, as its conservative state premier Peter Mueller argues in a desperate fight to his job?

Or will the new leftist alliance in Saarland be able to better tackle state's woes, as the SPD state premier candidate Heiko Maas insists?

Depending on your Weltanschauung, that's what Sunday's election in three German states boils down to -- an emotional debate about whether the ex "Communists" in the form of the Left party should be allowed to be part of the next Saarland government or not.

It doesn't matter that the Left has already been in eastern state governments and will probably also be part of the next state government in the eastern state of Thuringia, which also elects a new state assembly on Sunday.

The "Cold War" has flared up again in Germany ahead of Sunday's elections in three German states, a closely watched warm-up for the national election on Sept. 27 when Chancellor Angela Merkel will be seeking a second term.

It's hard to explain to anyone outside Germany why the Left party has been seated in state and local governments throughout eastern Germany for the last 15 years with hardly a murmur while it was until recently an absolute taboo in western Germany. It's also not easy to explain to some Germans, especially those born after the Cold War.

But here goes: Many western voters have until now had a knee-jerk reaction to the Left party -- as well as its predecessor the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which is the direct descendent of Erich Honecker's SED. Westerners remember the Wall, the shoot-to-kill orders, the barbed wire and the Iron Curtain that divided post-war Germany.

"It's not a big deal in Saarland anymore," Maas, the SPD candidate in Saarland, told me in an interview on the campaign trail in Saarbruecken this week. "The CDU is trying to make a scandal out of it.

They've been trying to whip up fears about 'red-red' for months but there hasn't been any movement in the opinion polls. I think that shows people aren't interested in the parties mud-slinging about coalitions. They're tired of those games. They want political leaders to resolve their problems."

Many eastern voters long ago realised the Left party is not the SED that built the Wall. In the east, the Left  has become the most powerful party in many regions partly due to nostalgia for East Germany but mainly due to its fighting for leftist ideals as well as standing up for the so-called "losers" of unification.

"A 'red-red' government would send Saarland down the tubes," said CDU leader Mueller.  And Merkel added at a rally in Saarbruecken: "This state cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of 'red-red'." She does not use that line in her campaign speeches in the former Communist east, where she was raised, because she knows it would sound ridiculous to eastern ears.

The SPD rules out a "red-red" coalition with the Left party at the national level because of deep differences over foreign and economic policy. But it now says it is ready to open the door to such alliances in western states -- after some painful experiences in the last few years. And Maas in Saarland could be the first to go through. The SPD will probably drop that ban on "red-red" coalitions at the national level someday as well after having abandoned it for eastern Germany in 1994.

So is it "The Commies are at the Gate in Saarland?"  Or is it just part of a democratic evolution that the renamed, reborn East German Communists are about to gain a small but important foothold in western Germany?
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Tune into the Global News blog on Sunday evening for live blog coverage on the elections in the three German states.

Related Story: Merkel faces left threat in German state votes

It's not often you get to lift the hood and watch a power struggle going on in the engine room of General Motors. But the vice-president of GM Europe, John Smith, has just provided tantilising details of the arguments over the rival bids for Opel/Vauxhall, the main European arm of the fallen U.S. auto giant. Smith is the chief negotiator on the sale of Opel.

In a blog apparently intended to reassure Opel staff, but accessible to the public, he insisted GM had not specified a preferred bidder. But he made clear his own preference for the bid from Belgian financial investor RHJ International, which is loosely related to U.S. private equity fund Ripplewood, over the offer by Canadian-Austrian car parts maker Magna and its Kremlin-backed Russian partner Sberbank.

Smith's post is entitled "Clearing the Air" and was ostensibly written to clarify GM's intentions and dispel erroneous reports ascribed to interested parties. But his account shows just how poisonous the atmosphere appears to be between GM and Magna, and GM and the German government, which backs Magna's bid. It also suggests that the air is not too clear within GM's top management either.

Specific to the Magna bid, which is clearly preferred by several politicians and the Labor Bench, the bid presented to GM varied from the negotiations we had in the previous weeks and contained elements around intellectual property and our Russian operations that simply could not be implemented...

The bid from RHJI is completed and would represent a much simpler structure and would be easier to implement. It would require less monetary participation by the government and would keep our global alignments solid, while still creating an independent Opel/Vauxhall organization in Germany. This remains a reasonable and viable option to be considered as the very difficult issues around the Magna negotiations continue to be worked.

The following day, (July 29) Smith felt the need to add an update denying that GM was seeking to buy back control of Opel at a later date, or that it had asked the U.S. Treasury for financial assistance to restructure Opel. The former is strange since several sources have said a buy-back option is a key feature of RHJ's offer and not of Magna's.

So what is going on here and why did the chief negotiator feel the need to explain himself in semi-public in this way? One can only speculate, but one plausible theory is that GM's top management is split. This would not be surprising since the U.S. government now holds a controlling stake in the shrunken GM that emerged from bankruptcy, and Washington is probably being lobbied heavily by Berlin to support the Magna bid. A senior aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed Opel with the U.S. Treasury on Wednesday.

If GM were to choose RHJ in defiance of Berlin's clearly stated wishes, it would spark a crisis with political ramifications just as Germany is entering the final phase of campaigning for a Sept. 27 general election. Might the Obama administration not lean on GM's top management in Detroit to avoid being branded as a potential job-killer in Germany? If so, Smith's blog may be a doomed effort to make business arguments prevail over politics.

– Margaret Doyle is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

Germany’s politicians seem to have rescued their bad bank. Pushing back the valuation date for toxic assets to before the Lehman collapse has made it more likely that banks will consign their dud investments to the voluntary scheme.

It had looked as if the banks might simply boycott it. However, while the government has scored a political goal, it is no closer to its aim of boosting lending to a credit-starved German economy.
The essence of the scheme is that banks will be able to transfer some 250 billion euros of toxic assets into “eine Bad Bank”. In exchange they receive government-backed paper that they can count towards regulatory capital.

In principle this will raise their lending capacity. However, because the Germans do not want to reward reckless banks, the banks will pay an annual fee to participate, and will be liable for any shortfall at the end of the scheme. In other words, there is no fundamental risk transfer from the banks and the uncertainty about their eventual liability remains.

The breakthrough this week is that the government has pushed the valuation back to before the collapse of Lehman last autumn — when valuations were much higher.

One of the perverse effects of the revision is that some banks may enjoy a gain on the value of their impaired bonds because they have already been written down. This explains why shares in Commerzbank jumped by almost 20 percent when the news emerged on July 1.

However, like the original plan, the amendment is simply a sleight of hand. The government is still putting no cash into the scheme. The German public is dead against bailing out reckless banks, and the government, mindful of September’s general election, is in no mood to trifle with voters.

All that this plan does is to buy the banks time. Indeed, by giving the banks a higher starting value, the government is increasing the annual charge that banks will have to pay.

The risk is that banks will behave according to this economic reality rather than to the accounting and regulatory fiction conjured up by the government. Under pressure from shareholders to return to health, they may shrink their balance sheets and curtail lending.

Merkel may have succeeded in avoiding a bailout of Finanzplatz Deutschland for now, but perhaps at the cost of financing Deutschland AG.

(Additional reporting by Paul Taylor)
(Editing by David Evans)

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Higher taxes? Lower public spending? Devaluation? Inflation? Investment in green growth?

European governments are pointing in very different directions as they debate an exit strategy from the global financial crisis. Despite European Union efforts to coordinate economic policy, there are clear signs that the main European economies will charge off in disarray towards separate exits.

Germany is stressing an early return to fiscal discipline despite economists’ warnings against a premature withdrawal of fiscal stimulus. Berlin has just amended its constitution to anchor a timetable for a balanced budget, and is holding down labour costs to promote an export-led recovery.

“This means that the German constitution now forces a very harsh austerity stance on Germany for the coming years,” economist Sebastian Dullien wrote on the Eurozone Watch blog.

“For the rest of (the euro area) this means that after the crisis, Germany will consolidate its budget much earlier and much quicker than the rest of Europe,” he said, arguing it would weaken domestic demand and hurt growth.

German and EU officials say the amendment merely enshrines existing European budget rules and note that a get-out clause allows parliament by a simple majority to set aside the target.

By contrast, French President Nicolas Sarkozy outlined plans last week to raise a big public loan to finance investment in “tomorrow’s growth”, despite warnings from the European Central Bank and the Bank of France against any increase in debt.

France’s deficit is set to remain higher than Germany’s. But with an eye to re-election in 2012, Sarkozy explicitly ruled out austerity or tax increases to pay off mounting public debt, although he talked of cutting wasteful spending, controlling health costs and possibly raising the legal retirement age.

In Britain meanwhile, the opposition Conservatives, scenting victory in a general election due within a year, are preparing to roll back public spending to curb a runaway deficit incurred partly to rescue wayward banks and combat the recession.

Conservative finance spokesman George Osborne has been quoted as telling business leaders: “After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war.”

The Europeans face a common challenge — adapting to lower trend growth while coping with mass unemployment, an aging population and overstretched public finances after the deepest recession since the 1930s.

Different national economic cultures, as well as election timetables, explain the wide diversity of policy responses.

Britain has let the pound slide on foreign exchanges to help restore competitiveness after its banks were hard hit by the credit crunch. The British are more sanguine about the prospect of higher inflation after the crisis to work down public debt.

Influential French officials, such as Sarkozy’s political adviser Henri Guaino, see higher inflation as inevitable, and not necessarily unwelcome, and worry about too strong a euro.

Germany is allergic to inflation out of bitter historical experience in the 1920s and wants a strong currency.

Its Bundesbank president, Axel Weber, has said the ECB will not be influenced by politics in withdrawing liquidity once recovery is under way.

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet has made clear that his institution, which defines its mandate of maintaining price stability as keeping inflation below but close to 2 percent, will not allow prices to surge.

Despite these deep-seated differences, there is one key area on which the Europeans ought to be able to agree.

The EU has taken global leadership in the last decade in moving towards a low-carbon economy based on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and promoting renewable energy. Under President Barack Obama, the United States is also pushing for the green economy as a source of growth and jobs.

If European leaders joined together in a continent-wide investment and tax incentive programme to promote clean energy, energy efficiency and low-carbon innovation, they could boost the growth potential on which sound public finances depend.

(editing by David Evans)

-- Margaret Doyle and Paul Taylor are Reuters columnists. The opinions expressed are their own --

LONDON/PARIS, April 23 (Reuters) - Germany is to set up a system of bad banks before the summer recess to hold some 250 billion euros of toxic assets. Finance Minister Peer Steinbruek has assured taxpayers that his solution -- called "eine Bad Bank" (there is no German word for the concept) -- will not weigh on the budget.

He is fooling them, if not himself. If the rescue really were such a free ride for the taxpayer, some savvy commercial investor would have stepped in. Under the proposed scheme, the taxpayer will end up carrying the risk of "Schrottpapiere" (scrap paper).

Like governments everywhere, the Germans are desperate to get their banking systems moving again -- to save the economy by saving the banks, as British minister Baroness Vadera put it.

The snag is simple. Crystallising all the losses in the banking system might lead to widespread nationalisation of banks -- something most governments are keen to avoid.

But the alternative is equally unpalatable: that the state buys lots of "Schrottpapiere" from troubled banks at unrealistic prices, essentially mutualising all the losses and leaving the banks to keep their profits in private hands.

A German Finance Ministry document seen by Reuters admits this, saying, "Finance ministry examination has shown that in all models, there remains an insurmountable contradiction between the aim of removing assets from the balance sheet and the protection of the taxpayer: if the bank is to be unburdened, the taxpayer has to take on a substantial part of the risk."

The German plan is to allow banks to recognise losses on structured products over their lifetime, perhaps up to 20 years. The government would still guarantee those assets, but would only pay up at maturity if the final value of the assets is less than the "fair value" for which the banks must make provision.

That means any nasties would be pushed out -- certainly well beyond this September's Federal election, and probably one or two beyond that.

By giving the banks time to reserve for impaired assets, it allows them to earn their way out of trouble. And, the politicians get to pretend that there is no damage to Germany's vaunted fiscal stability.

However, it leaves a question-mark over the health of the banks. There is no real severance between the good and bad bank. And the need to build up reserves over a protracted period could act as a drag on the performance of banks -- and their willingness to lend.

It is puzzling why the German government needs to go down this tortuous route of creating special vehicles, with neutral parties to value assets and new accounting rules for reserving.

It is widely acknowledged that the biggest users of the scheme will be the Landesbanks, most of which are themselves owned by regional governments (although some have minority private sector shareholders). They have long been accused of using cheap state-backed credit to provide unfair competition to the commercial banking sector.

That these institutions, created to support regional economic development, ended up buying risky U.S. structured products shows just how far they had strayed from their original purpose. The state could in theory just break them up as it saw fit.

Pushing any assistance out into the future -- and structuring any asset protection on the basis that it can be argued that the shareholders had to take a hefty first whack -- seems designed to obfuscate the scale of any such rescue.

It is always a mistake, as Barack Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, memorably observed, to let any crisis go to waste.

A better course of action in this instance would be for Berlin to admit that the Landesbank model is broken, insist that their assets be run off over time, and give the private banking system a better chance to flourish when conditions improve.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The United States is fighting a fire in the world economy, but Germany and some other European countries fear a flood of inflation as a result.

That clash of cultures is at the heart of transatlantic debate over whether Europe should spend more and ease monetary policy to revive growth, with a deep economic contraction certain this year and an end to the recession not yet in sight.

The perception gap could cause lingering resentment among Americans and Germans on the way out of the crisis.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick sees concern on both sides of the Atlantic, not just in Europe, at the risk of inflation down the road from the massive additional liquidity created by the U.S. Federal Reserve and soaring public debt.

The current gush of liquidity made the glut after the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001 look like a desert, he told the weekend Brussels Forum, a conference of North American and European policymakers, business and opinion leaders.

The dollar’s sharp fall and the jump in the price of gold after the Fed’s announcement of a giant purchase of long Treasury bonds reflected fears that the United States will try to inflate its way out of the crisis.

“What some political leaders say when you bring this up is: “Well gee, when we’re putting out the fire, can you really worry about the water damage?” In a way, you really do have to worry about both,” Zoellick said, advocating a timely pathway back to fiscal and monetary discipline.

The European Central Bank has provided unlimited liquidity for banks to unfreeze credit markets and is weighing following the Fed into unconventional measures such as buying bonds to provide an extra monetary stimulus. But Germans are especially wary due to their traumatic history of hyperinflation in the 1920s, something that contributed to the rise of Hitler.

“I can promise you the European response to this crisis will not be inflationary. That’s why guys like me exist,” German Bundesbank President Axel Weber, a member of the ECB’s Governing Council, told the Brussels Forum. “I can promise you once it starts looking inflationary we will tidy up the mess.”

European Union leaders agreed at a summit last week they had taken enough fiscal stimulus measures for now and rejected pressure from the Obama administration to do more.

German leaders were particularly dismissive of calls to throw more money at the crisis when two stimulus packages adopted in the last five months are still being implemented.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso made clear EU countries would review their stimulus efforts if the economy continues to deteriorate. European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said the high debt levels of many states before the crisis were a constraint on further deficit spending.

“We are concerned by countries whose public debt is increasing very, very fast,” Almunia told the forum. “We cannot afford to spend the next two decades absorbing the debt we have created to tackle this very deep recession.”

The dispute about how to fight the crisis may have longer term negative consequences on both sides of the Atlantic — fuelling pressure in the United States for trade protectionism and stoking opposition in Germany to helping European partners.

Germans feel they made tough choices in the good times to balance their budget and cut unit labor costs to improve their competitiveness. Now many feel they are being expected to pay for the fiscal recklessness of other European countries.

Americans are raging at the greed and irresponsibility of bankers and corporate moguls. But if Main Street resents bailing out Wall Street, it will be even more resistant to paying to revive European or emerging economies through imports.

Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the British minister in charge of preparing next week’s London crisis summit of G20 nations, said there was a big risk if Americans felt other countries were not pulling their weight in reviving the global economy.

“The most dangerous idea out there is that the world is somehow going to expect the American consumer to ride to he rescue,” the former senior U.N. official said. “If that idea is left out there, it’s going to lead to protectionism in America.”