Kafka, le purgatoire et l'enfer de la bureaucratie franco-allemande I

There is an international organisation in Paris that likes to divide its member countries into different categories according to economic performance. The story typically runs somewhere along these lines:

1. High efficiency - low equity countries with fast adoption of new technologies and a well-developed service economy prefering a light regulatory touch. Yes, you guessed it, those countries are Anglo-Saxon, perfectly happy embracing globalisation with its pleasant shake-up for everybody who risked falling asleep.
2. High-efficiency-high equity countries with fast adoption of new technologies and a-well developed service economy, overall, prefering a light regulatory touch: That's the Nordic Paradise, including Holland - because we're not German, we don't like them and can't do anything about it, it's genetic (because we always lose the important football games, more like).
3. And losers on all of those grounds. Yes, that would be us. Big continental European countries, stubbornly resisting the winds of change and the much needed adjustment to it. Doomed to downfall.

I came to Paris and experienced the culture-clash right away, between flexible and market-oriented Anglo-Saxons and old-world continental Europeans who cannot adapt. I met this English bloke who wanted to rent a 30 sq meter, three-storey house in a Marais backyard to me. When I asked him for a written contract, he said: oh no! First we should trust each other, because we know one person in common, and second, he didn't want to go through the annoyingly bureaucratic French system. Do you need translation? While I very much enjoy your wine and your savoir-vivre, I have no intention of paying your outrageously high taxes, you bloody continental socialists, what do I say - Stalinists! He backed down, though, when he realised he was trying to rent his hut to a treasury official. He offered me some ink on paper along with the promise that he'd file taxes in England. I bet the French and the English have a double tax agreement that allows you to pay taxes on your French real estate income in England.

He had no problem cancelling on his Japanese clients to make a longer arrangement with me. When - just to let French bureaucracy pale - I sent around Botschaftsrat Sauer to look at the house and convince himself in the name of the Federal Republic of Germany that it was befitting for me to represent her in it, the buraucracy-phobe Englishman even found a way to let him in from across the channel.

But when I finally pulled out myself because I found a better offer and decided to embrace market flexibility for once, the man wrote a heartbreaking, bilingual email copied to our common friend about his personal disappointment, my cunning in particular and the hardships of business in general.

Market flexibility is all very well for the Englishman as long as he does not have to bear the consequences.