Germany's Rhine Is Drying Up

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1:02Adam Tooze: Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos' FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FP's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us in Berlin is FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Twos. Hi, Adam. Hi, Adam. So, one data point for you all today, and that is 21, as in 21 centimeters. That's how low the water got last week in the Rhine River in Germany, at least at a single gauge near a town called Kaub, which is apparently halfway between Koblenz and Mainz.

1:42Cameron Abadi: Heat waves and lack of rain have led to a sharp drop in the levels of Germany's inland waterways. The Rhine River's water level has sunk to record lows. That's taking a heavy toll on commercial shipping as vessels have to...

1:55Adam Tooze: Several states in Germany are easing restrictions for transport trucks as Germany's longest river dries up. Freight carriers can now drive on Sundays and public holidays. The Rhine is a key artery for... 21 centimeters. That is the lowest reading since Germany started keeping records at that gauge in 1880. But yeah, the significance of those low water levels goes really far beyond that historical fact. In fact, economically, this is the most load-bearing river in the world. The Rhine is. It's connected to the largest chemical complexes, not only in Europe, but on Earth. And now the barges that go down the Rhine are only moving at a fifth of their full capacity.

2:40Adam Tooze: Yeah, and in Germany specifically, this is not just infrastructure. It is identity. The Rhine is featured in Richard Wagner's operas and Heinrich Heine's poetry. It is the border that's been fought over and occupied and reconciled ultimately across multiple wars. And so, yeah, the drying up of the Rhine is a significant event on a national level, international level. And we thought we would unpack it, given that we are both in Germany, as I mentioned, at the outset. So, Adam, to start off with, obviously, as I mentioned, the Rhine is a waterway of navigation and infrastructure. but it is also a border and that dates back to the Roman era.

3:25Adam Tooze: I mean, famously, it's cited as the kind of informal boundary that the Romans reached and didn't manage to cross, but it's also a border in modern times between France and Germany, famously. So what is the relationship between these two functions, you know, navigation and border? Is there a tension between those two functions and how does that work in practice?

3:46Cameron Abadi: Yeah, rivers always do have this strange dualism and they're both connectors and barriers, hence the strategic significance of bridges in wars and in blockades and things like that. And Kalb is a case in point. So those perhaps not terribly familiar with the geography of Germany, if you've ever seen a picture of the River Rhine with a castle in the middle of the river and kind of wondered why you'd put a castle there, one of the reasons to put a castle in the middle of the river is it's hard to attack because it's been surrounded by a moat. But the other reason to put a castle in the middle of the river is to exact tolls.

4:19Cameron Abadi: on people on the river. So precisely this dualistic fashion, and that's what Kalb has been doing since the medieval period, the buildings which are there now, which are one of those really picturesque, it's really the classic shot of the Rhine, of Kalb or some of the other castles in this particular section rising out of the water, is to act as a kind of highway toll on what, through to the advent of the railway, was the only real way of moving heavy goods over long distance was water. You couldn't really do it efficiently. There were no paved roads in Europe on a very large scale since the Roman period.

4:58Cameron Abadi: They only start getting built again in the late 17th, 18th century. So the way you move things was on water, which is why all, I think we've discussed this before, practically every major city in the world is either on the seacoast, in a bay, in a harbour, or at an estuary, or on a river. I looked today that I think Joburg in South Africa is practically the only major global city with no river So yes, they always have this dualism and the Rhine is absolutely fundamental If you go to Versailles and you look up in the Great Hall of Mirrors in Versailles The Palace of Louis XIV, the centre of French Absolutis Pa And at the heart of that palace is this famous rim which is covered in mirrors the Hall of Mirrors, where Germany forced France to surrender in 1871, and where the French forced the Germans to surrender at the Treaty of Versailles.

5:48Cameron Abadi: If you look up at the ceilings, what it shows you is Louis XIV's armies crossing the Rhine. And in World War II as well, the famous bridge too far is not about the Rhine, it's about the Dutch bridges that take you to the Rhine. So the Arnhem operation that went terribly wrong in 1944, when the British and the Americans were trying to leapfrog as quickly as possible to the Rhine and then ultimately the bridge over the Rhine at Remmogen that was crucial to allowing the Allies to rapidly advance in the West. So yes, this river has this deep dualism and it is indeed a major infrastructural industrial hub because the German chemicals industry is centred in central Western Germany around Ludwigshafen, Mannheim in particular, and the connection from there and then upstream all the way to Switzerland and downstream all the way to Rotterdam is really one of the great arteries of the world economy.

6:39Cameron Abadi: In terms of industrial conglomeration and concentration, it's even more intense, presumably, than the great rivers of China or even the Mississippi in the US. So it's a major event that water should have dried up the extent it has. It's also a German infrastructure story because there's some rocks there and they should have dug them out or at least reduced their size and they haven't gotten around to it even though they've been thinking about it since the 1990s.

7:03Adam Tooze: Yeah, that is a consistent story in recent German governance, managing to overlook infrastructure needs and now bearing the fruit of that. But in reading about the Rhine, I was also fascinated to see the history of navigation on the Rhine as an example of internationalization as well. And specifically, there is the Mannheim Act of 1868, which internationalized this activity of navigating the Rhine. And it established the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, which is still responsible for governing shipping today on the Rhine, if I understood that correctly. And the fact that this is sort of continuously operating since the late 19th century, I mean, it made me wonder if this is the oldest continuously operating international organization in the world and what accounts for it enduring so long in the first place.

8:03Cameron Abadi: Yes, some people claim that it is. It certainly goes back a long way. It was a product of the Congress of Vienna of 1815. That's what set this in motion. This was the great peace conference after the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps the classic demonstration of the kind of logic, not to say wisdom, of post-revolutionary conservative geopolitics, the idea that you could organize the world in a concerted way, a kind of concert of powers. that would manage the world, the dream of Kissinger and everyone that came afterwards in the 20th century. This had a technological side. And that was, in this case, before the advent of railways, the management of waterways.

8:46Cameron Abadi: And out of that came a convention signed at Mainz in 1831 that began to remove those river tolls that were so pesky and that Calb was all about. And it's out of that that the Mannheim Convention was signed in 1868. The timing is not altogether accidental. The mid-19th century is the moment of the emergence of modern internationalism. I immediately thought, well, what about the International Red Cross, which is also a product of that same moment? It comes into existence in 1863. The first big scientific congresses began to meet internationally in the 1850s. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the biggest trade fair in history.

9:27Cameron Abadi: so this mid 19th century moment is precisely where you would expect this kind of institution to emerge from it's not at all surprising at that way there was news to me and you know thanks for the prompt that you know this this one was very early and is continuously operating and in terms of international relations theory I think you would say it's you know it's a powerful confirmation of the basic logic of what an international relations theory is called functionalism In other words, that there is great power politics, which produces the tragedy of international politics, which is the security dilemma, like my security is your insecurity.

10:04Cameron Abadi: And the more security I search, the more insecure you become. And so there is this problem, this tragedy of international relations. but there is another liberal functionalist view that says hold your horses that's all very well yes states do conflict but we also have all these common interests and so it's not surprising that we see institutions and innovations emerging to take care of those common interests along functional lines this was a theory that really took off in the early 20th century and is commonly invoked to explain things like European integration because in the end on this same border dissected by the Rhine, there are the Germans, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch.

10:41Cameron Abadi: And it all turns out they actually all have profoundly similar and identical economic interests, which lead to things like the coal and steel community and the European common market in the 1950s. And this 100 years earlier would be the kind of the seed of that kind of logic, which is, hey, we may fight wars, but in the end, this is a waterway and we've got to figure out how to manage it. And so let's do some internationalism. And then there's only so many times you can sit down with your counterparts from the other side of the ride and agree on technical management logics without in the end constituting some kind of community which supersedes, go beyond and somehow transcends pure national interest and security logic.

11:24Cameron Abadi: And so that's, I think you could invoke this as a rather striking example of that kind of functionalist logic and international relations.

11:31Adam Tooze: Yeah, that certainly does make sense. And sure enough, this institution does still exist. And it's based in Strasbourg, France. I don't know if they get visitors, but maybe I can imagine in some capacity as a father bringing my kids there to show them the first international institution. I'm sure they would roll their eyes and wonder why we're there.

11:55Cameron Abadi: What else is there? There's the European Parliament, right? You know, other meeting places, Strasbourg. So classic sites of this kind of European logic.

12:03Adam Tooze: Yeah. Yeah. I'll explain that to my family as I plan that trip. Why we're going... I'll take the hit. Exactly. I did bring my kids to the World War I site in Ypres and they were interested. So, you know, these kinds of historical pilgrimages can satisfy everybody, I suppose. But to return to the Rhine specifically, you know, there's obviously a lot of discussion of the economic impact of this drought in the Rhine. You know, we've sort of mentioned some of the causes, but yeah, I'm curious just the depth of that economic impact. What exactly accounts for that? Because the whole world seems to be watching what's happening right now in this German river.

12:43Adam Tooze: Clearly the Rhine is the backbone of German industry to some extent, but yeah, what exactly makes it of global significance?

12:51Cameron Abadi: Well, I mean, I think we probably shouldn't overrate it. I mean, is a good summer story it produces extraordinary images but um you know de facto only about five percent of german logistical traffic goes on on waterways at all and 80 percent of that is right is is the rhine but but it's not it's not the hugest piece of the german economy when the rhine is disrupted it does have a big impact so when there were the big floods in 2018 this took I think 0.3, 0.4 % off German GDP, which is roughly what Germany is expected to grow at at this time. So, I mean, part of the attraction of this story at the current moment is that the German economy's pulse rate is so goddamn low that anything disrupts it, threatens to upheave and, you know, obstruct and violate any further prospect of economic growth.

13:45Cameron Abadi: And then there's the other thing about this, which is that it sits at the nexus of one of the most symbolic elements of German capitalism, which is the chemicals industry, and in particular BASF, which sits in Ludwigshafen and is a riverine-based heavy chemicals business. And if you think of maybe the three big iconic names of German industrialism in the 20th century, one would probably be Krupp making steel and another one might be Mercedes-Benz making cars. and the one in the middle, the key term in the middle is Rhenish chemical capitalism and that's IG Farben and IG Farben's core component, the heavy chemicals component of IG Farben, the people that won the Nobel Prize for the Harvard-Bosch process is BASF in Ludwigshafen and their business is centred on this axis.

14:39Cameron Abadi: They also were the driving force in the huge debate in 2022 during the early phase of the war in Ukraine over the question of whether Germany could do without Russian gas. Again, in the end, it was BASF that was at the core of that conversation because they take a lot of Russian gas as their feedstock. So here, when we start tweaking these elements of the German system, we see not just, you know, not really huge pieces of GDP, so much as highly symbolic elements of the German industrial and economic system showing their vulnerabilities. Now, BASF is a rich company. They all find ways of accessing the raw materials they need.

15:24Cameron Abadi: But to find themselves at the mercy of weather and heat and temperature and rock formations in the Rhine and medieval castles just makes for a kind of configuration of history that is truly, truly peculiar. And it's what I think that we have to start getting used to. And when you look at the numbers, it's kind of bonkers when you especially look at the cow bottleneck. There's a rock formation there that costs a couple of million euros probably to shave off. And they just haven't gotten around to doing it. And all of a sudden, you've got a fraction of 1 % of GDP on the line that might be disrupted here.

16:02Cameron Abadi: and you know the ecologists will say well just digging the ditch deeper the channel deeper won't add water to the Rhine which is absolutely true it won't it won't fundamentally change the ecological challenge here but Germany right now is in the grip of multiple overlapping crisis so there's a huge you know crisis is perhaps too strong a word it's like um you know an aged arthritic economic system that is facing a series of combined and pressures on it and so I think it It does rather vindicate that kind of story, that this notionally highly sophisticated powerhouse industrial economy could find itself at the mercy of the question of whether the water level is one or two inches too high or too low is extraordinary.

16:47Adam Tooze: Yeah, and that crisis kind of flows, so to speak, I guess, no pun intended, in a couple directions because, yeah, it's not only the output of these industries that flows down the Rhine, but if I understood correctly from what I was reading, it's also the Rhine traditionally was like cooling. some of the equipment in the chemical industries themselves. So it's like they now can't run their machinery because they depended on the water in the river to cool it, not only to move it, but to cool it.

17:11Cameron Abadi: Same story in France with the nuclear reactors, right? I mean, France has this famous, the large nuclear fleet that supplies the vast majority of its electricity, so far relatively cleanly. But the reactors rely on water for cooling. And when the Rhone, when the Loire run too shallow, they can't actually operate the nuclear power plants because they can't get water, which is another one of these just extraordinary kind of interwovenness, interdependence that in an ordinary, safely operating economy under normal natural conditions, you can just ignore. And what is coming home to us is that we just simply don't have the luxury of assuming that envelope of stability anymore.

17:53Adam Tooze: All right. We're going to take a quick break right here, but we'll be back in a second to continue talking about the Rhine River.

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19:37Adam Tooze: As I also mentioned at the outset, the Rhine is also of vast cultural importance in Germany traditionally, and perhaps that accounts for the level of attention it gets in the country and also beyond. You know, people may be familiar with this from Richard Wagner's operas, you know, famously the Nibelungen operas has a central plot point of gold being found in the river or produced by the river. Also plenty of romantic poets wrote about the Rhine, the Lorelei, the famous kind of like siren songs being delivered by deities in the river. And the Rhine then also kind of became, yeah, a place that even internationally drew people, romantic artists and poets to come paint, write about, be inspired by the Rhine.

20:29Adam Tooze: And then at some point, it even seemed to have become consciously marketed as a place for tourism connected then to all of this, but ultimately kind of sustaining itself independently from it. Yeah. Middle-class tourism, you know, going towards the Rhine. And I'm curious, like when did that, or how did that transition happen from being a kind of object of, you know, aesthetic inspiration to a, to a place of middle-class tourism specifically?

20:58Cameron Abadi: I mean, it's in the transition from the Romantic period of the 18th century through to the tourist economy of the 19th century that we've spoken across several shows about at various points. Yeah, the German, you know, in the face of French power in the 17th and early 18th century and the continued divisions of Germany at the time, Romanticism acquires this, you know, huge valence for Germany and the sites on the Rhine Valley. I mean, Heidelberg, where I grew up, is the classic case in point, become places of pilgrimage for the romantically inspired youth and intellectuals and cultural class of the 18th century.

21:39Cameron Abadi: It's also a stop. It's a relatively minor stop, but it's a stop on the Grand Tour, which are the affluent, above all, English gentlemen and gentlewomen who are doing early tourism and, of course, are headed towards Italy, ultimately, but go through Germany en route. And so at that point, the sort of romantic canon of Germany is established. And then really it's from the early 19th century onwards. No doubt supercharged by the kind of big patriotic push that comes out of the Napoleonic Wars that you get the development of real tourism organized around the Rhine. And before you can make steam engines work efficiently on rails, you can put them in boats to drive paddle steamers.

22:24Cameron Abadi: and by the 1820s there are not just tourist guide maps and tourist tours of the Rhine Valley but a steamboat operating between Cologne and Mainz that is carrying by the mid-19th century up to a million passengers a year so a really vigorous steamboat cruising activity on the river by the mid-19th century driven essentially by the middle-class leisure activities no doubt there's commerce as well this is one of the great arteries of commerce once upon a time it would also have been a zone of Christian pilgrimage. But in the 19th century, it becomes one of leisure commerce. I mean, to anyone who's actually ever been, I have taken a cruise up the Rhine from Amsterdam to Switzerland.

23:06Cameron Abadi: If you've ever been on the truly dramatic river, the Rhine is a letdown. I mean, there are a couple of passages, especially around the Lorelei, which if you wake up early enough in the morning with the mist, are dramatic for about 20 minutes. And then it wears off. This is not the Ganges, this is not the Danube Delta, this is not the Mississippi. It is a pretty modest little river and of course in the 19th and 20th century massively canalized, you know channels dug out, the flow of the river straightened to allow more you know commerce. So this is not, you don't do the Rhine for like real river excitement but it does have this pattern of these deep layers of history.

23:49Cameron Abadi: And if you get off your cruise, all the way along, it's just one dense palimpsest of European history after another in each one of the towns that you get on. It's just crazy. I mean, you can't step off the boat without stepping into prehistoric Roman, early Christian, early medieval Renaissance history. It's absolutely insane all the way along. The Reformation, the printing press, commerce, the Roman Empire, like the whole thing just stacked from end to end.

24:19Adam Tooze: That's very useful and clarifying because I was going to ask about this or this was on my mind, namely the Rhine, in my own virtual experience, as you suggested, also seems underwhelming as a kind of tourist site. So I'm interested that it had become this kind of almost sort of pilgrimage site. It's almost to me an example of how a kind of myth making can have a

24:39Cameron Abadi: logic its own you know i have to say this some people will take this as a rather profane example but it reminds me a little bit of some of the holy sites in palestine and israel to be absolutely honest like the dead sea is you know it's not a very dramatic place when it comes down to it or the jordan river like you talk about an undramatic river river that like features large in our cultural imagination for very good reason not a dramatic natural site so or the golan heights like as high as what exactly like so these places uh they have huge historic significance without necessarily being very dramatic geographic features yeah i mean it's in my experience

25:18Adam Tooze: in contrast to the alps say in germany which really do uh live up to the the reputation or you know i mean much less the kind of national parks in the united states in the west say which are also on a completely different scale but but yeah i guess you mentioned the history that is interwoven with the river. And perhaps that is indeed the attraction. That did get me wondering, and yeah, maybe this is the place this conversation should end, about the history that is uncovered by this drought that is ongoing. I mean, it seems to me there's almost a kind of like accidental archaeology that is being performed here as the water recedes.

26:02Adam Tooze: You know, what exactly is the significance of what has been revealed in the Rhine? Because I've been reading about World War II munitions, sunken vessels that are being revealed, other examples of historical communication, hunger stones, these kinds of like carved warning markers from other historic droughts. Yeah, what is the relation between this kind of natural phenomenon and kind of the archaeology of human history that we're now encountering.

26:31Cameron Abadi: Yeah, I mean, the hunger stones are these extraordinary objects that they literally have on them in the inscription, if you see this line, weep. You know, it means, in other words, you're going to have a terrible harvest and there's going to be famine. If you see this line, weep. It's quite the message. Yes, this is part of the story of these places, which takes us right back to where that you know the wonderful question at the opening of like what do these rivers do because they both they're both channels of communication and they are zones of conflict and right now it's not just the Rhine that's affected by very low water but the entire European river system and this has been most dramatic in the Danube where there's extremely low water levels as well and what's come to the surface is an entire fleet of I think 200 vessels The Wehrmacht, the retreating German army, as it pulled up the Danube, sunk deliberately into the Danube River channel to block, presumably, Soviet maritime forces coming up from the Black Sea, I guess.

27:40Cameron Abadi: And now, so then Serbia and other countries are having to struggle and sort out how they deal with this detritus that's emerged from the late war stage. and so it does indeed reveal I mean this is the another one of these extraordinary effects that what we used to call the Anthropocene this collective massive transformation of the ecological system that we are sited within it all of a sudden the effects of the ensuing crisis are that they expose things that we thought were buried forever and were out of reach and no they're coming back now skeletons of you know lost or hidden forgotten battles are coming back to view so it's very eerie i think it's a it's extraordinary extraordinary conjuncture extraordinary moment yeah the return of the

28:32Adam Tooze: repressed in some sense i guess um and yeah it does seem like and anywhere one looks one would find evidence of things that humans have destroyed or created and seen destroyed in their wake but But I guess what the drought does is it forces us to look. For the most part, we can look away. But I guess it's this kind of phenomenon that reveals, despite our best efforts, I guess. Yes, in any case, we should probably end a conversation here for now. Of course, we will be back in a week with new data points to discuss.

29:15Adam Tooze: ones and twos is written and edited by adam and me and produced by claudia tady the show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and ones and twos listeners as always we love getting listener feedback you can leave voice messages on the ones and twos homepage on foreign policy.com or email us that's podcasts at foreign policy.com or you can tweet us that's at onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week.

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