MANY Britons worried about a “hard Brexit” are clinging to a reassuring thought. Germany, the most important country in Europe, trades so much with Britain that it would suffer from a messy divorce between Britain and the European Union. So even if countries such as France want to teach Britain a lesson, the theory goes, Germany’s carmakers will use their vast influence to sway Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to go easy on Britain in its coming negotiations with the EU.
The first part of this thesis is true. Britain is Germany’s fifth-largest trading partner and its third-largest export market (after America and France). Some 750,000 German jobs depend on those exports, and Germany’s trade surplus with Britain is second only to the one it runs with America. Every fifth car made in Germany is sold in Britain, as are many German chemicals, machines and electronics. Britain is the biggest foreign investor in Germany, and some 2,500 German firms have subsidiaries in Britain, employing about 400,000 people there.
But the rest of the theory gets progressively weaker. Start with the notion that industrialists call the shots in Germany…