Megan McArdle writes:  Greece is having an important election on Sunday, and nobody seems to care.  No one has exhibited any notable enthusiasm for the upcoming vote; some of them hadn’t even decided whether they were going to bother casting a ballot, or if so, who they would be voting for. People seem weary of elections.

For Germany in particular, government and civil society’s welcoming of Syrian refugees continues the country’s quest for redemption from the unspeakable crimes of their grandparents and great-grandparents. The German people’s attempt at redemption is a secular cause played out on a Biblical scale, because the Holocaust was a crime against not only humanity, but against human civilization itself. For religious believers, it was a crime against God. In some sense, “Germany” may never redeem its crimes, but “Germany” is not today’s German people, difficult as that may be for some people to accept.

Germans for decades shied away from international political leadership. Its leaders made of Germany’s economic success and generosity in financing European integration (plus its unyielding political support of Israel) the basis of its international influence. During these decades Germany’s foreign economic generosity was its foreign policy. With the French, Germany organized the complexities of the European Union’s internal contradictions into a vision of Europe’s renewal, the possibilities of resurrection. German money underwrote France’s political leadership. The two countries produced leaders of vision on the scale of history: Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle; Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand. Today no other country’s political and business elites, not even those in France, are thinking as deeply as Germany’s about how to move European integration forward in a strategy that combines national interests and Europe’s necessities. Germany’s partner countries want more rather than less German leadership, an astonishing international recognition of redemption. Germany’s willingness to accept large numbers of refugees is only the most recent act of this attempt to prove that the “German problem” is history.

Accepting large numbers of refugees is also good for Germany itself. Along with Europe’s other demographically withered countries, Germany, whose birth rate is among the lowest in the world, needs significant immigration to finance its future, while doubters and racism have rendered it thus far impossible. From the point of view of German interests, Syrians (and many opportunist refugees) are an educated population, willing, indeed desperate, for jobs and acceptance. Ties to the Syrian homeland will remain strong, but gratitude to Germany will be real. America’s experience, despite current electoral posturing, shows that immigration is a boon to national vibrancy. Why not for Germany and Europe as well? Furthermore, a significant Syrian minority population will increase social pluralism, among other things diluting domestic focus on Germany’s Turkish minority.

A few hundred thousand or even a few million new immigrants won’t solve Germany’s or Europe’s demographic problems. But the irrepressible urgency of the current refugee crisis is accomplishing what politics failed to do — lancing a boil, unlocking a self-defeating national stalemate. In contrast, Germany’s reception of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing former Yugoslavia’s wars in the 1990s was not an economic necessity, because the demographic deficit was not so evident then. Taking in Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and others was a political act of redemption and, for Germans themselves, an act of national catharsis. Yet strong internal opposition to immigrants did not abate.

Accepting Syrians inevitably increases the need for German leadership in Europe’s response. Germany’s government, led by the indomitable Mrs. Merkel, is stepping up to the task successfully. (It will accept at least 800,000 asylum seekers in the coming year, far more than any other EU country and probably not the end of what Germany will do.) The trouble with German redemption, however, is that dealing with a problem may not solve it but increase it. I often wondered during years of teaching European politics how long the German Problem would endure, at least in people’s minds. When would redemption be complete? I don’t know the answer, but at a certain distance from the event, history makes such questions irrelevant.

The US Fed did not raise rates, even an iota today.  The world waited and watched.  This morning, the US prognosticators gave a rate hike a 30 percent chance.  They were right.  When are we going to have other measures for economic strength?

Julian Hattem and Devin Henry write:  U.S. companies won’t be rushing in to do business in Iran, even once the terms of the landmark nuclear accord go into effect.

Lawmakers have been unable to kill the terms of the agreement on Capitol Hill, but lingering sanctions and the threat of new action will prevent the vast majority of American companies from setting up shop in Iran — even while their foreign competitors race in.

In fact, except for caviar, carpets and a few other specific areas, the U.S. economic relationship with Iran won’t change much at all.

The nuclear deal lifts sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors in exchange for limits on its ability to build a nuclear bomb.

The vast majority of U.S. sanctions, however, will only be lifted on foreign companies — not American firms.

Once regulators certify that Iran has taken a number of steps to shut down its nuclear program — which won’t happen for a few months — some industries will have a small amount of flexibility.

The most notable is civilian aircraft materials, of which Iran is in desperate need.

 The U.S., in return, will allow imports of Iranian carpets and foodstuffs including caviar and pistachios. Those shipments serve a symbolic purpose but aren’t likely to have a transformational effect on the Iranian economy, analysts said.

In any case, corporate America doesn’t appear to be chomping at the bit to rush in to Iran, which may be in part due to the threat of new sanctions from Congress..

While many American firms will be on the outside looking in at Iran, the deal will lift most United Nations and European Union sanctions on Iran, which could open the floodgates for foreign firms..

The main target of that foreign activity is likely to be energy, though the degree to which American firms get in on the game remains a question mark. 

Federal analysts say the country has up to 30 million barrels of oil in storage and could grow its production by up to  700,000 barrels a day once sanctions are lifted. 

Iran’s oil minister said in May that “we will witness involvement” of American firms once that happens, but even companies bullish on the prospects aren’t moving quickly to confirm their involvement. 

Royal Dutch Shell told The Hill in May that the company is “interested in exploring the role Shell can play in developing Iran’s energy potential,” but a spokesman Wednesday said only that that position still stands. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he doesn’t expect many U.S. companies to join the parade to Iran, citing uncertainty about the stability of the country’s legal system and its lax environmental regulations. 

But other countries, Cassidy predicted, are ready to move in when they can. 

“The Chinese are going to be the ones who benefit the most in terms of trade, and then the Russians and then the Germans,” he said. “I don’t think the American companies would be anywhere close to it.”

“This is an incredible deal — if you’re in another country, starting with Iran.”

Joel Weickgenant writes:  In March Bronislaw Komorowski, at the time Poland’s president, addressed a crisis to his country’s east, telling a crowd of diplomats, journalists, and politicians gathered at Brussels Forum that Ukraine needed its own Marshall Plan. This week Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni, addressing a crisis at his country’s south, told a similar crowd at London’s Chatham House that the Middle East and North Africa needed its own Marshall Plan.

Komorowski’s message reflected an existential Polish concern that has become a long-term European challenge. Gentiloni’s message reflected a longstanding Italian strategic priority which, turned in on itself, has become Europe’s latest, most urgent, and sure to be chronic crisis. Refugees are not arriving in Lampedusa or Lesbos; in their mind, they are arriving in Europe, full stop. There can be no Polish solution. There can be no Italian solution. These are not short-term crises, and there can only be a European solution. Geopolitical analyst Robert Kaplan, as sometimes only he can do, put it best in Bloomberg View this week. The very geography of Europe has changed, and with it, the rules:

“The Mediterranean, it turns out, is not the southern border of Europe: Rather, that border lies somewhere in the Sahara Desert from where African migrants coalesce into caravans headed north. And as they have throughout history, the Balkans still form a zone of human migration from the Near East. For decades, the dream of the European Union was to become a post-national paradise of prosperity and the rule of law, and gradually, through various association agreements, extend the bounties of civil society to contiguous regions. Now the process is being reversed: The contiguous regions are exporting their instability into Europe itself. Eurasia, a super-continent of historic exoduses, is starting to reintegrate Europe.

The defense of Europe’s welfare states was protected when the continent’s leaders brought into being what passes for EU migration and asylum policies. As the London School of Economics’ Georgia Mavrodi wrote in a recent paper:

Within the framework of the ‘Fortress Europe’ metaphor, new immigration was considered undesirable. At best, member states were supposed to be interested in a minimal harmonisation of their policies on immigrants who had already been present in their territories and considered most likely to remain.

In the economic field the EU was considered overly protectionist towards the rest of the world, keen to profit from the movement of goods, capital and services in the internal market, while endorsement of the movement of people was limited to EU citizens and their families only.”

In the Europe of yore it was possible to craft an external policy focused on internal movement, shutting the gates to the world and leaving its constituent states to deal alone with manageable numbers of refugees. Those days are gone, and they are not soon to return. Or as Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi put it in April, before Rome could convince anyone else to take refugees seriously: “If this is your idea of Europe, you can keep it.”

The Mediterranean is again, for good and for ill, a crossroads of civilizations, and the English Channel, to quote London Mayor Boris Johnson, is just a primeval river that got slightly too big. The realities of social geography demand an answer, and it’s not likely to be an answer properly arrived at parliament by parliament. That’s a brutal reality to thrust upon a European Union that already suffers democratic deficits both real and perceived, and upon national governments struggling to keep the anger of populists at bay. Just as Europe has paid a steep price for forming a currency union shackled by lack of economic coordination, it is now paying a price for bringing to life a borderless arena that lacks a fully formed common immigration and asylum policy. In the same way, it is collecting the bill for a decade of eastward expansion unaccompanied by an emphasis on strong national and supranational defense policies.

As Renzi pushes forward constitutional reforms in Rome — reforms on which the young center-left prime minister is willing to stake his leadership — he is set to perhaps take a harder line against austerity in EU fora, telling his counterparts that his country has done enough, and is recovering. So, is it? Il Sole 24 Ore‘s Alberto Orioli looks at seven indicators to gauge the health of the employment market, and finds some evidence of positive growth, but it’s hard to build an enthusiastic case. Production is up 0.1 percent year-over-year. That may sound a trifle, but as the writer points out, it does follow 20 years of 0 percent or negative growth.

Comments from West Java:  When Christine Lagarde took the stage, all eyes turned to her. It was her highly anticipated speech the audience wanted to hear the most. Sitting in the back row, I could tell that she was the star of the Bank Indonesia- International Monetary Fund (IMF) joint conference, “Future of Asia’s Finance: Financing for Development 2015.” The extensive debate and controversy over policies exercised by the IMF over these past years did not stop experts, academics, policymakers and practitioners around the globe from hoping for more. Pinning down their aspirations on this international financial institution for remedies to cure the ongoing global economic recession, the words of its commander-in-chief on any given event drew all ears.

Reuters reports:  Migrants walked through cornfields into the European Union through Serbia’s western border with Croatia, opening a new front in the continent’s migration crisis after Hungary shut the main overland route.

Croatia said it was urgently sending demining experts to the border area to identify minefields left on the frontier from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the last time hundreds of thousands of displaced people marched across Europe.

Hungary’s decision to shut the EU’s external border with Serbia this week was the most forceful attempt yet by a European country to close off the unprecedented flow of refugees and economic migrants overwhelming the bloc.

The route through Hungary has been the main one used by migrants who arrive first by dinghy in Greece and then trek across the Balkan peninsula to reach the EU’s frontier-free Schengen zone, most eventually bound for Germany.

With that route closed, thousands of migrants remain in the Balkans seeking other paths north and west, possibly through Croatia and Romania, both of which are in the EU but not in Schengen.

Hundreds of people, some of whom identified themselves as Iraqis, trek through fields near the official Sid border crossing between Serbia and Croatia, a fellow former Yugoslav republic which joined the EU in 2013.

They arrived by bus from the southern Serbian town of Presevo, rerouted late on Tuesday to the Croatian border after the Hungarian border shut.

Serbian media reported that at least 10 migrant buses had left Presevo overnight bound for Sid.   Three arrived, one a double-decker that offloaded its passengers within a few hundred meters of the border.

Hungary has thrown up a 3.5 meter (10 foot) high fence along the length of its border with Serbia. Engineers and soldiers were marking out a path to extend the fence along the border with Romania, a plan that has angered Bucharest.

Hungary says it is simply enforcing EU rules by sealing the Schengen zone’s external border. It says Serbia is a safe country, so asylum seekers who reach the frontier there can be automatically turned back in a process that should take hours.

Hungary blames Germany for exacerbating the crisis by announcing in August it would suspend normal EU asylum rules and take in Syrian refugees regardless of where they enter the EU. Thousands have since been trekking across the bloc, mainly through Hungary and Austria, to reach Germany, clogging railway stations and forcing trains to be canceled.

Record numbers rushed to cross Hungary in the days before the border was shut, with thousands now backed up in Austria trying to reach Germany.