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A female worker on the assembly line for the iconic (and much-lampooned) Trabant car, Zwickau, Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany), 1960 (Photo: August Horch Museum, Deutsches Historiches Museum)

Feature

Germany as a laboratory of 'communism vs capitalism'

A female worker on the assembly line for the iconic (and much-lampooned) Trabant car, Zwickau, Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany), 1960 (Photo: August Horch Museum, Deutsches Historiches Museum)

As every good European knows, the EU began life after the Second World War as the European Coal and Steel Community.

But within that small club of members, born out of the rubble of a continent, one country in particular, a big exporter of both steel and coal, offered an real-time, almost laboratory conditions, experiment through the post-war decades of what became the EEC (European Economic Community), then t...

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Author Bio

Matthew is EUobserver's Opinion Editor. He joined EUobserver in June 2018. Previously he worked as a reporter for The Guardian in London, and as editor for AFP in Paris and DPA in Berlin.

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