The U.S. Army last year published a handbook (pdf) for commanders and other U.S. military personnel who are newly deployed to Germany which describes German customs, protocol and etiquette — as understood by the Army.
It includes a wide variety of interesting and peculiar details, including an introduction to German wine and beer.
“German wine categories are more complicated than German beer categories,” the Army guide says. “There are three types of wine and three colors.”
It also includes advice for how to handle delicate interpersonal situations.
For example, if two persons pledge brotherhood (“Brüderschaft”) over drinks and switch from using the formal you (“Sie”) to the informal you (“du”) and one of them later comes to regret the intimacy — what then?
“If an unhesitating ‘Sie’ is used [by one person] at the next encounter following a Brüderschaft drink, the other person should also revert to using ‘Sie’.”
See “Commanders Guide to German Society, Customs, and Protocol,” USAREUR Pamphlet 360-6, 20 September 2005.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.