It is always puzzling to me with how Germany has many cultural similarities with us Nordics and is an advanced science nation, yet is always so much slower in adopting new technologies. In Norway we have used electronic receipts since 2013. That is like a decade.
But I suspect it is a difference in attitude. I think in Scandinavia we are generally far more enthusiastic about new things.
Germany has a different history with surveillance and authoritarian state control.
Not only did the nazis use the resident register to find undesirables, but also the soviet union used any and all avenues to spy and control people.
Privacy and scepticism of making the sate a mandatory middleman is deeply entrenched for historic reasons.
Specifically this cryptographically tight identification, electronic-only payment etc. are very contentious for this reason I believe.
But overall your point is still correct, there is a strong bias towards the status quo and the new thing has a lot of proving itself to do before being accepted.
That's the main reason but not the only one, federalism is the other (unless you consider that also a consequence of certain 20th century events, which in part it absolutely is and in others it absolutely isn't). The ID is clearly federal, but almost everything you might want to implement on top of it is not. The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy.
>The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy.
Size of a country has nothing to do with this. Neighbouring Austria is tiny and is also federalized, with each state having several degrees of autonomy and potentially causing various bureocratic nightmares depending on what you want to do.
True, but I'd expect that those smaller units still have it much easier to pragmatically standardize procedure even when those are formally below federal than in larger units.
Germans have diffuse fears of new technology. Many of us are skeptical whenever it comes to new gadgets, especially if the risk of being tracked or spied on plays a role. Eventually most people level out and get it anyway, like the cell phone, the smart phone, credit cards, Google/Apple pay, etc. Not sure if our history has something to do with it so that many feel uneasy about giving away too much control about our personal data, but maybe it does.
> Not sure if our history has something to do with it so that many feel uneasy about giving away too much control about our personal data, but maybe it does.
Germany has seen two dictatorships in the last century. The first one was more brutal, but the second one maintained a gigantic spying apparatus on its citizens, that took a large fraction of the state's budget.
What's your level of comparison here? Japan? New economies?
If you contrast it with the US, you'll find some technologies earlier in use in Germany, like texting, and some stuff that just went different (credit vs. debit cards). And talk to someone from the US or even the UK about mandatory ID cards, and you'll hear different things about privacy.
I think this specifically is mostly to blame on bureaucracy and the federal system, not a reflection of general German luddism.
Nobody really wants fax machines.
«With the examples of surveillance discussed above, we now know why contemporary Germans so highly value privacy and limits on state surveillance. They are reluctant to go back down that road again.»
But I suspect it is a difference in attitude. I think in Scandinavia we are generally far more enthusiastic about new things.