Year 30 Germany's Second Chance Jürgen Habermas

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The German version of this essay appeared in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 9/2020.

English translation by David Gow

ISBN 978-3-948314-14-9 (ebook)
ISBN 978-3-948314-15-6 (paperback)

Copyright © 2020 by Social Europe Publishing & Consulting GmbH in cooperation with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS).

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Open INTRODUCTION

Thirty years after the seismic shift in world history of 1989–90 with the collapse of communism, the sudden eruption of life-changing events could be another watershed. This will be decided in the next few months—in Brussels and in Berlin too.

At first glance it might seem a bit far-fetched to compare the overcoming of a world order divided into two opposing camps and the global spread of victorious capitalism with the elemental nature of a pandemic that caught us off-guard and the related global economic crisis happening on an unprecedented scale. Yet if we Europeans can find a constructive response to the shock, this might provide a parallel between the two world-shattering events.

In those days, German and European unification were linked as if joined at the hip. Today, any connection between these two processes, self-evident then, is not so obvious. Yet, while Germany’s national-day celebration (October 3rd) has remained curiously pallid during the last three decades, one might speculate along the f

Open HOW GERMAN UNITY AND EUROPEAN UNIFICATION HANG TOGETHER

If today, given the new life breathed into the European dynamic, we were to go back over three decades and point to a parallel with the initial links between the German and the European unification processes, we would have to start by recalling the braking effect that German unity put upon European policy. Even if the restoration of the German state was met, to some extent, by the pro-integrationist move of giving up the Deutschmark, this did not exactly deepen European co-operation.

For the former citizens of the German Democratic Republic, brought up within a completely different type of culture and politics, the theme of ‘Europe’ did not have the same importance and relevance as it did for citizens of the ‘old’ (West German) federal republic. Since the (re)founding of national unity the interests and thinking of German governments have also changed. Attention was first wholly absorbed by the unprecedented task of adapting the decrepit GDR economy to the markets of Rhineland capitalism and hooking up a c

Open THE TURNING-POINT IN GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS EUROPE

Even before the introduction of the euro, decided upon in Maastricht, experts were already discussing the dysfunctional structure of the currency union. The politicians involved were also aware that a common currency, which removed the option of devaluing their national currency from economically weak member countries, was bound to increase existing imbalances within the currency union, so long as the political competences at the European level for providing counter-balancing measures were absent. The eurozone can only achieve stability by harmonising fiscal and budgetary policies—ultimately only by adopting a common fiscal, economic and social policy. So the currency union was created by its protagonists in the ready expectation that it could be extended, in a series of stages, into a full-scale political union.

The absence of further reforms along these lines led during the financial and banking crisis which erupted in 2007 to the measures we know, some of them adopted outside prevailing EU legislation—a

Open AFD AT THE INTERFACE OF THE EUROPEAN/GERMAN UNIFICATION PROCESS

The AfD was originally set up by a nationalist-conservative group of west German economists and business representatives, for whom the federal government’s selected European policy at the height of the 2012 banking and sovereign-debt crisis did not adequately protect German economic interests. Added to this came something like a split in the CDU’s national-conservative wing, named after Alfred Dregger, which today finds itself embodied in the figure of Alexander Gauland (AfD Bundestag group leader).

As a litmus test for the intense nature of conflicts within the reunification process, this party first took flight when, from 2015, not least thanks to a way of thinking rooted in the old federal republic—namely the conservative dislike of the 1968 generation—it established itself more firmly in the east German Länder, under the leadership of Frauke Petry and Jörg Meuthen. There it linked up with local themes within a swelling critique of unification policies. Criticism of Europe worked as a catalyst for the

Open THE SHOCK OF ERFURT IS AN ALL-GERMAN PROBLEM

What was revealed in Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg is, of course, not an east-German problem alone. The authorities had already comprehensively failed throughout Germany in pursuing the National Socialist Underground—in a series of crimes the extent and circumstances of which have not been clarified even yet by the judiciary. The far-right riot in 2018 in Chemnitz and the strikingly circuitous dismissal of the head of domestic state security triggered a learning process everywhere in the country. As the hesitant proceedings against far right networks in the armed forces, police and security agencies show, the first signs of an infiltration of core institutions of the democratic state are not just a matter for east Germany alone.

The fact is that this recent development was preceded in the east German Länder by a spate of outbreaks of violence from the far right, unhindered Nazi parades and disturbing cases of politically preoccupied prosecution. The brutal and often life-threatening ca

Open ONE FRONTLINE, TWO VIEWPOINTS

Yet the Thuringian affair did not just delineate a political frontline running right through the population in both east and west: alongside this new shared experience, the affair made clear the different viewpoints from which people perceive a common conflict because of their different histories, political experiences and learning processes. All the same, this emerged much more clearly on one side than on the other.

Whereas, locally in the east, ideas about the political substance behind the concept of bürgerlich or ‘middle-class’ mentality had to be sorted out first, reactions in the west reflected a legacy inherited from the old federal republic. The fact that the Thuringian government crisis dragged on for weeks, even after the resignation of the state premier who had been elected thanks to the AfD, was a farcical double-bind in which the CDU parliamentary group was marooned only because it was forced by its federal chair (who came from the Saarland) to stick to the incompatibility of any coalition w

Open POLICY TOWARDS THE PAST IN THE OLD FEDERAL REPUBLIC

Only these strident disputes, often carried out in unruly fashion between the generations, explain why, in the ‘Bonn republic’, the initially widespread opportunistic adaptation to a political order introduced by the victor powers more or less changed over the decades into a principled commitment to the normative foundations of the constitutional state. However, the constant flare-up of confrontations over what the historian Ernst Nolte called a ‘past that will not go away’ made this anything but a surefire success.

They were ignited directly after the Nazi period came to an end by controversies about the Nuremberg trials of crimes against humanity or about books such as those by Eugen Kogon (camp survivor/historian) or Günther Weisenborn (in the Nazi resistance). But as a result of the rapid rehabilitation of the old Nazi elites and a population released from the anti-communist spirit of the times, they were then extinguished. So, they had to be revived again and again from the oppositional margins, again

Open THE ABSENCE OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN GDR TIMES—AND THEREAFTER

Even so, I do mention this asymmetry because it points to a very relevant circumstance: the east German populace had neither before 1989 nor afterwards access to their own public sphere, in which conflicting groups could have staged debates on identity. Because in 1945 one dictatorship followed another (if of a quite different kind),¹ there was no real place in the decades thereafter for a spontaneous, self-started, painstaking clarification of a shattered political consciousness, similar to what happened in the west. That is a deficit, arising through no fault of their own, whose consequences I cannot estimate.

I am an equally poor judge of for which parts of the population explanations of the psychotherapist Annette Simon, daughter of novelist Christa Wolf, hold true when she speaks of how the party-ordered, anti-fascist identity had a strong influence. This was, she said,

because it offered comprehensive exculpation from German crimes… Everything that was further internalised post-1945 in terms of p

Open WHAT’S STILL LACKING AND WHAT COUNTS NOW

What, at first glance, seems little more than a partial aspect of converting the economy to capitalistic, competitive structures in reality gets to the heart of a political culture which came out of the Nazi period with a completely different profile. In this ‘takeover’ of a sensitive communicational interweave which, even at its best, was thoughtless, the naivety of the assumption which generally guided the federal government in the triumphal confirmation of its anti-communism came to light. This naivety was given legal expression in the choice of the constitutional path of a ‘reunification’ with the (as yet non-existent) eastern Länder via article 23 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). This article was originally customised for the entry to West Germany of the Saarland which in 1949 had only been separated for four years—so that then, as was swiftly confirmed, one was allowed to infer an ‘accumulated’ national connection between the two sides. That, decades later, in the case of reunification, one started f

Open Notes

1. Introduction

1. Luuk van Middelaar (2016), Vom Kontinent zur Union, Berlin, pp. 299ff.
2. There is still no common political will for a truly European shared perspective on the shape of things to come. As for criticism of the half-hearted nature of the Brussels compromise, see the proposals from the head of Kiel’s Institute of the World Economy, Gabriel Felbermayr, “Was die EU für die Bürger leisten sollte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 7th 2020.

3. The turning-point in German policy towards Europe

1. Ashoka Mody (2018), Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, Oxford University Press.
2. Wolfgang Schäuble, “Aus eigener Stärke,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 6th 2020.

4. AfD at the interface of the European/German unification process

1. Whatever feelings then may have been still in play, west Germans (according to their age) can mouth the now usual phrase of the “happy” event of reunification for personal reasons, because this reminds them of the sheer happenst