Germany: Power and the Left
Markovits, Andrei S.
The momentous events of 1989 and the unification of Germany recast the long-standing debate about Germany's role in a changing Europe. Virtually all the English-language newsweeklies ran cover...
...In every category listed by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), West Germany was the leading Western trading partner with Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union...
...One member of the media union went so far as to compare Polish unionists to Hitler's storm troopers...
...Social democracy's difficulties in Germany, indeed across Europe, come from its acceptance by much of the continent's political class...
...German influence in Eastern Europe is even more pronounced than in the West...
...One by-product of the Federal Republic's westernization and bourgeoisification was the emergence of a broad milieu of intellectuals devoid of nationalist sentiments—people who are first and foremost "federal republican...
...The unique burden of Germany's past further exacerbates the left's malaise by complicating its relationship to such contemporary issues as nationalism...
...the future of the German left will depend on its ability to adjust and innovate...
...In short, the left's history rendered it unprepared to address unification on an equal footing with the right...
...Instead, they harped on its costs, which did not endear them to East Germans and provided insufficient appeal in the West...
...Its support in the western part of the country declined perilously close to 30 percent...
...One component of the left's identity crisis may be called the postnational consciousness of virtually all the Greens and much of the SPD...
...Indeed, the adage that Deutsche marks will go much farther than Panzers seems compelling...
...German firms have also taken the lead in forming joint ventures in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...One of Ostpolitik's contradictions was best described by its political architect, Willy Brandt: "In order to shake up the status quo politically, we had to accept the status quo territorially...
...The Greens, too, can put their identity crisis to good use...
...In fact, the German left has much to contribute in the formation of this new Europe...
...Their discomfort mixes anger, embarrassment, and nostalgia and seems explainable only through a larger, unhappy context...
...Its most important institutional representative, the Social Democratic party (SPD), lost the third national election in a row (1983, 1987, 1990...
...The '68ers were much more critical of the GDR's communism than some of the Greens and a good portion of the SPD would be later...
...Moves now under way to make German into the third official working language of the community (along with English and French) symbolize the political reality...
...One of the Federal Republic's leading commentators aptly characterized the Greens as "soluble fertilizers on the fields of the classical parties...
...The SPD and the Greens were reactive when they could and should have been active in shaping unity from the very beginning...
...West Germany's market share in terms of intra-EC exports has consistently grown since the 1970s, rising to nearly 28 percent by 1989...
...Virtually all the English-language newsweeklies ran cover stories on the new "German question," and academic experts weighed in on the op-ed pages...
...For the Greens, the left's other parliamentary representatives, December 2 ignominiously ended a decade of gains...
...The German left is consequently largely absent from the trenches while European capitalism is dramatically reorganized...
...It is entirely different to play this role in a united Germany within a transformed, and still changing, Europe...
...A new era in German politics has begun...
...the SPD's Bad Godesberg Congress shed Marxism in SUMMER • 1991 • 355 Germany: Power and the Left favor of Keynesianism...
...Whatever the rivalry between Social Democratic "reformism from above" —the SPD led the government from 1969 to 1982—and its extraparliamentary challengers "from below," both contributed to a broad leftist milieu in which public criticism of the GDR became taboo...
...Although he belongs to the same "restless" generation inside the party as Oskar Lafontaine and Gerhard Schroeder, Engholm seems to be both temperamentally and strategically a conciliator...
...This "anti– anticommunism" was challenged only periodically by some daring Greens, but virtually never within the SPD, excepting some pockets of the party's right wing...
...The existence of the European Community (EC) seems to have benefited Germany more than any other country...
...ooking West, we find problems of a somewhat different nature...
...Unlike in the 1980s, the Greens won't be able to upstage them...
...But East Germany was the SPD's cradle, and in such pre-1933 strongholds as Saxony and Thuringia voters gave the party only 15.1 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively...
...The GDR's dictatorial ways and bureaucratic repression were criticized, but they paled beside the achievement of a truly antifascist society via the abolition of capitalism...
...Although this malaise is in good part due to Germany's new power, it also stems from internecine battles that contributed to a certain loss of purpose and vision...
...Such assertions completely disregard the hegemonic power—resting on economics—already exercised by Germany in Europe...
...The Greens, in particular, exhibit substantial hostility toward the project...
...A leading activist (who was prominent in the SUMMER • 1991 • 357 Germany: Power and the Left leftist Media, Printers' and Writers' Union) condemned any union member who protested the dissolution of the Polish writers' union...
...The extreme negativity of the Greens may render them peripheral to the entire debate on Europe's future...
...Despite its repression under communism, German has been reborn in postcommunist Mitteleuropa...
...Yet, the power already exercised by a united Germany in Europe and beyond cannot be underestimated...
...By virtue of Germany's hegemonic position its left has— despite itself—become Europe's most influential left...
...In the course of the 1970s the SPD and much of the West German left tempered its anticommunism and came to accept the GDR...
...Their disappearance from the federal level is a temporary phenomenon due mainly, though not solely, to the specific circumstances of unification...
...Germany is no longer "merely" an economic giant and a political dwarf...
...Finally, the German left harbors a fundamental mistrust of power and leadership as a consequence of the Nazi past...
...These setbacks reveal a deep identity crisis...
...However, the optimists—and the vast majority of Germans—tend to see the future of Germany in Europe through rosecolored glasses, convinced that history—the Auschwitz trauma—now renders them essentially benevolent...
...The Greens also have a crisis of identity as a result of success...
...There is truth in both optimistic and pessimistic claims...
...Many unionists and Social Democrats railed against the "Catholicreactionary" nature of Solidarity (in 1981, not 1991...
...Had the Social Democrats recognized that unification—not a two-state 358 • DISSENT Germany: Power and the Left solution—was the name of the game as of January 1990 and had they assumed a posture of leadership, German unity might not have become the exclusive preserve of the conservatives...
...A new self-perception and a new strategic presence are required...
...involvement in Central America— was repeatedly shunned by one of the trade unions' main youth organizations...
...It should come as no surprise that many West German leftists, including a substantial segment of the SPD's left wing, remain profoundly unsettled about the disappearance of the GDR...
...Pessimists on the left worry that the Federal Republic's democratic foundations are not really democratic...
...In fact, the contemporary West German left is very much a creature of West Germany's successful integration into Europe...
...Throughout the 1980s only West Germany had a positive balance of trade among Europe's "big four...
...In the eyes of some in the West German left, the GDR was unequivocally the morally superior of the two German states: it was the first "socialist" experiment on German soil and embodied the only genuine break with the Nazi past...
...Among the Federal Republic's greatest achievements is its eradication of most factors that might engender another Auschwitz...
...At the celebrations of Willy Brandt's seventy-sixth birthday in December 1989 in Berlin, Pavel Kohut declared that "you [Social Democrats] will yourselves have to analyze why you dropped us in the 1970s, and why you allied not with the beaten but with the beaters, or at best stayed neutral...
...However, I have yet to see any comprehensive proposal from the German left that could even vaguely serve as a useful political strategy for these fundamentally new conditions...
...It marked the intellectual origins of social democracy's Ostpolitik— a policy that, in the long term, contributed decisively to Leninism's eventual collapse...
...In 1959 it responded with a dramatic change in direction...
...This perception of the GDR is linked to the political fate of the left inside the Federal Republic...
...To most West German leftists, the GDR—while certainly no model—had become at least acceptable, if not commendable...
...Local and state contests after December's Bundestag election have demonstrated that the Greens will remain a permanent political force in Germany...
...Once the party is able to adjust to the fact that it operates in an enlarged Federal Republic in a completely new Europe, it will experience an electoral revival similar to the one that boosted it into power in the late 1960s...
...The optimists are the majority...
...This became evident in the process of unification, when many Social Democrats, and especially Greens, simply refused to accept a reality that contradicted their image of what should have been—and because this reality demanded forthright leadership from them...
...One legacy of the "new" left is a tendency to frown on large-scale projects...
...SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt spent a sequestered weekend consulting with GDR chief Erich Honecker—in the latter's country house—while General Jaruszelski's troops were imposing martial law in neighboring Poland...
...Being a German nationalist—in any shape or form—simply became unacceptable for West German leftists, especially after the belated discovery of the Holocaust in the 1960s and the immense impact of the student revolt of the late 1960s, known in Germany as "1968...
...Data corroborate the view that the European Community—at least thus far—has constituted a zero-sum game between Germany and its major rivals...
...Conservatives, in turn, judge these structures irrelevant in a world ruled by renewed nationalism...
...This region wants to become European again—that is, Western, but in a commercial rather than cultural sense...
...Jobs, growth, energy, and investment all had to be debated again...
...They can safely claim to be the sole parliamentary representatives of the left...
...If the Greens can curtail the internecine battles that have disrupted them so often, they can re-enter the Bundestag in 1994...
...in the Financial Times's words, "peaceable, fearful— and Green...
...In 1989 West Germany led all Western countries in export sales to Eastern Europe, and the figures are dramatic: $21.2 billion for West Germany, followed by Italy with $6.7 billion and $5.8 billion for the United States...
...The surroundings, however, have changed significantly...
...Tacit approval of the communist status quo in Eastern Europe reached the highest echelons of the West German Social Democratic hierarchy in a bizarre—though telling—incident in December 1981...
...Ironically, this atmosphere helped to create the Greens just as much as did the SPD's failure to respond to the country's energy problems and demands for "new" politics...
...Though poorer than the West and more repressive, the East was perceived to be an experiment worthy in principle if flawed in practice...
...left has been rather uninterested in Europe '92...
...This is exactly what the party needs...
...Founded in 1980 as an "ecological, social, grass-roots democratic, nonviolent" movement, the Greens were arguably the New Left's most important political legacy in the advanced capitalist world...
...On December 2 they collapsed at the polls...
...The SPD was caught between an Old Left insistence on growth and productivism and a New Left assertion of grass-roots democracy and anti-authoritarianism...
...And in each case Germany's trade was, at a minimum, double that of its nearest Western competitor...
...Initially operating against social democracy, the New Left was in good part transformed by social democracy's reforms during the 1970s, which led to an uneasy symbiosis between the New Left's successors—the new social movements—and an SPD that, in turn, had become radicalized by its contacts with these movements...
...It is encouraging that a substantial majority of Germans favor a low profile for their country in world affairs, and are...
...Culture and language are among the most decisive transmitters of economic and political influence...
...But successful democracies, such as Germany's, are powerful because of the consensual nature of their politics and the high productive and distributive efficiency of their markets...
...Precisely at this moment of national ascendance, the German left finds itself in one of its most serious crises since 1945...
...Until the late 1960s, virtually all West German discourse was engulfed by an anticommunism that often bordered on outright hysteria...
...Using export prowess as an indicator, there can be little doubt that the Federal Republic in Europe and Japan in expanding parts of Asia have reached hegemonic status...
...The contrast with the French and Italian left could not have been more stark—at least in this area...
...Finally, a generational factor also helps explain the West German left's discomfort with unification...
...Liberals fret that its institutions have never been truly tested in a crisis comparable to the depression of the early 1930s and are thus "fair weather" institutions at best...
...Lafontaine's confrontational style and imperious personality were too divisive for a movement encumbered by serious identity problems...
...Germany's share is nearly three times 354 • DISSENT Germany: Power and the Left that of Italy...
...Moreover, they have also been confronted with the onerous task of integrating the increasingly worried workers of the former GDR into a new union structure...
...Again the left seems resigned to accept the role of post hoc critic instead of vigorous creator...
...Just when the "new" priorities triumphed, enter the old GDR...
...Surveys show that many young West Germans perceived the GDR as considerably more foreign than Holland, Austria, Switzerland, or even Italy...
...It was one thing to be the progressive force in a smaller Federal Republic of Germany tied to the United States...
...Much of the West German left—led by the Social Democratic party—shared this antipathy for everything communist throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s...
...True, the SPD won 23.6 percent in what was East Germany, a 3 percent gain over its March 1990 showing there (in the only democratic election ever held in the GDR—the German "Democratic" Republic...
...Although commendable in many ways, it can also lead to irresponsibility...
...In the united Germany of the 1990s, East Germany's 1950s-style materialism will undoubtedly challenge West Germany's 1980s-type postmaterialism as the left seeks a new identity...
...In virtually every aspect of economic life, the Federal Republic has a formidable lead over its nearest Western European competitors...
...The year 1968 changed this both "from above" and "from below...
...Identity crises result, in part, from success...
...Schmidt was not sufficiently disturbed by the events to break off the meeting.* The neglect of Eastern Europe by the German left led to an understandable mistrust by East Europeans of the German left...
...The SPD and the trade unions have an especially ignominious record...
...In recent decades the German left has been, by and large, uninterested in Eastern Europe's dissidents...
...Always cynical about the tenuous nature of the Federal Republic's "constitutional patriotism" (Jtirgen Habermas's term), conservatives hope that nationalism will make a credible return as a new political force in a strong Germany, thereby challenging the anemic arrangements of the Bundesrepublik...
...But both parties must recognize that German—and European—politics in the 1990s will differ dramatically from the previous four decades...
...The absence of the West German Greens from the Bundestag during the following term should give the Social Democrats a much-needed breathing space...
...After all, the GDR claimed the legacy of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, 356 • DISSENT Germany: Power and the Lett Thaelmann, and Brecht in a land where Hitler had ruled not long ago...
...At the risk of simplification, one can divide these commentaries into two categories: optimists, who viewed unification as a boon to Germany, Europe, and global peace, and pessimists, who were concerned that a strong Germany might repeat past mistakes...
...This makes Germany the major political player inside the EC...
...It was obvious to all that the Social Democrats and the Greens were uncomfortable addressing the national dimension of German unity...
...Indeed, it was at this time—and not immediately after World War II—that much of the West German left developed the notion that the country's permanent division was a just penalty for Auschwitz...
...In power in the 1970s, social democracy successfully expanded the state sector, introduced educational reforms, and spawned a general liberalization of West German public life...
...The fact that Helmut Kohl never attempted to pursue anything vaguely resembling Thatcherism or Reaganism has much to do with the successful integration of social democratic values into the mainstream of West German politics...
...Instead, it will denote the projection of German power in an economically fragile and politically volatile part of an otherwise wealthy and stable continent...
...that the ingredients that produced Auschwitz have been extirpated by "Modell Deutschland" —West Germany's exemplary democracy...
...Concentrated in Berlin, Frankfurt, and a number of university towns, the '68ers created an extraparliamentary movement that confronted all German institutions, including social democracy...
...In East-Central Europe, German provided a common cultural bond and a lingua franca within the political and cultural elites at least until 1945...
...In no other European country did anticommunism serve to affirm the existing order as forcefully as in the Federal Republic of Germany...
...All three establishment parties (Christian, Free, and Social Democrats) developed strong proecology positions, became advocates of women's rights, and were defenders of disarmament and detente during the last few years...
...This unexpected development demanded the unions' full attention and further diluted their lukewarm commitment to Europe '92...
...A similar predicament pertains to Europe...
...Optimistic liberals and pessimistic conservatives, though from opposite vantage points, all see democratic institutions as mitigating power...
...True, many of the past markings that defined the identity of the German left still remain—relations vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and the United States, the problems of capitalism and socialism...
...Consequently, the German * Friends of mine who attended an anti-Jaruszelski demonstration that Sunday in Frankfurt were not surprised by the low turnout in a town known for the political activism of its sizable leftist subculture...
...This has led, among other things, to an intellectual and experiential distancing of the left from Eastern Europe on a number of levels...
...Questions of feminism and ecology were again overwhelmed by bread-and-butter issues...
...And the Social Democrats are once again caught between residues of their "old" left fixation on growth and their "new" left negation of growth and everything related to it...
...Its warnings that Europe '92 means a "Europe of capital" may become a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...Except for some anarchists and Trotskyists, most of the left stayed home...
...The German left carries a heavy burden concerning Eastern Europe...
...As a consequence of its singularly advantageous position within the EC, Bonn has been the largest contributor to the community's budget...
...Mention of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan— even in a "politically correct" combination with the U.S...
...The Germans dominate the corridors of the EC headquarters in Brussels...
...The Polish union, he declared, was a "fifth column," which undermined "socialism...
...In other words, the division of Germany and Bonn's successful integration into Western Europe diluted identification with the GDR in favor of cultural empathy with other Western countries...
...Engholm is the SPD's fifth postwar leader (following Schumacher, 011enhauer, Brandt, and Vogel) and gained national attention by leading the party to impressive successes in the state of Schleswig-Holstein...
...If the SPD's elites shed their unification phobia and develop a viable strategy for the new Europe (and, of course, the new Germany), Social Democrats could recapture power before the end of the century...
...but, for understandable reasons, both voices are preoccupied by the legacy of Auschwitz...
...The left is haunted by its memory of the 1950s, when the Christian Democrats were dominant and the SPD was politically "ghettoized" and excluded from power...
...It is a new and very powerful country in a new Europe no longer divided into East and West...
...Ostpolitik, to take one example, will no longer mean accommodation with a formidable communist foe for largely instrumental reasons and purposes of temporary detente...
...Polls convincingly demonstrate that in the course of the 1980s a majority of West Germans became "green" in attitude, though not "Green" at the ballot box...
...December 2, 1990, witnessed the nadir of the German left...
...Oscar Lafontaine, the SPD candidate for chancellor last year, is a product of this milieu...
...At the same time, they were equally opposed to the repressive aspects of Bonn's anticommunism...
...German political prowess was attained quietly and "by doing" —hard committee work—rather than through constant posturing, which has been the French style, or the spoil-sport negativism perfected by the British under Thatcher...
...As for the changes "from below" —little in West German public and private life remained untouched by the challenges posed by the New Left...
...Some of his colleagues called KOR, the organization of Polish intellectuals associated with Solidarity, "a questionable organization which transforms Solidarity into a political resistance movement...
...They have articulated the conventional (and largely correct) criticisms of the plans for a unified internal European market as a distant, overly bureaucratized, dehumanizing, and capitalist megamachine that will trample everything in its way...
...This lent a particular legitimacy to the GDR, a legitimacy bestowed by the left on few other countries, save in the Third World...
...The unions seem completely preoccupied with defending the economic interests of their members and are fearful of a challenge to their position from the working classes of Europe's southern rim...
...The interaction between social democracy, the New Left, and its successors also changed the earlier adherence by the left—and by the general public—to traditional anticommunism...
...Hence, he was simply no match for Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher in an election that was dominated by the national question (even though it was surprisingly muted in nationalist fervor...
...Its future extension is certain...
...Its $208.5 billion surplus for the decade contrasts sharply with the huge deficits incurred by Italy, France, and the United Kingdom...
...East-Central Europeans are now learning German in order to converse with Siemens and Volkswagen, not to read Goethe and Schiller...
...Germany wins what the other three lose...
...Engholm's quiet confidence will provide the party with fine leadership while at the same time offering it some respite from the frenzied conflicts of the recent past...
...This would not have been the case had it involved comparable developments in Central America or other parts of the Third World, including Iraq, of course...
...The optimists have made it their mission to convince their audiences (perhaps even themselves...
...q SUMMER • 1991 • 359...
...For too much of the German left, endless hearings in the committees of the Brusselsbased Eurocracy —concerning issues like the standardization of measurements across the continent—seem boring and irrelevant to the "big picture...
...France, the runner-up, has 15.6 percent, and the United Kingdom 11.4 percent...
...Unification upset the left's equilibrium...
...Its Social Democratic party, now led by the quiet but very capable Bjoern Engholm— a centrist—remains the dominant force in the Socialist International and on the European scene...
...Today, a new Bad Godesberg may be required, although perhaps not quite as dramatic...
...For a decade, the values of "old" and "new" politics had contended with each other...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
