[guest name="Dick Howard" biography="Dick Howard is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York."]
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, America.gov, as part of its feature “The Unfinished Work of Democracy,” is asking academics and journalists from the United States and elsewhere to comment on the challenges to democracy that still lay ahead for countries of the former Eastern Bloc. What follows are their responses – and yours are welcome as well.
Twenty years after the unexpected and certainly not sought for by the majority in the East or the West unification or, as some prefer to say, the reunification of Germany, the chief problem facing the country is posed by the political name of the country itself: the Bundesrepublik. In what sense is it a “Bund” and how does it bind its members? And perhaps more important, in what sense is it a “republic”?
The constitution of the old Bundesrepublik of West Germany was sometimes referred to as the “oktroyierte Verfassung” imposed on a defeated totalitarian aggressor. But it became, over time, a positive cultural trait that fostered what Jürgen Habermas popularized as “constitutional patriotism.” The crucial moment in this development of Western democracy was the coming together of the activism of the student-led New Left with the changes in the Social Democratic Party that, after having given up its Marxist orthodoxy at Bad Godesberg in 1959, recognized the need, as new Chancellor Willy Brandt put it succinctly, “to dare to accept more democracy” in all aspects of life (mehr Demokratie wagen). The maintenance of the republic, its rule of law, and respect for human rights would be maintained even during the dark days of the Notstandsgesetzen, the laws of exception against the threat of a misguided left-wing terrorism.
Meanwhile, in the East, a “democratic republic” gradually asserted its power after the repression of a genuine working class rebellion in 1953. The legitimacy of this regime was based on its title: The “German Democratic Republic” claimed to stand for true democracy against the representative republic in the West. Its claim was that it spoke for the people whereas the Westerners were simply the voice of capital. It in fact created a kind of kleinbürgerliche society of mediocrity that seemed to guarantee its political power. This seemed to justify the claim of the GDR that its republic was the true one, since it assured not only equality before the law but real social equality.
When the Wall fell, the new Bundesrepublik was supposed to unite a western republican democracy that accepted liberal inequality as long as it was procedurally legitimate with an eastern democratic republic which sought to eliminate inequality by means of state intervention.
Although the party landscape has come to resemble the one that existed in the old West Germany, the content of political debate is no longer the same. The West — be it the Social Democrats (SPD) or the proponents of a “social market economy” (CDU, CSU)¬ — never understood why its Eastern compatriots rejected their democratic socialism. As a result, the “two Germanys” remain apart despite their unification. And this, it seems to me, is one of the reasons that the formerly stable three-party West German party system (CDU-SPD-FDP) has now devolved into a five-party carousel whose ability to form coalitions is increasingly threatened.
To summarize in a word: the West never understood the East, either for what it (misguidedly) pretended to be, and therefore it was unable to integrate its new citizens, or to understand its new status. That is why I prefer to talk about a unification of Germany rather than a reunification.
Learn more about Professor Dick Howard.
