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How European Nations End
How European Nations End by Paul Gottfried Paul Gottfried ([email protected]) is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College.
Die Krisen der Demokratie: Ein Gespra¨ch mit Antonio Polito by Ralf Dahrendorf. Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2002. 114 pp. 7.90 eur (cloth). Trans. from the Italian (Dopo La Democrazia, Bari: Laterza, 2003) by Rita Seuss. Englishlanguage edition Crisis of Democracy: In Conversation with Antonio Polito (London: Gibson Square Books, 2003) Demokratie-Sonderweg Bundesrepublik [Democracy, Separate Path, and the Federal Republic] by Josef Schu¨sslburner. Fulda: Lindenblatt Media Verlag, 2004. 798 pp. 39.80 eur (cloth) Charakterwa¨sche: Die Reeducation der Deutschen und ihre bleibenden Auswirkungen [Characterwashing: The Reeducation of the Germans and its Enduring Effects] by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, enlarged edition. Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 2004. 328 pp. 19.90 eur (cloth) A German Exception The books on contemporary German history under review here reveal several overarching themes: the possibility of what the Germans call ‘‘constitutional patriotism’’—that is, basing the country’s national identity on commitment to what are supposed to be universal legal norms and rights; the future of the European nation; and the level of self-government required for genuine democracy. How has this postwar undertaking to manufacture a German identity independent of ethnicity and historical pride worked after almost sixty years? While some of the trends that now prevail in Germany can be found elsewhere in Western and Central Europe—particularly state-sponsored moves to replace national with supranational administrations and loyalties—the German case stands out as an exceptionally vivid illustration of this. Germans call their situation a Sonderfall (special case). The German people lost two devastating world wars in the twentieth century, and after the defeat of Hitler’s iniquitous regime in World War ii, Germany was occupied and ‘‘reeducated’’ by the victors. The Allied occupiers in West Germany guided the rewriting of Germany’s history texts to underscore a total break from its national past, using all possible means to drive home the magnitude of Nazi atrocities under the Third Reich. The occupation also left behind a Basic Law (Grundgesetz) under which the then-only-partially rehabilitated (and still territorially divided) Germans would govern themselves. Although this # 2005 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Review Essays Law, which was promulgated on May 23, 1949, was technically the work of German jurists—most of them associated with the Center-Left—it is hard to miss here the fingerprints of the American occupation government. The first nineteen articles—particularly the first, which dwells on the ‘‘unassailability of human dignity’’—safeguard ‘‘human rights,’’ which include, significantly, a ‘‘right to asylum’’ for the politically persecuted. Article 23 provides for the eventuality of a European Union, toward the creation of which the German republic would presumably work and to which sovereignty would be transferred, with the support of the upper house (Bundesrat) of the federal assembly. If the fervent hope of America and Britain were fulfilled, Germany would soon sink into an eu founded on ‘‘democratic principles’’ but allowing the Germans only limited room for regional autonomy. Other measures were also imposed to make sure that the once rogue nation stayed out of rightwing mischief. Articles 20 and 21 provide the means to prosecute individuals or political parties that threaten what Article 21 identifies as the ‘‘freedom-oriented, democratic basic order.’’ Moreover, Article 21 refers to a ‘‘federal constitutional court’’ (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that would be authorized to decide whether a party was acting ‘‘against the Constitution’’ (verfassungswidrig). Thus there emerged in the Federal Republic a Teutonic counterpart to the American Supreme Court, albeit one that not only judges whether legislation conforms to the Basic Law but also whether certain parties, whatever the size of their popular base, pose a threat to German ‘‘democracy.’’ As a backup, the Allied High Command made the Germans accept a Verfassungsschutz (intelligence agency) that was put in place on both the federal and provincial levels.1 This agency both gathers evidence and keeps records, which it routinely hands over to courts and public administration, about the ‘‘extremist tendencies’’ it finds in individuals and groups. Although the Verfassungsschutz cannot try or detain suspects, it is allowed to infiltrate organizations and make public its judgments. Unlike the American fbi, the Verfassungsschutz is authorized to deal with only one form of public threat: ideologically driven attacks on the German democratic, constitutional order. As historian Claus Nordbruch demonstrated in his 1999 work on the subject, such powers have been turned repeatedly to partisan use, and in the largest German state, Nordrheinland-Westfalen, the Verfassungsschutz has served as an instrument of intimidation against the Center-Right. When groups have been thought to stray in the direction of the nationalist Right, the Socialists, through their political appointees, have pursued them as a threat to the German democratic order. This agency’s largely uncontested right to infiltrate has made it an even greater threat to what AngloSaxons understand as ordinary liberties. In a 2001 investigation of the right1
Claus Nordbruch, Der Verfassungsschutz. Organisation Spitzel Skandale (Tu¨bingen Hohenrain, 1999).
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Review Essays wing National Democrats, the Verfassungsschutzma¨nner—those put in charge of protecting the constitution against extremists—planted incriminating evidence on members of the group that they were trying to have banned. Although the exposure of this stunt kept the National Democrats, who have done well in elections in the former East German states, from losing their right to organize and campaign, it did not result in any restraints’ being put on the transgressing agency. Moreover, the Center-Right cdu-csu (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) continues to goad the Verfassungsschutz to find evidence of ‘‘extremism’’ in its electoral opponents on the Right, in order to avoid being forced to compete with an ‘‘extreme Right’’ party for the votes of German nationalists. The Verfassungsschutz continues to be a bull in the china shop of German constitutional freedoms. An address given in 1985 by Germany’s thenminister of the interior, Friedrich Zimmermann illustrates the obstacles encountered by all politically incorrect critics of German democracy. Zimmermann stated that he ‘‘who challenges the mission of the Verfassungsschutz calls into question the constitutional principle of militant democracy established by our constitution.’’2 Nordbruch underlines the self-serving definition of ‘‘democratic parties’’ that now prevails in Germany, by which those parties that control parliamentary institutions are by definition ‘‘democratic’’ and those they hope to exclude are ‘‘extremist’’ and therefore subject to investigation. For example, the recycled Communists who organized the Party of Democratic Socialists (pds) have been reingewaschen (washed clean) by the usually Leftleaning Verfassungsschutz; at the same time, the Republikaner, formed in 1983 by breakaway cdu-csu officials, has been kept under steady investigation. Although Nordbruch found nothing to suggest that the anti-immigrationist Republikaner would suspend democratic government, or in fact would not practice it more fully than the current party rule, the Verfassungsschutz kept the Republikaner under a cloud of suspicion on the grounds that some members ‘‘in all probability represent Right-extremist positions.’’3 The same Verfassungsschutz office in Cologne, however, refused to investigate the pds with the same thoroughness, claiming that only individual members but not the entire group held ‘‘leftwing extremist views.’’ In Demokratie-Sonderweg Bundesrepublik, a sprawling inquiry on the Basic Law, Josef Schu¨ sslburner, a Bavarian jurist formerly attached to the un and then to the eu, asserts that German democracy has abandoned the exercise of popular self-government. The term now refers to something that Ralf Dahrendorf, Ju¨ rgen Habermas, and other celebrated defenders of constitutional patriotism call wehrhafte Demokratie (militant democracy), a concept rooted in the Jacobin ascendancy of the French Revolution and, more recently, in the American occupation of Germany. Germans rule themselves 2 3
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Ibid., dedicatory page. Ibid., pp. 152–53.
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Review Essays \democratically when they make electoral decisions that reflect authorized democratic attitudes. Hence, those who oppose diversity or gay rights cannot possibly be speaking or acting democratically, because what they express is both undemocratic and extremist. Nor should Germans value their national solidarity or any specifically German heritage if they wish to be truly democratic. For their history largely exemplified illiberalism up until the Allied occupation, and thus the Germans must strive to overcome their past by becoming global citizens in a world community held together by human rights. Schu¨ sslburner easily demonstrates how widespread such views are among German elites and traces this thinking back to the construction of the Basic Law. Schu¨ sslburner does not claim that the entire document—particularly after additions such as Articles 79 and 146, which deal with substantive changes or the possibility of replacing the document in case of reunification—is all of a piece. He is also aware of the intrinsic tensions between the guarantee to express one’s opinions freely in Article 4 and the powers that the Basic Law bestows on judges to suppress political opposition. Article 21 defends the free formation of parties as necessary to ‘‘mold the popular will,’’ but then creates a court authorized to close down parties that ‘‘threaten’’ the order that the free flowering of parties is supposed to foster. Schu¨ sslburner asks whether judges may stifle as constitutionally prohibited threats to Germany’s ordered freedom parties that call for radical change in the current parliamentary system. For the view that has won out in the German press and government—that the state is free to crush opinions, particularly on the antiimmigrationist Right, that do not meet ‘‘democratic’’ criteria—may not have been what Article 21b originally intended. Schu¨ sslburner points out that the Basic Law may not be mandating the German government to treat civil liberties as cavalierly as do the present federal regimes and at least some of the provincial governments. He observes that academic and press freedoms were far better protected in Germany under the now-despised Second Empire than under the present version of ‘‘militant democracy.’’4 But having conceded that the Basic Law has been tendentiously interpreted for decades to destroy freedom and real self-government, Schu¨ sslburner also emphasizes that the Basic Law greased the skids for this development. It was inflicted on a people who were not allowed to express a collective self that did not derive from universal rights and from certain technical governing procedures. Although provisions were added permitting drastic revision and even replacement of the Basic Law, the heart of the founding document in 1949 lay elsewhere. That document was integral to an effort to denationalize the Germans, the results of which are still abundantly in evidence. In December 2004, the speaker for the cdu-csu delegation in the 4
For evidence of Germany’s parlous civil liberties situation, see Paul Gottfried, Multikulturalismus. Unterwegs zum manipulativen Staat (Graz: Ares Verlag, 2004), pp. 67–9, 130– 38.
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Review Essays Bundestag, Wolfgang Bosbach, proposed a motion that the nation recognize that Germans have a Leitkultur (dominant culture) consisting of ‘‘liberal democracy,’’ the advocates of which ‘‘demand integration and oppose with determination all forms of extremism.’’ This motion, which would only be controversial in a country embarrassed about its national identity, stems from the fact that Germany currently is home to about 7 million Turks, of whom many know little German and seem drawn to the Islamist movement that is rising in German cities. If Chancellor Schro¨ der gets his way on this point and Turkey—whose per capita income is some 15 to 21 percent of Germany’s, according to German economist Paul J. J. Welfens—enters the eu, then by 2010 at least 4 million additional Turks will have likely joined their compatriots already in Germany. Earlier, Christian Democratic critic Friedbert Pflu¨ ger observed that his party seemed to be having cold feet about ‘‘overcoming the radical ’68ers’’ who turned self-hate into the only acceptable German identity. Unless Germans learn to like themselves better as a people, noted Pflu¨ ger, they will not only fail to address their immigration problem but also cease to exist as a recognizable nation.5 The Left opposition, which until now had equated Leitkultur with disguised neo-Nazism, this time responded to the Union with amused perplexity. There seemed no reason, they argued, to designate as peculiarly German what the Left had already advocated: ‘‘living together on the basis of shared values’’ of diversity and loyalty to existing constitutional processes. Social Democrats Helmut Schmidt, chancellor from 1974 to 1982, and Egon Bahr, a journalist and former Bundestag delegate, have taken exactly the same stand. Both now express the opinion that Germans spend too much time feeling guilty and denying Vaterlandsliebe (love of country). Thus Germans cannot deal emotionally with the cultural and social problems produced by the arrival of large numbers of non-European Muslims; they look at European integration as a cure-all for a national identity that they are trying to disown. Bahr, foreign minister under Willie Brandt in the early 1970s, has remarked, ‘‘There is no recipe by which our peaceful and peace-loving country in the middle of Europe can celebrate the end of History. Germany must develop a politics of its own, as a sovereign state that can no longer hide behind the back of its elders.’’6 Tony Judt, an American moderate liberal, has made a similar argument about the false expectations that some Europeans have for a eurocracy that has yet to prove itself a suitable replacement for the nationstate. Judt urges Europeans to think clearly before yielding their sovereignty to commissars in Brussels and Strasbourg.7 In Germany this monumental cession of democratic power is occurring without a popular vote: Even in this land of 5
See Friedbert Pflu¨ ger, Weckruf fu¨r Europa (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 2002). Die Zeit, Sept. 12, 2004. 7 Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion: An Essay on Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). See also his essays for New York Review of Books. 6
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Review Essays uninterrupted politically correct conformity, the present left-of-center coalition is afraid that their fellow citizens might revert to being Germans.
Continuing Reeducation Schu¨ sslburner suggests that the increasing self-abnegation that has overtaken the Germans as a people is partly a legacy of the radicalism that took off during the 1960s. This is the narrative favored by both the German Left and the German Right, despite the fact that they apply to this story diametrically opposed value judgments. Thus for leftist antinationalist Habermas, the entire Cold War was an unhappy interruption in the process of ripping Germans away from their past, which began with the postwar occupation in 1945. Morally contrite Germans therefore needed to start the ball rolling again, which they did in the sixties, by refusing to be diverted by anticommunism and by backing out of the Cold War. The best conservative treatment of this approach to coercive reeducation has been done by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, former editor of the German quarterly Criticon (1970–97) and since then director of a Munich-based educational foundation. His Charakterwa¨sche has now been published in an expanded edition. A superb German stylist, Schrenck-Notzing tells his story with elegance and interpretive cogency. His work plots the reeducation efforts that were made in postwar Germany, how the American struggle with the Soviets altered American-German relations, and the antinational reeducation resumed by the Germans themselves. Charakterwa¨sche divides this process of ‘‘denazification’’ into two distinct, although occasionally overlapping, phases. The first was the postwar phase, characterized by military occupation; far-reaching censorship that favored the Left, including the Communist Left; intimidation to achieve certain desired social psychological ends; and a new official history stressing the Germans’ culpability for all recent wars involving their country. Phase Two, which goes back to the mid- and late 1960s, involved a selective resumption, minus the pressure of occupation forces, of Phase One. Since Schrenk-Notzing’s work was first published in 1965, what he predicted through a glass darkly has come to pass with a vengeance. We now see what German critics call a specifically German ‘‘cult of guilt,’’ which public administrators, educators, and journalists have all worked to keep going. What separated the two phases was the onset of the Cold War and America’s need to rehabilitate the Germans as Christian and/or democratic allies against the Soviets. Further hastening this transformation was the resounding victory of the anticommunist Center-Right in the American congressional elections of 1946 and the subsequent repudiation of the pro-Soviet policies pursued by the wartime Democratic administration. By 1947 the U.S. government was losing interest in prosecuting suspected Nazis or applying psychological methods drawn from radical German e´ migre´ s to reconstruct Summer 2005
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Review Essays formerly fascist societies. What the Germans produced was the ideological counterpart of this American anticommunism—namely, an intellectually fortified campaign against totalitarianism. This campaign was anchored in a prewar, liberal bourgeois outlook, and its representatives, who often came out of the academy, focused on the overlaps between Nazi and communist practices. The anti-totalitarians thought they were defending a constitutional order that incorporates Christian moral teachings and maintains non-statecontrolled spheres of individual autonomy and corporate authority. And while they accepted those Allied-imposed agencies intended to restrict threats to the political order, they viewed them initially as playing only a very limited political role. In time, however, this view would change, as the revolutionary Left in the sixties became more violent and the non-revolutionary Left more willing to dig up and divulge classified information; thereupon the liberal conservative establishment responded by pushing for extraordinary measures to contain perceived threats to the constitutional order. This tendency could be seen in 1962, when German Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss impounded the press and put several editors under temporary custody in order to show his displeasure with Der Spiegel for leaking classified military documents. Self-described German constitutional liberals rallied to the defense of Strauss, a fiercely anticommunist Bavarian, though the anti-anticommunist and antinationalist elements of the German Left played the incident up in order to discredit the ‘‘authoritarian Right.’’ The leader who from 1949 until 1963 presided over the new Germany and inspired the anti-totalitarian consensus was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), a onetime Rhineland separatist, a Catholic anti-Nazi, and a loyal ally of the Eisenhower administration. In his steady control of the helm of state, Adenauer dwarfed all his predecessors since Bismarck.8 Curiously, Adenauer, an anti-Prussian Catholic, may well have loathed Bismarck almost as much as he loathed Hitler, and his pronounced Francophilia reflected the regional culture from whence he came. The elderly Adenauer gave form to the postwar cdu, expanding it from the exclusively Catholic Zentrumspartei of the Weimar era, in which Adenauer had once served, and building bridges to both Protestants and the Bavarian regionalists grouped in the csu. While Adenauer was a bridge-builder, he wore the mantle of German patriotism uneasily. He was willing to offer Germans expelled from Eastern Europe both rhetorical sympathy and subsidies. And he went along with the Hallstein Doctrine, which refused recognition to any country that recognized East Germany. (Although this practice remained in force from 1955 until 1969, it was contradicted by West Germany’s establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union within months of its introduction.) 8
Frank Bo¨ sch, Die Adenauer-CDU. Gru¨ndung, Aufstieg und Krise einer Erfolgspartei, 1945– 1969 (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001) may be the definitive study of this extraordinary statesman.
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Review Essays But while the anti-German Left attacked Adenauer and his circle for being insufficiently contrite about the Nazi past (it is hard to see how Adenauer, given his hunted status under the Nazis, could have felt any personal contrition), it is impossible to portray this figure as a German nationalist. It was his adversary Kurt Schumacher, on the Left, who happily wore that label, before the Socialists in the late sixties under Willy Brandt swerved in the opposite direction. Although from the standpoint of the present Social Democrats, as indicated by party historian Franz Walter, Schumacher ‘‘sent the wrong signals,’’ there can be no doubt about his patriotic feelings.9 Despite having spent the war years in a concentration camp in harrowing conditions (from which he never recovered), this Socialist academic pined for the lost independence of eastern Germany and accused Adenauer of closing the door on the possibility of negotiating German reunification. Contrary to the American view of the 1940s, that Schumacher was simply soft on the Soviets, he was actually brutally upfront about his welfare-state German nationalism, particularly in his diatribes against ‘‘the American prefects’’ in his own party and on Adenauer’s side. Until the Brandt takeover in 1969, Adenauer and his successors were decidedly internationalist, launching the eu, signing the Treaties of Rome, and subordinating German reunification to an American-led struggle against communism. What they were not, and what their successors would become, were single-mindedly ‘‘antifascist,’’ fixed on destroying any moral justification for German patriotism and blindly pursuing internationalist projects as a moral imperative. For these undertakings, the 1970s left-of-center found a legal foundation in the Basic Law, which, as noted by Schu¨ sslburner and SchrenckNotzing, had an antinational purport and whose authors were concerned chiefly with rightwing threats to the new constitutional order. The left-ofcenter German establishment had a readymade document for its work, without having to replicate the American judicial invention of a ‘‘living constitution.’’ The Crises of Democracy The fact that the Basic Law excludes referenda (or direct election of presidents) throws light on how the Socialist-Green coalition now in power can impose the eu constitution on their fellow Germans without having to consult the popular will. In Die Krisen der Demokratie, Ralf Dahrendorf, a German sociologist who changed residence and now sits in the English House of Lords, notes how haunted the architects of the Grundgesetz were by the populist aspects of the Weimar constitution, which supposedly helped the Nazis find public endorsement for their work. But Dahrendorf then observes 9
Franz Walter, SPD: Vom Proletariat zur Neuen Mitte (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 2002), p. 132.
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Review Essays that ‘‘Weimar is already in the distant past. . . . Now many, including many liberal thinking people, believe that there are subjects about which one ought to ask the voters.’’ Alas, these ‘‘fears’’ were overblown to start with. In Germany’s last direct presidential race, in 1932, Hindenburg beat Hitler handily. Once in the driver’s seat, the Nazis manipulated referenda, (Volksentscheide) but such manipulation does not discredit a democratic practice that continues to be applied in American states (notably California) and in nations (such as Switzerland) without creating a Nazi dictatorship. Equally unconvincing, Schu¨ sslburner explains, is the creation of a 5-percent-of-the-vote ‘‘hurdle’’ that parties must reach in order to enter provincial or federal legislative bodies. Schu¨ sslburner further notes that the actual hurdle may be closer to 7 percent, since parties need at least that percentage in order for their candidates to look electable. Many political scientists have assumed that the more proportionate representation for parties that existed under the Weimar constitution made it easier for the Nazis to increase their share of delegates. But a proportionate system without hurdles has operated elsewhere without this untoward effect. According to Schu¨ sslburner, the Basic Law has moved Germany toward neither anarchy nor personal dictatorship, but the rotating rule of two monopolistic blocs, a lock hold that is protected by encouraging judges and Schu¨tzma¨nner to go after potential competitor parties as ‘‘extremist.’’ I read Dahrendorf’s book, an extended conversation held with the Italian journalist Antonio Polito, in a highly fluent German translation. Despite the self-importance that comes through in Dahrendorf’s references to his highplaced British friends, his membership in the House of Lords, and his selfattributed ‘‘liberal’’ bien-pensance, he does raise timely issues about the eu, the European nation state, and judicially run government. He notes that there is a democracy deficit in the Union and that the European Parliament does not represent the interests and views of Europeans to the same degree as do traditional parliamentary representatives. There is a point of remoteness from the voter at which elected officials cease to speak for them, particularly when the Union’s commissars, judges, and functionaries wield most of the actual power. Dahrendorf distinguishes between ‘‘liberalism’’ and ‘‘democracy’’ and acknowledges that nineteenth-century Prussia met the requirements of a ‘‘state under law.’’ Despite its admittedly restricted practice of popular government, it was equipped with a generally impartial judiciary. He also grasps the fact that parliamentary blocs in today’s Europe can establish a ruling monopoly that is almost impossible to break. And it is questionable whether this monopoly can be accurately described as democratic.
Sovereign Nation-States Dahrendorf might have done better in his interview not to work so hard as a spokesman for today’s regnant form of liberal democracy. He views 568
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Review Essays America’s as possibly the best of all regimes ‘‘because it has functioned for over two centuries’’ as a responsive popular government. Clearly he misses the dramatic changes in the American government over the last century, particularly the steady progress toward administrative and judicial centralization. Dahrendorf quotes John Stuart Mill on the need for cultural and geographic dimensions in a nation-state, but then quickly reminds us that culture has nothing to do with ethnicity. Rather it reflects ‘‘an unwritten value consensus among people living within a delimited space.’’ He also questions Mill’s assertion about ‘‘the mutual sympathy leading to cooperation’’ that defines nations, a predisposition often strengthened by a shared language: ‘‘The Swiss can contest this thesis with good reason. And the U.S. today is a greater land now than two hundred years ago, while Spanish has established itself as a second language.’’ In fact, most of those living in Switzerland speak German or SwissGerman as their first language; and except for the Muslim newcomers, who have added disproportionately to crime and welfare rolls,10 almost all of the Swiss are Catholics or Calvinists—and therefore Christian. Moreover, before the Swiss republic achieved its present degree of unity, which is now being politically challenged by anti-immigrationists, its cantons fought wars against each other for centuries. And the comment that America is a ‘‘greater land now’’ because of Hispanic immigration is too vague to mean anything. ‘‘Greater in what way?’’ might have been Polito’s follow-up question. Dahrendorf then inveighs against European regionalists, specifically Jorg Haider and Umberto Bossi, who ‘‘aim at ethnic homogeneity’’ and claim ‘‘rights of sovereignty for those living within particular borders in order to exclude minorities.’’ Such behavior, ‘‘which has created havoc in Europe,’’ causes states ‘‘to become intolerant of its minorities and to practice aggression against neighbors belonging to a different ethnic group.’’ It is hard to see how Bossi’s or Haider’s attempt to limit immigration into their region, particularly in the case of uneducated third-worlders, will incite aggression against their neighbors. And why is it less ‘‘democratic’’ for a region to decide on who will be allowed to enter as new residents and eventually citizens than to consign such decisions to federal or international administrators and judges? Equally unsettling is Dahrendorf’s lack of historical understanding of nation-states. What distinguished the nation-state from the governing artifice that was Thomas Hobbes’s new sovereign state was its ethnic, cultural, and religious specificity. Unlike a mere governing instrument, a nation-state has internal cohesion that sovereigns once favored in building stable relations among their subjects. Sovereign states in early modern Europe, and those that imitated their examples, featured established churches, national languages, and, if possible, ethnic homogeneity. One does not have to be an antiimmigration populist to grasp these historical facts. In the nineteenth century, 10
See Zachary Shore, ‘‘Can the West Win Muslim Hearts and Minds?’’ in this issue of Orbis.
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Review Essays the rising European bourgeoisie worked to establish parliamentary governments and liberal freedoms, particularly religious liberty, but also embraced nationalist ideas and promoted national literatures. Dahrendorf deplores any return to an ethnically related political identity and expresses fear that such a course would bring about ‘‘wars of conquest and suppression.’’ Still, it is unclear that he is interested in nation-states or in actual democratic selfdetermination. As a self-exiled member of a humiliated and self-debased people, Dahrendorf wants heterogeneity and enforced tolerance for ideologically reconstructed European nation-states. Whether he is describing or denaturing these entities is another matter. Others have deplored as a straitjacket what he celebrates. Thus Gianfranco Miglio (1918–2001), the famous jurist at the Catholic University of Milan and occasional advisor to the Northern League, explained that the national liberal aspirations of Italy’s unifiers had not borne fruit either under Mussolini or in the bureaucratically suffocating partitocrazia in which Italy existed before and after fascism. Miglio proposed a regional division of Italy, which allowed his fellow-North Italian burghers to develop their own culture and economy and, above all, to control access to citizenship. Such an arrangement, he stressed, was consistent with the bourgeois nation-state that his progenitors had worked to bring about.11 For Dahrendorf, such critical thinking has no place in a discussion about European governments but must lead to ‘‘the fragmentation of the world into aggressive and brutal ministates.’’ One may be justified in raising doubts about this gloom-and-doom prediction.
11
See Gianfranco Miglio, Una costituzione per i prossimi trenta anni [A Constitution for the Next Thirty Years] (Bari: Laterza, 1990).
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Die Krisen der Demokratie: Ein Gespra¨ch mit Antonio Polito by Ralf Dahrendorf. Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2002. 114 pp. 7.90 eur (cloth). Trans. from the Italian (Dopo La Democrazia, Bari: Laterza, 2003) by Rita Seuss. Englishlanguage edition Crisis of Democracy: In Conversation with Antonio Polito (London: Gibson Square Books, 2003) Demokratie-Sonderweg Bundesrepublik [Democracy, Separate Path, and the Federal Republic] by Josef Schu¨sslburner. Fulda: Lindenblatt Media Verlag, 2004. 798 pp. 39.80 eur (cloth) Charakterwa¨sche: Die Reeducation der Deutschen und ihre bleibenden Auswirkungen [Characterwashing: The Reeducation of the Germans and its Enduring Effects] by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, enlarged edition. Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 2004. 328 pp. 19.90 eur (cloth) A German Exception The books on contemporary German history under review here reveal several overarching themes: the possibility of what the Germans call ‘‘constitutional patriotism’’—that is, basing the country’s national identity on commitment to what are supposed to be universal legal norms and rights; the future of the European nation; and the level of self-government required for genuine democracy. How has this postwar undertaking to manufacture a German identity independent of ethnicity and historical pride worked after almost sixty years? While some of the trends that now prevail in Germany can be found elsewhere in Western and Central Europe—particularly state-sponsored moves to replace national with supranational administrations and loyalties—the German case stands out as an exceptionally vivid illustration of this. Germans call their situation a Sonderfall (special case). The German people lost two devastating world wars in the twentieth century, and after the defeat of Hitler’s iniquitous regime in World War ii, Germany was occupied and ‘‘reeducated’’ by the victors. The Allied occupiers in West Germany guided the rewriting of Germany’s history texts to underscore a total break from its national past, using all possible means to drive home the magnitude of Nazi atrocities under the Third Reich. The occupation also left behind a Basic Law (Grundgesetz) under which the then-only-partially rehabilitated (and still territorially divided) Germans would govern themselves. Although this # 2005 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Review Essays Law, which was promulgated on May 23, 1949, was technically the work of German jurists—most of them associated with the Center-Left—it is hard to miss here the fingerprints of the American occupation government. The first nineteen articles—particularly the first, which dwells on the ‘‘unassailability of human dignity’’—safeguard ‘‘human rights,’’ which include, significantly, a ‘‘right to asylum’’ for the politically persecuted. Article 23 provides for the eventuality of a European Union, toward the creation of which the German republic would presumably work and to which sovereignty would be transferred, with the support of the upper house (Bundesrat) of the federal assembly. If the fervent hope of America and Britain were fulfilled, Germany would soon sink into an eu founded on ‘‘democratic principles’’ but allowing the Germans only limited room for regional autonomy. Other measures were also imposed to make sure that the once rogue nation stayed out of rightwing mischief. Articles 20 and 21 provide the means to prosecute individuals or political parties that threaten what Article 21 identifies as the ‘‘freedom-oriented, democratic basic order.’’ Moreover, Article 21 refers to a ‘‘federal constitutional court’’ (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that would be authorized to decide whether a party was acting ‘‘against the Constitution’’ (verfassungswidrig). Thus there emerged in the Federal Republic a Teutonic counterpart to the American Supreme Court, albeit one that not only judges whether legislation conforms to the Basic Law but also whether certain parties, whatever the size of their popular base, pose a threat to German ‘‘democracy.’’ As a backup, the Allied High Command made the Germans accept a Verfassungsschutz (intelligence agency) that was put in place on both the federal and provincial levels.1 This agency both gathers evidence and keeps records, which it routinely hands over to courts and public administration, about the ‘‘extremist tendencies’’ it finds in individuals and groups. Although the Verfassungsschutz cannot try or detain suspects, it is allowed to infiltrate organizations and make public its judgments. Unlike the American fbi, the Verfassungsschutz is authorized to deal with only one form of public threat: ideologically driven attacks on the German democratic, constitutional order. As historian Claus Nordbruch demonstrated in his 1999 work on the subject, such powers have been turned repeatedly to partisan use, and in the largest German state, Nordrheinland-Westfalen, the Verfassungsschutz has served as an instrument of intimidation against the Center-Right. When groups have been thought to stray in the direction of the nationalist Right, the Socialists, through their political appointees, have pursued them as a threat to the German democratic order. This agency’s largely uncontested right to infiltrate has made it an even greater threat to what AngloSaxons understand as ordinary liberties. In a 2001 investigation of the right1
Claus Nordbruch, Der Verfassungsschutz. Organisation Spitzel Skandale (Tu¨bingen Hohenrain, 1999).
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Review Essays wing National Democrats, the Verfassungsschutzma¨nner—those put in charge of protecting the constitution against extremists—planted incriminating evidence on members of the group that they were trying to have banned. Although the exposure of this stunt kept the National Democrats, who have done well in elections in the former East German states, from losing their right to organize and campaign, it did not result in any restraints’ being put on the transgressing agency. Moreover, the Center-Right cdu-csu (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) continues to goad the Verfassungsschutz to find evidence of ‘‘extremism’’ in its electoral opponents on the Right, in order to avoid being forced to compete with an ‘‘extreme Right’’ party for the votes of German nationalists. The Verfassungsschutz continues to be a bull in the china shop of German constitutional freedoms. An address given in 1985 by Germany’s thenminister of the interior, Friedrich Zimmermann illustrates the obstacles encountered by all politically incorrect critics of German democracy. Zimmermann stated that he ‘‘who challenges the mission of the Verfassungsschutz calls into question the constitutional principle of militant democracy established by our constitution.’’2 Nordbruch underlines the self-serving definition of ‘‘democratic parties’’ that now prevails in Germany, by which those parties that control parliamentary institutions are by definition ‘‘democratic’’ and those they hope to exclude are ‘‘extremist’’ and therefore subject to investigation. For example, the recycled Communists who organized the Party of Democratic Socialists (pds) have been reingewaschen (washed clean) by the usually Leftleaning Verfassungsschutz; at the same time, the Republikaner, formed in 1983 by breakaway cdu-csu officials, has been kept under steady investigation. Although Nordbruch found nothing to suggest that the anti-immigrationist Republikaner would suspend democratic government, or in fact would not practice it more fully than the current party rule, the Verfassungsschutz kept the Republikaner under a cloud of suspicion on the grounds that some members ‘‘in all probability represent Right-extremist positions.’’3 The same Verfassungsschutz office in Cologne, however, refused to investigate the pds with the same thoroughness, claiming that only individual members but not the entire group held ‘‘leftwing extremist views.’’ In Demokratie-Sonderweg Bundesrepublik, a sprawling inquiry on the Basic Law, Josef Schu¨ sslburner, a Bavarian jurist formerly attached to the un and then to the eu, asserts that German democracy has abandoned the exercise of popular self-government. The term now refers to something that Ralf Dahrendorf, Ju¨ rgen Habermas, and other celebrated defenders of constitutional patriotism call wehrhafte Demokratie (militant democracy), a concept rooted in the Jacobin ascendancy of the French Revolution and, more recently, in the American occupation of Germany. Germans rule themselves 2 3
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Ibid., dedicatory page. Ibid., pp. 152–53.
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Review Essays \democratically when they make electoral decisions that reflect authorized democratic attitudes. Hence, those who oppose diversity or gay rights cannot possibly be speaking or acting democratically, because what they express is both undemocratic and extremist. Nor should Germans value their national solidarity or any specifically German heritage if they wish to be truly democratic. For their history largely exemplified illiberalism up until the Allied occupation, and thus the Germans must strive to overcome their past by becoming global citizens in a world community held together by human rights. Schu¨ sslburner easily demonstrates how widespread such views are among German elites and traces this thinking back to the construction of the Basic Law. Schu¨ sslburner does not claim that the entire document—particularly after additions such as Articles 79 and 146, which deal with substantive changes or the possibility of replacing the document in case of reunification—is all of a piece. He is also aware of the intrinsic tensions between the guarantee to express one’s opinions freely in Article 4 and the powers that the Basic Law bestows on judges to suppress political opposition. Article 21 defends the free formation of parties as necessary to ‘‘mold the popular will,’’ but then creates a court authorized to close down parties that ‘‘threaten’’ the order that the free flowering of parties is supposed to foster. Schu¨ sslburner asks whether judges may stifle as constitutionally prohibited threats to Germany’s ordered freedom parties that call for radical change in the current parliamentary system. For the view that has won out in the German press and government—that the state is free to crush opinions, particularly on the antiimmigrationist Right, that do not meet ‘‘democratic’’ criteria—may not have been what Article 21b originally intended. Schu¨ sslburner points out that the Basic Law may not be mandating the German government to treat civil liberties as cavalierly as do the present federal regimes and at least some of the provincial governments. He observes that academic and press freedoms were far better protected in Germany under the now-despised Second Empire than under the present version of ‘‘militant democracy.’’4 But having conceded that the Basic Law has been tendentiously interpreted for decades to destroy freedom and real self-government, Schu¨ sslburner also emphasizes that the Basic Law greased the skids for this development. It was inflicted on a people who were not allowed to express a collective self that did not derive from universal rights and from certain technical governing procedures. Although provisions were added permitting drastic revision and even replacement of the Basic Law, the heart of the founding document in 1949 lay elsewhere. That document was integral to an effort to denationalize the Germans, the results of which are still abundantly in evidence. In December 2004, the speaker for the cdu-csu delegation in the 4
For evidence of Germany’s parlous civil liberties situation, see Paul Gottfried, Multikulturalismus. Unterwegs zum manipulativen Staat (Graz: Ares Verlag, 2004), pp. 67–9, 130– 38.
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Review Essays Bundestag, Wolfgang Bosbach, proposed a motion that the nation recognize that Germans have a Leitkultur (dominant culture) consisting of ‘‘liberal democracy,’’ the advocates of which ‘‘demand integration and oppose with determination all forms of extremism.’’ This motion, which would only be controversial in a country embarrassed about its national identity, stems from the fact that Germany currently is home to about 7 million Turks, of whom many know little German and seem drawn to the Islamist movement that is rising in German cities. If Chancellor Schro¨ der gets his way on this point and Turkey—whose per capita income is some 15 to 21 percent of Germany’s, according to German economist Paul J. J. Welfens—enters the eu, then by 2010 at least 4 million additional Turks will have likely joined their compatriots already in Germany. Earlier, Christian Democratic critic Friedbert Pflu¨ ger observed that his party seemed to be having cold feet about ‘‘overcoming the radical ’68ers’’ who turned self-hate into the only acceptable German identity. Unless Germans learn to like themselves better as a people, noted Pflu¨ ger, they will not only fail to address their immigration problem but also cease to exist as a recognizable nation.5 The Left opposition, which until now had equated Leitkultur with disguised neo-Nazism, this time responded to the Union with amused perplexity. There seemed no reason, they argued, to designate as peculiarly German what the Left had already advocated: ‘‘living together on the basis of shared values’’ of diversity and loyalty to existing constitutional processes. Social Democrats Helmut Schmidt, chancellor from 1974 to 1982, and Egon Bahr, a journalist and former Bundestag delegate, have taken exactly the same stand. Both now express the opinion that Germans spend too much time feeling guilty and denying Vaterlandsliebe (love of country). Thus Germans cannot deal emotionally with the cultural and social problems produced by the arrival of large numbers of non-European Muslims; they look at European integration as a cure-all for a national identity that they are trying to disown. Bahr, foreign minister under Willie Brandt in the early 1970s, has remarked, ‘‘There is no recipe by which our peaceful and peace-loving country in the middle of Europe can celebrate the end of History. Germany must develop a politics of its own, as a sovereign state that can no longer hide behind the back of its elders.’’6 Tony Judt, an American moderate liberal, has made a similar argument about the false expectations that some Europeans have for a eurocracy that has yet to prove itself a suitable replacement for the nationstate. Judt urges Europeans to think clearly before yielding their sovereignty to commissars in Brussels and Strasbourg.7 In Germany this monumental cession of democratic power is occurring without a popular vote: Even in this land of 5
See Friedbert Pflu¨ ger, Weckruf fu¨r Europa (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 2002). Die Zeit, Sept. 12, 2004. 7 Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion: An Essay on Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). See also his essays for New York Review of Books. 6
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Review Essays uninterrupted politically correct conformity, the present left-of-center coalition is afraid that their fellow citizens might revert to being Germans.
Continuing Reeducation Schu¨ sslburner suggests that the increasing self-abnegation that has overtaken the Germans as a people is partly a legacy of the radicalism that took off during the 1960s. This is the narrative favored by both the German Left and the German Right, despite the fact that they apply to this story diametrically opposed value judgments. Thus for leftist antinationalist Habermas, the entire Cold War was an unhappy interruption in the process of ripping Germans away from their past, which began with the postwar occupation in 1945. Morally contrite Germans therefore needed to start the ball rolling again, which they did in the sixties, by refusing to be diverted by anticommunism and by backing out of the Cold War. The best conservative treatment of this approach to coercive reeducation has been done by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, former editor of the German quarterly Criticon (1970–97) and since then director of a Munich-based educational foundation. His Charakterwa¨sche has now been published in an expanded edition. A superb German stylist, Schrenck-Notzing tells his story with elegance and interpretive cogency. His work plots the reeducation efforts that were made in postwar Germany, how the American struggle with the Soviets altered American-German relations, and the antinational reeducation resumed by the Germans themselves. Charakterwa¨sche divides this process of ‘‘denazification’’ into two distinct, although occasionally overlapping, phases. The first was the postwar phase, characterized by military occupation; far-reaching censorship that favored the Left, including the Communist Left; intimidation to achieve certain desired social psychological ends; and a new official history stressing the Germans’ culpability for all recent wars involving their country. Phase Two, which goes back to the mid- and late 1960s, involved a selective resumption, minus the pressure of occupation forces, of Phase One. Since Schrenk-Notzing’s work was first published in 1965, what he predicted through a glass darkly has come to pass with a vengeance. We now see what German critics call a specifically German ‘‘cult of guilt,’’ which public administrators, educators, and journalists have all worked to keep going. What separated the two phases was the onset of the Cold War and America’s need to rehabilitate the Germans as Christian and/or democratic allies against the Soviets. Further hastening this transformation was the resounding victory of the anticommunist Center-Right in the American congressional elections of 1946 and the subsequent repudiation of the pro-Soviet policies pursued by the wartime Democratic administration. By 1947 the U.S. government was losing interest in prosecuting suspected Nazis or applying psychological methods drawn from radical German e´ migre´ s to reconstruct Summer 2005
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Review Essays formerly fascist societies. What the Germans produced was the ideological counterpart of this American anticommunism—namely, an intellectually fortified campaign against totalitarianism. This campaign was anchored in a prewar, liberal bourgeois outlook, and its representatives, who often came out of the academy, focused on the overlaps between Nazi and communist practices. The anti-totalitarians thought they were defending a constitutional order that incorporates Christian moral teachings and maintains non-statecontrolled spheres of individual autonomy and corporate authority. And while they accepted those Allied-imposed agencies intended to restrict threats to the political order, they viewed them initially as playing only a very limited political role. In time, however, this view would change, as the revolutionary Left in the sixties became more violent and the non-revolutionary Left more willing to dig up and divulge classified information; thereupon the liberal conservative establishment responded by pushing for extraordinary measures to contain perceived threats to the constitutional order. This tendency could be seen in 1962, when German Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss impounded the press and put several editors under temporary custody in order to show his displeasure with Der Spiegel for leaking classified military documents. Self-described German constitutional liberals rallied to the defense of Strauss, a fiercely anticommunist Bavarian, though the anti-anticommunist and antinationalist elements of the German Left played the incident up in order to discredit the ‘‘authoritarian Right.’’ The leader who from 1949 until 1963 presided over the new Germany and inspired the anti-totalitarian consensus was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), a onetime Rhineland separatist, a Catholic anti-Nazi, and a loyal ally of the Eisenhower administration. In his steady control of the helm of state, Adenauer dwarfed all his predecessors since Bismarck.8 Curiously, Adenauer, an anti-Prussian Catholic, may well have loathed Bismarck almost as much as he loathed Hitler, and his pronounced Francophilia reflected the regional culture from whence he came. The elderly Adenauer gave form to the postwar cdu, expanding it from the exclusively Catholic Zentrumspartei of the Weimar era, in which Adenauer had once served, and building bridges to both Protestants and the Bavarian regionalists grouped in the csu. While Adenauer was a bridge-builder, he wore the mantle of German patriotism uneasily. He was willing to offer Germans expelled from Eastern Europe both rhetorical sympathy and subsidies. And he went along with the Hallstein Doctrine, which refused recognition to any country that recognized East Germany. (Although this practice remained in force from 1955 until 1969, it was contradicted by West Germany’s establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union within months of its introduction.) 8
Frank Bo¨ sch, Die Adenauer-CDU. Gru¨ndung, Aufstieg und Krise einer Erfolgspartei, 1945– 1969 (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001) may be the definitive study of this extraordinary statesman.
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Review Essays But while the anti-German Left attacked Adenauer and his circle for being insufficiently contrite about the Nazi past (it is hard to see how Adenauer, given his hunted status under the Nazis, could have felt any personal contrition), it is impossible to portray this figure as a German nationalist. It was his adversary Kurt Schumacher, on the Left, who happily wore that label, before the Socialists in the late sixties under Willy Brandt swerved in the opposite direction. Although from the standpoint of the present Social Democrats, as indicated by party historian Franz Walter, Schumacher ‘‘sent the wrong signals,’’ there can be no doubt about his patriotic feelings.9 Despite having spent the war years in a concentration camp in harrowing conditions (from which he never recovered), this Socialist academic pined for the lost independence of eastern Germany and accused Adenauer of closing the door on the possibility of negotiating German reunification. Contrary to the American view of the 1940s, that Schumacher was simply soft on the Soviets, he was actually brutally upfront about his welfare-state German nationalism, particularly in his diatribes against ‘‘the American prefects’’ in his own party and on Adenauer’s side. Until the Brandt takeover in 1969, Adenauer and his successors were decidedly internationalist, launching the eu, signing the Treaties of Rome, and subordinating German reunification to an American-led struggle against communism. What they were not, and what their successors would become, were single-mindedly ‘‘antifascist,’’ fixed on destroying any moral justification for German patriotism and blindly pursuing internationalist projects as a moral imperative. For these undertakings, the 1970s left-of-center found a legal foundation in the Basic Law, which, as noted by Schu¨ sslburner and SchrenckNotzing, had an antinational purport and whose authors were concerned chiefly with rightwing threats to the new constitutional order. The left-ofcenter German establishment had a readymade document for its work, without having to replicate the American judicial invention of a ‘‘living constitution.’’ The Crises of Democracy The fact that the Basic Law excludes referenda (or direct election of presidents) throws light on how the Socialist-Green coalition now in power can impose the eu constitution on their fellow Germans without having to consult the popular will. In Die Krisen der Demokratie, Ralf Dahrendorf, a German sociologist who changed residence and now sits in the English House of Lords, notes how haunted the architects of the Grundgesetz were by the populist aspects of the Weimar constitution, which supposedly helped the Nazis find public endorsement for their work. But Dahrendorf then observes 9
Franz Walter, SPD: Vom Proletariat zur Neuen Mitte (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 2002), p. 132.
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Review Essays that ‘‘Weimar is already in the distant past. . . . Now many, including many liberal thinking people, believe that there are subjects about which one ought to ask the voters.’’ Alas, these ‘‘fears’’ were overblown to start with. In Germany’s last direct presidential race, in 1932, Hindenburg beat Hitler handily. Once in the driver’s seat, the Nazis manipulated referenda, (Volksentscheide) but such manipulation does not discredit a democratic practice that continues to be applied in American states (notably California) and in nations (such as Switzerland) without creating a Nazi dictatorship. Equally unconvincing, Schu¨ sslburner explains, is the creation of a 5-percent-of-the-vote ‘‘hurdle’’ that parties must reach in order to enter provincial or federal legislative bodies. Schu¨ sslburner further notes that the actual hurdle may be closer to 7 percent, since parties need at least that percentage in order for their candidates to look electable. Many political scientists have assumed that the more proportionate representation for parties that existed under the Weimar constitution made it easier for the Nazis to increase their share of delegates. But a proportionate system without hurdles has operated elsewhere without this untoward effect. According to Schu¨ sslburner, the Basic Law has moved Germany toward neither anarchy nor personal dictatorship, but the rotating rule of two monopolistic blocs, a lock hold that is protected by encouraging judges and Schu¨tzma¨nner to go after potential competitor parties as ‘‘extremist.’’ I read Dahrendorf’s book, an extended conversation held with the Italian journalist Antonio Polito, in a highly fluent German translation. Despite the self-importance that comes through in Dahrendorf’s references to his highplaced British friends, his membership in the House of Lords, and his selfattributed ‘‘liberal’’ bien-pensance, he does raise timely issues about the eu, the European nation state, and judicially run government. He notes that there is a democracy deficit in the Union and that the European Parliament does not represent the interests and views of Europeans to the same degree as do traditional parliamentary representatives. There is a point of remoteness from the voter at which elected officials cease to speak for them, particularly when the Union’s commissars, judges, and functionaries wield most of the actual power. Dahrendorf distinguishes between ‘‘liberalism’’ and ‘‘democracy’’ and acknowledges that nineteenth-century Prussia met the requirements of a ‘‘state under law.’’ Despite its admittedly restricted practice of popular government, it was equipped with a generally impartial judiciary. He also grasps the fact that parliamentary blocs in today’s Europe can establish a ruling monopoly that is almost impossible to break. And it is questionable whether this monopoly can be accurately described as democratic.
Sovereign Nation-States Dahrendorf might have done better in his interview not to work so hard as a spokesman for today’s regnant form of liberal democracy. He views 568
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Review Essays America’s as possibly the best of all regimes ‘‘because it has functioned for over two centuries’’ as a responsive popular government. Clearly he misses the dramatic changes in the American government over the last century, particularly the steady progress toward administrative and judicial centralization. Dahrendorf quotes John Stuart Mill on the need for cultural and geographic dimensions in a nation-state, but then quickly reminds us that culture has nothing to do with ethnicity. Rather it reflects ‘‘an unwritten value consensus among people living within a delimited space.’’ He also questions Mill’s assertion about ‘‘the mutual sympathy leading to cooperation’’ that defines nations, a predisposition often strengthened by a shared language: ‘‘The Swiss can contest this thesis with good reason. And the U.S. today is a greater land now than two hundred years ago, while Spanish has established itself as a second language.’’ In fact, most of those living in Switzerland speak German or SwissGerman as their first language; and except for the Muslim newcomers, who have added disproportionately to crime and welfare rolls,10 almost all of the Swiss are Catholics or Calvinists—and therefore Christian. Moreover, before the Swiss republic achieved its present degree of unity, which is now being politically challenged by anti-immigrationists, its cantons fought wars against each other for centuries. And the comment that America is a ‘‘greater land now’’ because of Hispanic immigration is too vague to mean anything. ‘‘Greater in what way?’’ might have been Polito’s follow-up question. Dahrendorf then inveighs against European regionalists, specifically Jorg Haider and Umberto Bossi, who ‘‘aim at ethnic homogeneity’’ and claim ‘‘rights of sovereignty for those living within particular borders in order to exclude minorities.’’ Such behavior, ‘‘which has created havoc in Europe,’’ causes states ‘‘to become intolerant of its minorities and to practice aggression against neighbors belonging to a different ethnic group.’’ It is hard to see how Bossi’s or Haider’s attempt to limit immigration into their region, particularly in the case of uneducated third-worlders, will incite aggression against their neighbors. And why is it less ‘‘democratic’’ for a region to decide on who will be allowed to enter as new residents and eventually citizens than to consign such decisions to federal or international administrators and judges? Equally unsettling is Dahrendorf’s lack of historical understanding of nation-states. What distinguished the nation-state from the governing artifice that was Thomas Hobbes’s new sovereign state was its ethnic, cultural, and religious specificity. Unlike a mere governing instrument, a nation-state has internal cohesion that sovereigns once favored in building stable relations among their subjects. Sovereign states in early modern Europe, and those that imitated their examples, featured established churches, national languages, and, if possible, ethnic homogeneity. One does not have to be an antiimmigration populist to grasp these historical facts. In the nineteenth century, 10
See Zachary Shore, ‘‘Can the West Win Muslim Hearts and Minds?’’ in this issue of Orbis.
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Review Essays the rising European bourgeoisie worked to establish parliamentary governments and liberal freedoms, particularly religious liberty, but also embraced nationalist ideas and promoted national literatures. Dahrendorf deplores any return to an ethnically related political identity and expresses fear that such a course would bring about ‘‘wars of conquest and suppression.’’ Still, it is unclear that he is interested in nation-states or in actual democratic selfdetermination. As a self-exiled member of a humiliated and self-debased people, Dahrendorf wants heterogeneity and enforced tolerance for ideologically reconstructed European nation-states. Whether he is describing or denaturing these entities is another matter. Others have deplored as a straitjacket what he celebrates. Thus Gianfranco Miglio (1918–2001), the famous jurist at the Catholic University of Milan and occasional advisor to the Northern League, explained that the national liberal aspirations of Italy’s unifiers had not borne fruit either under Mussolini or in the bureaucratically suffocating partitocrazia in which Italy existed before and after fascism. Miglio proposed a regional division of Italy, which allowed his fellow-North Italian burghers to develop their own culture and economy and, above all, to control access to citizenship. Such an arrangement, he stressed, was consistent with the bourgeois nation-state that his progenitors had worked to bring about.11 For Dahrendorf, such critical thinking has no place in a discussion about European governments but must lead to ‘‘the fragmentation of the world into aggressive and brutal ministates.’’ One may be justified in raising doubts about this gloom-and-doom prediction.
11
See Gianfranco Miglio, Una costituzione per i prossimi trenta anni [A Constitution for the Next Thirty Years] (Bari: Laterza, 1990).
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