The German Right: Markets, Morality and Migration
If Germany's Christian Democratic Union wants to take votes away from the Social Democrats, it must forge a more mainstream ideology.
Jan-Werner Mueller
Savvy
political observers recognized a decade ago that the implosion of communism
would prove a short-term victory and a long-run curse for conservative
parties in the West. For decades, anti-communism provided the glue that
held a diverse coalition of social conservatives, nationalists and libertarians
together. This was particularly the case in countries on the front lines
of the Cold War, such as Italy and West Germany, where Christian Democratic
parties never quite had to answer the famous British conservative Lord
Salisbury's question: "What is it that you wish to conserve?" After
1989 -- and after the transatlantic revolution of neoliberalism -- conservatives
had little to offer in terms of the "vision thing," except for more
of the same: more tax cuts, more privatization and more assertive foreign
policies.
When
Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union was crushed in the federal
election of 1998, Germany's longest-serving chancellor left behind a
party that was not only ideologically exhausted, but also in organizational
shambles, because the entire party had been organized around Kohl. Though
the CDU swiftly rose in the polls again due to the initial blunders
of the inexperienced and internally divided Red-Green government, it
soon plunged into the most profound crisis of its history when the party's
illegal financing methods were uncovered in late 1999.
With
Kohl disgraced, and the old party machine dismantled, the Christian
Democrats are now in ideological and organizational limbo. Like other
conservative parties, the CDU is still viewed as the representative
of cold-hearted capitalism, and it has had great difficulty in finding
a credible ideological response to the Social Democratic "Third Way."
In theory, however, the CDU is well placed to go down the road of compassionate
conservatism. The party was never as clearly neoliberal as Republicans
or British conservatives, and its Catholic social doctrine already contains
many of the policy prescriptions that conservative parties in the West
are now selling as ideological innovations.
Yet,
in the short term, the CDU's prospects remain bleak: Its new leadership
has been hapless, the scandal over Kohl's illegal finance practices
has yet to be fully resolved, and the present left-of-center government
has proved to be more competent in handling the economy than expected.
More importantly, if a more compassionate CDU moves to the left, political
space might open up again for the far right in German politics.
CDU's
Disgrace: Price of Personalized Politics
No
party in the history of German democracy ever seemed to have recovered
from a crushing defeat more quickly than the CDU after the federal elections
in the fall of 1998. Gerhard Schroeder's first months in office were
characterized by mismanagement -- a particularly grave disappointment,
since, as in 1969, the left had only won because it billed itself as
the more competent choice and made vague promises to create a more modern
Germany. The CDU got back on its feet after its strategists hit on what
seemed to be a winning issue: the Christian Democrats fiercely opposed
the planned liberalization of the citizenship law, which would have
significantly lowered the barriers to the naturalization of foreigners
in Germany. CDU supporters were particularly opposed to provisions for
dual citizenship, and the party collected more than a million signatures
against them. Campaigning mainly on the citizenship issue, the CDU comfortably
won the state election in Hesse in early 1999, thereby depriving the
government of its majority in the upper house.
Then
the CDU's recovery was decisively derailed by revelations of illegal
financing practices under the Kohl regime. Faced with revelations of
numerous undeclared donations and news about secret Liechtenstein accounts
breaking almost daily, Kohl, who ran foreign and domestic policy on
the basis of personal friendships with Bill, Boris and various domestic
allies, refused to release the names of donors. He couldn't, he claimed,
because he had given them his personal "word of honor" that he would
not. Personal trust, he asserted, "was more important than purely formal
criteria."
Nobody
suggested that Kohl was personally corrupt -- but everybody could now
see where the so-called "Kohl system" of patriarchal patronage had led.
Kohl had inherited a party for which raising funds in the fight against
communism was more important than the campaign financing laws it had
itself enacted. Kohl continued these practices, eventually putting personal
power above everything else.
The
CDU in Ideological Limbo
When
it seemed that the CDU might collapse like its Christian Democratic
sister party in Italy had a few years earlier, CDU general secretary
Angela Merkel, writing in a conservative daily in 1999, courageously
asked Kohl to come clean. The media -- and many CDU members -- took
an immediate liking to the soft-spoken East German pastor's daughter
and called for her to take over the party. While Merkel had served in
Kohl's cabinet for eight years, she was not tainted by the Cold War
politics of the old Bonn Republic and, more than Kohl's hand-picked
CDU leaders in the federal states, promised a clean break with the past.
Merkel
was elected CDU leader at what seemed more like a religious revival
meeting than a party conference in March 2000. Merkel's ascendancy in
itself constituted nothing less than a cultural revolution for the German
right. The first female leader of a major party, a divorcee, an Easterner
and a Protestant, Merkel seemed as far removed from the old, oligarchical,
Rhineland Catholic and patriarchal CDU as one could possibly get. She
immediately promised a kinder and more colorful party. And for a while
it seemed as if the CDU could indeed become more diverse, decentralized
and democratic, with a larger role for women, younger members and Easterners.
Nevertheless,
while Merkel clearly embodied a vision of a different CDU, the party's
political direction remained less clear. While the CDU never embraced
neoliberalism in quite the same way that Thatcher's Conservatives or
Reagan's Republicans did, the party came to be perceived as cold and
heartless. Now, Merkel advocated a more compassionate society and, at
the same time, a "new social market economy" to make Germany successful
in the leaner, meaner world of globalization.
Yet
by the time the CDU began to reorient itself, the government had found
its bearings aided by the departure of Schroeder's rival and standard-bearer
of the socialist left, Oskar Lafontaine, and by the largely successful
conduct of the Kosovo War. More importantly, after years of blocked
reforms, the Social Democratic Party stole the CDU's neoliberal clothes
and enacted major changes in the tax and pension systems. The Social
Democrats could begin to claim that they too were competent in running
the economy, the CDU's traditional strength. Schroeder, the popular
"chancellor of consensus," systematically closed down political space,
as his reforms favored corporations, but his party managed to convince
Germans that it was most concerned with social justice. As in Tony Blair's
Britain, the Third Way seemed to lead, above all, to comfortable re-election.
Schroeder
also narrowed the options of the opposition by adopting de facto CDU
positions in foreign policy. For example, during the Kosovo War, the
SPD-Green government was, if anything, overeager to prove its reliability
to its allies. While Schroeder had initially shocked his European partners
with speeches about a new German assertiveness and a more self-confident
promotion of the German national interest, he soon reverted to a kind
of pragmatic multilateralism which was not all that different from that
of his predecessors. He might not be a European at heart in the way
Kohl, with his personal memories of the war, was, but he remains no
less willing to push European integration and E.U. enlargement. Consequently,
the CDU, as pro-European as ever, has found it difficult to identify
an angle from which to attack the government.
The
Third Way knows no enemies, as its ideologues are eager to satisfy both
the proponents of the market and the promoters of social justice. Not
surprisingly, the CDU has had a hard time sharpening its profile in
opposition. The party thought it had detected the government's weakest
spot when it campaigned against the new citizenship law. The SPD and
the Greens in particular eventually had to back down on the plan to
allow dual citizenship. Yet, when Schroeder proposed a German "green
card" to attract highly qualified specialists in technology to make
up for the shortfall in computer experts in Germany, the CDU's infamous
campaign for "Kinder statt Inder" -- "Let us have children instead of
Indians," a higher birthrate instead of highly qualified immigrants
-- backfired badly. Not only did the party lose the elections in Germany's
most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, but it also appeared xenophobic
and out of touch with the realities of globalization. Nationalism, or
even a kind of "neonatalism," simply did not seem a convincing answer
to the declining German birth rate.
The
CDU's long-standing denial that Germany was a country of immigration
(which of course meant that no immigration policies were required) seemed
belied by the fact that there are more than seven million foreigners
in the country, and the fact that business leaders were complaining
constantly about a lack of native specialists in information technology.
Even for the CDU's traditional supporters in industry, then, the politics
of fear and denial simply would not work.
Nevertheless,
the Christian Democrats tried the national card again, when they advocated
a specific German Leitkultur -- an almost untranslatable German concept
for a "guiding culture" to which immigrants were supposed to subscribe.
Much subsequent mudslinging between government and opposition did little
to clarify what Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU caucus who had
first proposed the idea, actually meant. While Merkel, in a vain attempt
at clarification, eventually claimed that Leitkultur was an "open concept,"
its very openness ultimately suggested that the CDU had little to offer
as a coherent vision of Germany as a liberal multicultural society.
In
a subsequent, equally inconclusive debate on patriotism, the party leader
Merkel eventually settled on the slogan that she was "proud to be living
in this country." Even for the Germans who agreed, this in itself would
have been hardly a reason to vote for a party that is still in visible
ideological disarray. Like the British Conservatives, the CDU is unlikely
to win elections on issues of national identity and by subliminally
appealing to fears about immigration. The reason is simply that voters
are insufficiently concerned about these questions -- at least in comparison
to major social and economic issues -- not to mention the fact that
a campaign against immigrants and asylum-seekers does not really go
together with the idea of a more compassionate conservatism, unless
the CDU and other parties become openly nationalist and advocate the
confinement of compassion to co-nationals. In a country with Germany's
history, however, open nationalism remains out of the question.
In
the past, the CDU had always been able to find substitute sources of
social cohesion, whether religion, anti-communism, Atlanticism or Europeanism.
Now, some of these sources have dried up, but nationalism still is a
poisoned well. Consequently, the CDU faces a new dilemma in addition
to the problems of conservatives in general: it remains an advocate
of community, but has become unsure which community it should advocate.
It is an open question whether the party will ultimately come out of
denial and seek a cross-party consensus on immigration; the fact that
leading CDU politician Rita Suessmuth was willing to chair the official
commission on a new immigration law points in this direction. Yet confrontation
instead of consensus remains a permanent temptation, as long as the
CDU remembers its success in Hesse -- and listens to the pollsters who
find that almost 70 percent of all Germans oppose more immigration.
The
CDU in Organizational Limbo
Meanwhile,
the party has also been weakened by internal competition. The only thing
faster than Merkel's rise in the eyes of the German media has been her
downfall. The very qualities she was initially praised for -- independence
and deliberation -- have now become signals of weakness: She has been
accused of being indecisive and unable to lead, even from within her
own party. The rivalry between her and Merz, the CDU advocate of a German
Leitkultur, is an open secret. Not least, the technophile physicist
Merkel and the deeply Catholic Merz are divided on substantive issues
such as genetic engineering -- a topic on which the party has yet to
find a common voice.
Given
Merkel's weakness, it is not surprising that Edmund Stoiber, prime minister
of Bavaria and head of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian
Social Union, has been positioning himself as the most likely conservative
candidate for the federal election in 2002. Stoiber is an ambitious
technocrat who has demonstrated in Bavaria that competent economic management
and an emphasis on conservative, particularly Catholic, values can still
go together. He frequently flirts with the very idea that made Joerg
Haider and Silvio Berlusconi popular: namely, that politics should be
run like a successful business. On the other hand, Stoiber knows all
too well that the CSU cannot force a candidate on the much larger CDU.
After all, when the CSU last fielded the joint candidate for chancellor
-- Franz Josef Strauss in 1980 -- the blustering Bavarian did not have
the full backing of the CDU and turned into an electoral disaster.
As
in other countries, it seems that the CDU can only win if a left-center
government proves less than fully competent in managing the economy,
as in Italy, or is plagued by scandals, as in the U.S. No conservative
party has yet reinvented itself in the way left-wing parties did in
the 1980s and 1990s in response to the neoliberal revolution. Absent
new ideas on social and economic questions, conservative parties are
tempted to refight the culture wars of the past. In the controversy
surrounding foreign minister Joschka Fischer's history as a left-wing
radical, conservative intellectuals have tried to argue that the German
student rebellion of '68 was on a par with the Nazi era, since they
are both pasts with which the Germans have not yet come to terms. Yet
such culture wars are of little interest to the electorate, and Fischer
has remained one of the most popular politicians. In this regard at
least, for better or for worse, the Germans remain pragmatists: Competent
policy management in the present is more important to them than the
fact that a politician may have a shady past.
ÔNationally
Liberated Zones'
But
if the CDU were to move closer to the SPD on issues of immigration and
citizenship, would that not open political space for the far right in
German politics? The question has been a persistent one since unification,
but the electorate has hardly given a clear answer. On the one hand,
it still seems highly unlikely that either an openly racist party like
France's National Front or even a neoliberal-cum-nationalist party like
Haider's Free Democrats in Austria will have lasting success in Germany.
On the other hand, Germany's three major far-right parties have celebrated
sporadic successes, even though they have generally not been able to
unite their forces, and, like in other countries, remain plagued by
internal ideological and personal conflict.
Most
spectacularly, the xenophobic Deutsche Volks-Union (German People's
Union) picked up almost 13 percent of the vote in the state election
in Saxony-Anhalt in 1998. As is so often true in Germany, anti-foreigner
sentiment was unrelated to the actual presence of foreigners -- Saxony-Anhalt
has one of the lowest proportions of foreigners in Germany. Moreover,
as was quickly recognized, the DVU was essentially a phantom party without
real politicians and without a party infrastructure -- even though it
still boasts the largest membership (roughly 17,000 nationwide) of all
the extreme right-wing parties. DVU election success had essentially
been bought by the party's sponsor, Munich-based businessman Gerhard
Frey, who has made his fortune with books and newspapers dedicated to
historical revisionism. Not surprisingly, the party proved to be incompetent
in parliament and plagued by frequent defections. Its last success came
in September 1999, when Frey yet again put massive funds into a state
election campaign and got five seats in the Brandenburg legislature
in return. It was also one of the few occasions when two far-right parties
-- in this case, the DVU and the Republikaner -- did not field candidates
in the same election and therefore did not take votes from each other.
The
far-right parties have fallen into a pattern of electoral success, gained
by protest votes, followed by parliamentary failure and then electoral
oblivion. The Republikaner, the far-right party which tries hardest
to stay in the mainstream of German party politics, was thrown out of
the parliament of the Land of Baden-Wuerttemberg in March 2001, after
eight years of continuous presence in the legislature. Like the DVU,
it has seen its membership decline in the last few years. Moreover,
there is simply not enough political space between the right wing of
the CDU and the border beyond which parties could actually be outlawed
for extreme nationalism and anti-democratic tendencies.
Yet
even if party politics holds few prospects for the far right, it can
still focus its efforts on long-term strategies to transform German
political culture. The National Democratic Party, the oldest of the
far-right parties which almost made it into the Bundestag in the late
1960s, has reoriented itself to pursue grassroots activism. In so doing,
it has attracted free-floating neo-Nazis and in turn has become increasingly
radicalized. Young NPD activists have declared "nationally liberated
zones" primarily in the former East Germany. In such "centers of counter-power"
foreigners, the disabled, the homeless, homosexuals and leftists are
supposed to be expelled and right-wing youths are to provide social
services and cultural activities for "proper Germans" only. In these
enclaves governed by a bizarre (or perhaps all too familiar) mixture
of extreme nationalism and municipal socialism, local youths see themselves
as a right-wing avant-garde that puts into violent practice what their
elders only dare to think.
Of
all the parties, the NPD has focused most clearly on the young. It has
established highly trained cadres to penetrate youth culture and establish
loosely organized local "comradeships," which are often able to fly
under the radar screen of the local police. The NPD also is the only
party that was actually able to increase its membership last year (if
only slightly), and now sees itself as the head of a broad social protest
movement fighting for the streets, rather than focusing its efforts
primarily on electoral success. "Organization through disorganization"
became its watchword for a strategy of strengthening the spontaneous,
anti-institutional subcultures of right-wing protest. Unlike the other
far-right parties, the NPD realized early on that eastern Germans were
not all that interested in the "national question," historical revisionism
or Holocaust denial, but that Easterners still put much more trust in
the state and care more about social justice than the West Germans.
Generally, eastern youngsters have become increasingly alienated from
the political system, and the East in general is now distinctly more
inclined towards the far right than the West (whereas until the mid-1990s,
the western part of the country registered more extremist views). Consequently,
the NPD re-invented itself as primarily a national socialist party that
would even praise the social achievements of the GDR. The NPD now stands
mostly for anti-capitalism and ethnic pluralism which demands a strict
separation between Germans and non-Germans.
Areas
of "extra-parliamentary national resistance" -- which are still more
myth than reality -- could at some point prove to be hotbeds of anti-democratic
agitation and violence. The exact relationship between the electoral
fortunes of far-right parties and actual violence against foreigners
remains obscure. Yet it is certain that crimes against foreigners reached
an unprecedented peak in 1992 and 1993 but declined significantly toward
the late 1990s, as the strength of right-wing parties waned as well.
Last year, however, these crimes were very much on the increase again,
and it seems that the new strategies of the NPD and various neo-Nazi
groups might be a significant factor in this. On the other hand, most
crimes are committed by small cliques of youngsters whose behavior seems
to be better explained by boredom, aggression, alcohol and a longing
for comradeship, rather than organized right-wing ideology in any real
sense.
In
response to the rise in racist and, particularly, anti-Semitic violence,
the Interior Ministry has moved to ban the party under the provisions
of the Basic Law, which permits the prohibition of parties that seek
to undermine the "free and democratic basic order" of society. In addition,
Schroeder has appealed to society to begin an "uprising of decent citizens,"
calling for demonstrations and other kinds of democratic activism.
There
is little doubt that the NPD has turned into a safe haven for neo-Nazis
and that even its official publications repeatedly call for overcoming
the democratic system through a national revolution. Germans' views
on the government's move to outlaw the party have been mixed, however.
Some observers predict that right-wing activists will merely be driven
underground; now, at least, one can monitor the activities of such parties.
Others have attacked the whole idea of a "militant democracy" that infringes
on the right to free speech and association. And others again have predicted
that the party may not be ruled unconstitutional -- perhaps even for
merely procedural reasons -- in which case the legitimacy of the NPD's
positions would be affirmed in the most dramatic way possible.
Nevertheless,
the immediate election prospects for the far right remain bleak. It
lacks ideas; it lacks a charismatic figure of the Haider type; and it
lacks strong national organizations. Yet, with a looming recession,
E.U. expansion and the imaginary threat of East Europeans flooding the
German labor market, the right might be on the rise again. Meanwhile,
the silent expansion of what the British journalist Nicholas Fraser
has called "separate mini-republics of hatred" in the East might prove
the most dangerous long-term threat to democracy.
Dilemmas
of Contemporary Conservatism
So
how will the German right reshape itself in the future? In the past,
conservatism has proven itself to be the most adaptable of all ideologies.
Like the British conservatives, the Christian Democrats have often seemed
(and seen themselves as) the natural party of government and as a formidable
vote-gathering machine. Yet, for the moment the CDU suffers from the
same problem as other conservative parties in the West. A Third Way
Left has stolen its neoliberal thunder, but, by and large, has been
able to close down political space to its own left.
There
are also more specific challenges. Increasingly, federal elections are
being decided in the east. For a moment, Merkel seemed a perfect symbol
for recognizing the East German experience, and for a CDU that would
become the first genuinely all-German party. Yet, with the increasing
respectability of the post-communist SPD, the Social Democrats might
have more leeway in forming variable majorities, as a "red-Green-red"
coalition no longer seems unthinkable even at the federal level -- which
means that the SPD could now have a coalition with any of the other
parties in Germany. The CDU, on the other hand, remains restricted to
the neo-liberal Free Democrats as a coalition partner (even though there
have been some experiments in CDU-Green cooperation at the local level).
It
seems, then, that if the CDU wants to regain the ideological initiative,
it at the very least has to make its own peace with the Sixties and
with the presence of almost eight million immigrants. And it might want
to advertise for a new chief ideologue.
Jan-Werner
Mueller is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of
Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National
Identity (Yale University Press, 2000).
