Germany's National Welfarism
American Future
By Marc Schulman on Germany
This commentary by Gotz Aly, a professor of Holocaust Research at the Fritz Bauer Institute at the University of Frankfurt am Main, includes some truly remarkable information. [all emphases are added]
If Angela Merkel succeeds in winning office at the September elections . . . the Federal Republic should see changes more radical than any since 1949. As a physicist, she knows that the relationship between cause and effect cannot be simply wished away. Her most formative experiences came during communist East Germany's collapse. She has seen what happens when a country uses up its material basis, when it sinks into social and national stagnation while a regime of lies plays on, like the band on the Titanic. Most influential German politicians spent their youth, student years and early careers in the fat boom years of the old republic on the Rhine. Ms. Merkel likes to tell them, even those in her own party, "You have no idea how socialist you are."
In the words of German constitutional court judge Udo Steiner, Germans have an "equality sickness" that makes them dependent on the welfare state. This describes our society's worst burden, cultivated in the 20th century under various forms of government. Germans were never able to complete a bourgeois revolution. Their democratic institutions emerged from the chaos of defeat after two world wars -- in which they had been insulted, frightened, humiliated and, after 1945, burdened with guilt, and were forced to seek a new beginning. Both times, the German democrats, who had always existed, took up the ideas of the American declaration of independence and the French revolution, but gave them a peculiar cast. The eternally conflicting principles of freedom and equality were reinterpreted and ranked in a specific, German way. Civil equality before the law became social equality, and freedom was, in case of doubt, always sacrificed to the idea of social equality.
This may explain why "freedom" isn't one of Schroeder's favorite words:
The collectivist "public good," so defined, always ranked higher in the public mind than the protection of basic civil rights and universal human rights. To this day, Germans speak of a "Father State" that will always put things right. They see it as an insurance policy against absolutely everything. The vast majority believes, to this day, that the concepts of state and society are interchangeable -- that they are synonymous.
The policies of the "social market economy" in the early years of the Federal Republic paid tribute to this disastrous tradition. It was Konrad Adenauer who tied the level of state pension to income, and thus achieved sensational electoral victories without any concern for the future. At the same time, East German leaders declared the "unity of social and economic policy." Despite the disaster that followed, the economic consequences of which Germany will be paying off for many years, many East Germans still look back fondly on the warm hearth of socialism.
In this remarkable paragraph, the author shows that Hitler used bribery through social policy to maintain public support during the war years:
The not dissimilar welfare appeasement policies of both of the Third Reich's successor states were based on a common foundation: the ideology of the "national community" popularized by the Nazi regime. Hitler did not maintain the famously good relationship between the people and the leadership for years merely or primarily by making wildly anti-Semitic speeches. From the beginning, he used all the familiar methods of bribery through social policy. For example, in the midst of the war, he raised old-age pensions by 15% [!], and as early as 1939 he made sure that German soldiers and their families received wages and family-support payments twice as high as those of British and American soldiers and their families. In addition, entitlements for families with children rose in the first four years of the war by an incredible 400% [!]. For a long time, no one spoke of these roots of the German welfare state, and of our mentality.
Angela Merkel won't have an easy task. She will have to oversee the lean years of reform and consolidation. Germans must recognize that equality means equality before the law and finally accept freedom as a fundamental value. The coming years will be very interesting politically. Only afterwards will we know whether we are really -- as we like to claim -- a firmly established democracy.
A valuable perspective with which I wasn't previously familiar. |
