The New Old World (46 page)

In the Berlin Republic, the combined forces of the SPD, Greens and Left have to date commanded a sociological majority that was never available to Social Democracy during the Bonn years: some 53 per cent in 1998, 51 per cent in 2002 and 2005, as against successively 41 per cent, 46 per cent and 45 per cent for the CDU, CSU and FDP. But this structural alteration of the underlying balance of forces in the country so far remains ideologically debarred from expression at federal level. The PDS and now Die Linke have been treated as beyond the pale of respectable partnership in national government, considered tainted by descent from Communism. In 1998 and 2002, the SPD and the Greens did not need the PDS for a majority in the Bundestag. But in 2005, Schröder ceased to be chancellor only because of the taboo against forming a government with the support of the Left. Had the SPD and Greens been willing to do so, the three parties together would have enjoyed a robust parliamentary majority of forty. Since this combination remained unthinkable, the SPD was forced into the arms of the CDU/CSU as a junior partner, unsurprisingly to its detriment.

The record of the Grand Coalition has for the most part been an uninspired tale of wrangling over low-level social-liberal reforms as the economic upswing of 2006–7 reduced unemployment and absorbed the deficit with increased tax revenues, before the country plunged into deep recession in late 2008. Merkel, presiding over a recovery that owed little to her tenure, and a depression no less beyond her control, has benefitted from both, with ratings that far outstrip those of any potential SPD candidate for her post in 2009. But this popularity, probably as passing as any other, owes more to a carefully cultivated manner of unpretentious womanly
Sachlichkeit
, the staging of foreign policy spectacles—G-8, Eurosummit—and the current fear of instability, than to any special reputation for domestic efficacy. In opposition Merkel occupied positions on the tough right of the political spectrum, supporting the invasion of Iraq and attacking welfare dependence. In power, though more anti-communist than Schröder, and cooler to Russia,
she has otherwise cleaved to the centre, leaving little to distinguish her incumbency from his.
Fortwursteln
remains the tacit motto.
²⁸

Trapped into a debilitating cohabitation, its poll numbers steadily sinking, as matters stand the SPD risks a crushing defeat in 2009. Attempts to stop the spread of Die Linke with a few social gestures—a call for a federal minimum wage, restoration of commuter subsidies—have made little impression on the electorate. In desperation, the party's hapless chairman Kurt Beck—the fourth in five years—called for amendments to Hartz IV, as the heaviest albatross round its neck, before being ousted by the still strong SPD right, which has installed Schröder's long-term factotum, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now foreign minister, as its candidate for chancellor. Beyond such floundering, younger office-holders have started to contemplate the unthinkable, coming to terms with the Left. The statistical logic of a Red–Green–Dark Red coalition, long theoretically plain, risks becoming more and more a practical torment for German Social Democracy. In Berlin, Klaus Wowereit has held the capital for the SPD in a compact with the PDS-Linke for seven years, without even Green support. But for political purposes, Berlin counts as part of the East, and its big-city profile anyway separates it from the rest of the country—Wowereit belonging to the phenomenon of the good-time mayor of the metropolis, strong on shows and happenings, somewhat less so on budgets or utilities, that has produced Livingstone in London, Delanoë in Paris, Veltroni in Rome. Its electoral arithmetic is too atypical to offer any wider paradigm. More significant has been the debacle of the SPD in Hesse, where the local party leader Andrea Ypsilanti, after sternly promising not to make any deal with the Left, attempted to form a Red–Green government dependent for a hair-breadth majority on the support of Die Linke. With this, a step would have been taken whose implications escape no one. Once the taboo was broken in a Western
Land
, it could be replicated at federal level.

Between that cup and the lip, however, there remains a considerable distance. In part this is because, for the draught of an alternative coalition to be drunk—bitter enough, for the apparat of the party—the Greens have to be willing too. But their days of counter-cultural insurgency are long over. Once ensconced in office in the Berlin Republic, they shifted further to the right than the SPD under Schröder, embracing market-friendly and NATO-proud policies that would have been anathema in the seventies. The party has become an increasingly tame prop of the establishment, its ranks filled with politically correct yuppies competing with the FDP as a softeredged version of German liberalism. Fischer's own evolution, from bovver boy of the
Putz
faction of Revolutionary Struggle in Frankfurt to golden boy of Madeleine Albright, was an exaggerated version of this development. But his prominence as the Green talisman on the hustings, and consistent flattery in the media, meant that he could take the party further into a
Kaisertreu
Atlanticism than it might otherwise have gone.
²⁹
With his departure, the Greens have shown signs of trying to row back from the Western adventure in Afghanistan, if only on seeing how unpopular it was becoming. Structurally, however, the party has altered sufficiently to be a possible partner in power with the CDU. A Black–Green coalition is already in place in Hamburg and, niceties of energy policy aside, much of the party is in many ways now ideologically closer to Merkel than to Lafontaine. How far its voters would accept a connubium with the Centre-Right is less clear, and the principal inhibition on such a scenario.

If the Greens dislike talk of a ‘left bloc', the SPD is more divided, with younger figures like the party's deputy chair, Andrea Nahles, willing to toy with the prospect of such a combination in future. But its old guard, not to speak of the eager neo-liberal modernizers, both viscerally anti-Communist, remain appalled at
the idea, and enjoy widespread intellectual support. For left-liberal historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Heinrich August Winkler, the very thought of the SPD supping with the Stalinist Gysi and the renegade Lafontaine recalls nightmares of Weimar, when the party failed to see the need to abandon its Marxist illusions and forge a firm alliance with the Catholic Centre and moderate Liberals against the dangers of revolutionary extremism.
³⁰
The press, naturally, brings its weight to bear in the same sense. In Hesse, the right of the party had no hesitation in torpedoing the prospect of a SPD government, preferring to hand power back to a Black–Yellow coalition—which won a crushing victory after Ypsilanti was ditched by her own second-in-command—rather than permit contamination by Communism. Would not the SPD in any case fatally lose the middle-ground, if it were tempted to treat with the pariah to its left? Such arguments could paralyze the sociological logic of a realignment for a long time.

What finally of Die Linke itself? Like any hybrid formation, it faces the task of welding its disparate fractions into a political force with a common identity. Prior to the fusion, its PDS component had suffered a yet steeper attrition of membership—biologically determined—than the large parties, even as it increased its electorate. The ability of the new party to appeal to a younger generation across the country will be critical to its future. Programmatically, resistance to further deregulation of markets and erosion of social protections gives it a strong negative position. With positive economic proposals, it is not better endowed than any other contingent of the European left. In principle—even in practice, as the experience of Berlin shows—its domestic stance is not so radical as to rule out collaboration of the SPD with it. The sticking-point lies elsewhere, in Die Linke's refusal to underwrite German military operations in the Western interest abroad. This is where the real dividing-line for the European political class is drawn. No force that refuses to fall in with the requirements of the Atlantic imperium—as the Greens in Germany did effusively; the PCF in France and Rifondazione Comunista in Italy morosely, to keep impotent junior ministries—can be regarded as
salonfähig
. Only acceptance of NATO expeditions, with or without the figleaf of the UN, qualifies a party as a responsible partner in government. It is here—the conflict over Gysi in the PDS can taken
as a prodrome—that the pressure of the system on Die Linke will be most relentlessly applied.

If the long-run effect of unification has been to unleash an antithetical double movement within Germany, shifting the economy effectually to the right and the polity potentially to the left, the interplay between the two is bound to be mediated by the evolution of the society in which each is embedded. Here the changes have been no less pronounced, as the landscape of the Berlin Republic has become steadily more polarized. At the top, traditional restraints on the accumulation and display of wealth were cast to the winds, as capital markets were prised loose and Anglo-American norms of executive pay naturalized by German business. Schröder, slashing corporate and upper-bracket income tax, and rejecting any wealth tax, gave his own
enrichissez-vous
blessing to the process. Structurally still more important, by abolishing capital gains tax on the sale of cross-holdings, his government encouraged the dissolution of the longterm investments by banks in companies, and reciprocal stakes of firms, traditionally central to German corporatism—or in the consecrated phrase, the ‘Rhenish' model of capitalism. In its place, shareholder value was increasingly set free. The first major hostile take-over, an operation hitherto unknown in Germany, came within a year of Schröder's assumption of power, when Vodafone seized Mannesmann. Hedge funds and private equity companies were soon pouring into the country, as banks and firms unloaded their cross-holdings. By 2006, foreigners had acquired an average of more than 50 per cent of the free float of German blue-chip companies—the top 30 concerns on the Dax index.
³¹
In the opposite direction, German capital surged abroad, its volume of acquisitions level with inward investment, as more and more manufacturing moved offshore to cheaper locations. Nearly half the total value-added of German exports is now produced outside the country.
³²
The business press had every reason for its
satisfaction at
Kapitalentflechtung
, the unravelling of an older and more restrictive
Modell Deutschland
.

In these years, conspicuous among the expressions of the change was the emergence of a new breed of American-style managers with little time for sentimental talk of trade-unions as partners or employees as stake-holders—downsizing in good years or bad, maximizing shareholder value without corporatist inhibitions, and rewarding themselves on a hitherto frowned-on scale. The emblematic figure of this transformation has been Josef Ackermann, imported from Switzerland to run the Deutsche Bank, the country's largest financial institution and currently a leading forecloser of mortgages in the US. Embroiled in a prosecution for his role in the sale of Mannesmann, but a notable success in boosting profits and cutting staff, he soon collected a salary twelve times that of his famous precursor Alfred Herrhausen, an intimate of Kohl assassinated in 1989. At €14 million a year, this is still only a fraction of the earnings of the best-paid US executives, but a sufficient alteration of scale to attract wide public comment.
³³
Younger bosses in the same mould at Siemens, Daimler, Allianz and the like aspired to similar levels of remuneration. Below, the growth of long-term unemployment and the increase in jobless—often immigrant—youth have created a corresponding under-class of those beneath the official poverty-line, reckoned at about a fifth of the population. This too has aroused considerable public discussion, as a running sore—perhaps lurking danger—unknown to the Bonn Republic. Avarice at the top, abandonment at the bottom: neither comforts the self-image of a socially caring, morally cohesive democracy enshrined in the post-war consensus.

So far, the increasing inequality they promise remains moderate enough, by Anglo-American standards. Gated communities are still a rarity. Slums, where immigrants—now about one in five of the urban population—are most concentrated, may be coming into being. But ghetto riots have yet to break out. Comparatively speaking, German capitalism continues to be less starkly polarized than many of its competitors. But the trend, as elsewhere, is clear enough—between 2003 and 2007, corporate profits rose by 37 per cent, wages by 4 per cent; among the quarter of lowest-paid
workers, real wages had actually dropped by 14 per cent since 1995.
³⁴
Less typical is popular perception of these changes. The Bonn Republic was famous for the Americanism of its official outlook and cultural life, possessing the political establishment and intellectual class most loyal to Washington in Europe, steadfast in its ‘unconditional orientation to the West', in Habermas's ardent phrase. Much of this was the reflex subservience of the defeated, as—consciously, or unconsciously—tactical and temporary as in other such cases. But there was always one striking respect in which West Germany after the war did resemble, more than any other major European society, not in self-delusion but reality, the United States. This was in the relative absence of a traditionally stratified hierarchy of social class in the country. The two national patterns were, of course, not quite alike; still less was that absence absolute. But in certain respects a family resemblance obtained all the same.

The reason lies in the fall of the Third Reich, which took down with it so great a part of the elites that had colluded with Hitler. The loss of East Prussia and Silesia, and the creation of the DDR, destroyed the bulk of the aristocratic class that had continued to loom large, not least in its domination of the armed forces, during the Weimar Republic. The industrial dynasties of the Ruhr were decapitated, Krupp, Thyssen and Stinnes never recovering their former positions. Individual survivors of these formations—a Dönhoff or Lambsdorff; a Porsche or Mohn—could make careers or rebuild businesses after the war. But collective identity and power were decisively weakened. West Germany, bourgeois enough by any measure, felt relatively classless, because in that sense topless. Even today, if one compares its elites to those of Britain, France or Italy, which survived the war more or less intact, it is much less clear how they are recruited: no public schools, no
grandes écoles
, no clerical preferment. Indeed, in that respect the
Bundesrepublik
appears more socially acephalous than the US itself, where Ivy League colleges have always provided a fast-track to Washington or Wall Street, and the Gini coefficient is anyway far higher. But if the Bonn Republic lacked any clear-cut privileged stratum above, it contained labouring masses below with a far greater sense of their past, and position in society, than their counterparts in America. The German proletariat, historically a later arrival than the British, never developed quite the same
cultural density, as of a world set apart from the rest of society. But if its collective identity was in that sense somewhat weaker, its collective consciousness, as a potential political actor, was nearly always higher. Though both are greatly diminished today, the German working class—less pulverized by de-industrialization, in an economy where manufacturing still counts for more; less demoralized by frontal defeats in the eighties—retains a practical and moral influence in the political system which British workers have lost.