Twenty seven Greens were elected to the Bundestag in the recent German general election, which returned the conservative Christian Democrats into government. Gunter Minnerup analyses the significance of the rise of the Greens and the defeat of the Social Democrats in opening a new period in German and European politics.
The West German election of 6 March this year marked a decisive turning point in the political history of Europe's strongest imperialist power. But its significance lay not primarily in the actual result. The victory of the conservative Christian Democrats and the return of Chancellor Kohl's conservative-liberal coalition government was fairly predictable. The counting of the votes only confirmed what had been analysed and forecast before: in this case, the inevitable demise of German social democracy as the governing party in the Federal Republic'. The 6 March 1983 will enter the history books as the day that the era in West German politics which had begun in 1966 finally came to an end.
But if it were just a question of the social democratic (SPD) leaders having to live without their ministerial posts and salaries for the foreseeable future the world-wide interest aroused by the election would be hard to understand. In the eyes of the international media, this was the 'missiles election'. The expected conservative victory would provide Chancellor Kohl with a mandate to deploy the Pershing 2 and Cruise missiles allocated to the Federal Republic by NATO, whereas an SPD government dependent on the support of the Greens would have come under intense pressure from the peace movement to refuse deployment. Thus the public rejoicing in the Pentagon and Whitehall on 7 March.
This rejoicing may have been premature*. The missiles were clearly overshadowed by the economic crisis and unemployment as the decisive election issues, and both the extra-parliamentary peace movement and the parliamentary opposition to Cruise and Pershing are likely to grow faster now, possibly throwing the Kohl government into deep crisis if it pursues its original deployment plans this autumn. But Cruise and Pershing and the parliamentary manouevres between the SPD and the Greens from the opposition benches of the Bundestag, and even the mass extra-parliamentary peace movement are only surface phenomena of a much deeper crisis beginning to unfold in West Germany today - the erosion of the social and political consensus that underpinned the stability of the Federal Republic from the early 1950s. The true historic significance of the 6 March 1983 is that it finally sealed the end of the post-war era.
The NATO state
The Federal Republic of West Germany (FRG), is not an ordinary capitalist nation state like any other in Western Europe. Its political culture is heavily deformed by the unbewaltigte Vergangenheit (unmastered legacy) of fascism, war and national division, and by the circumstances of its creation and early consolidation. The present crisis cannot be fully understood without reference to these deformations.
German fascism did not fall as a result of revolution, but of military defeat by an alliance of foreign powers. Germany after May 1945 was an occupied country, its political future in the hands of the victorious allies. For the German anti-fascists emerging from the concentration camps, the underground, or enforced political passivity, Hitler's military defeat also meant liberation, But they were soon to find out how their liberators' interests imposed strict limits on their spontaneous attempts to reorganise post-war Germany on a unitary, democratic and socialist basis. With the break-up of the anti-Hitler coalition and the emergence of the Cold War, the division of Germany into what were essentially two client states of the opposing camps became increasingly inevitable.
Apart from its role as a lucrative investment market for US capital, the West German Federal Republic was assigned a crucial strategic function in a reconstructed imperialist alliance as the easternmost bulwark of capitalism in Europe, The vast industrial and military potential of Western Germany was to weight the scales decisively in favour of the 'free world' in its attempts to 'roll back' Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, with East Germany as the prime target in a domino strategy of anti-communist subversion and destabilisation. At the same time, a massive American economic and military presence would guarantee a special relationship between Washington and its German 'junior partner', making Bonn the principal ally of US imperialism in continental Western Europe.
This project was by no means easy to realise in the face of strong opposition to both national division and rearmament. Neutralism and pacifism remained strong currents even within the bourgeois parties until well into the 1950s, and the workers' movement was in any case strongly suspicious of Allied support for 'capitalist restoration'. The unprecedented economic boom after the currency reform in 1948 certainly contributed a great deal to the erosion of working class militancy, but cannot in itself explain the rapid consolidation of the new regime. It was the intense anti-communist hysteria unleashed during the Cold War, fuelled by events such as the 1948 Soviet blockade of West Berlin, the suppression of the 1953 East German workers' rebellion, and the 1956 Red Army intervention in Hungary, which put the pacifist and socialist opposition on the defensive. In divided Germany, the direct confrontation with Stalinism gave this hysteria a virulence unparalleled elsewhere, except perhaps in the USA under McCarthyism. This allowed Chancellor Adenauer to usurp the issue of national reunification under the banner of the liberation of East Germany from communism, creating a ruling bloc which dominated West Germany until the end of the 1960s, centred on the political catholicism of the old Centre Party and the forces of reactionary protestant nationalism attracted to the new Christian Democratic Party.
By 1957, the CDU/CSU (the CSU being the semi-autonomous wing of Christian Democracy in catholic Bavaria) polled over 50 per cent of the popular vote and the opposition had been crushed; the Federal Republic was a fully-rearmed member of NATO, the Communist Party was banned, and the SPD was preparing its final capitulation to the existing order. The ideology identified today with the wilder excesses of the Reaganites represented the respectable consensus upon which the West German state of the late 1950s and early 1960s was founded.
West German Social Democracy
Defeat in the 1949 election of the first Bundestag came as a shock to most SPD activists who had been unable to perceive of anything but a socialist future for post-Hitler Germany. The fact was, however, that the workers' movement had been decisively weakened by the division of Germany (which meant the loss of its traditional strongholds in East Germany), the Cold War, and the fact that the allied occupation powers, especially the US, had massively favoured Christian Democracy.
If the odds were thus heavily stacked against it, it was the inability of the SPD leadership to mobilise its base in a bold challenge to the emerging post-war settlement that was, in the last analysis, responsible for the series of defeats suffered in the 1950s. Compared to the present-day leadership of German social democracy, its then leader Kurt Schumacher was almost a class-struggle radical. He did attempt to build a broad popular alliance around the workers' movement by putting the issues of national unity and opposition to any re-militarisation at the centre of his rhetoric of 'intransigent opposition'. But the effect of his opposition was blunted by his obsessive anti-communism which made him denounce the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and especially the East German regime in terms no less violent than Adenauer himself. He thus delivered his working class following to political paralysis under the prevailing conditions and eventual acceptance of the West German status quo.
In addition, the SPD leadership had lost nothing of the parliamentary cretinism it had displayed in its meek capitulation to the fascist seizure of power in 1933 and it repeatedly strangled any rank-and-file attempts to oppose the government with extra-parliamentary mobilisations. Its catastrophic predictions about the immediate economic future under the capitalist system carried increasingly less conviction with the progress of the 'economic miracle', leading to growing political demoralisation in the party's ranks. Despite the simultaneous collapse of the Communist Party, the SPD lost hundreds of thousands of members' and the influence of those right-wing leaders who were calling for a radical re-appraisal of the party's programme grew rapidly after Schumacher's death in 1952,
The new programme adopted by the SPD congress in Bad Godesberg in 1959 marked the capitulation of German social democracy to the status quo. The quasi-Marxist rhetoric of earlier programmes was abandoned in favour of a formal acceptance of the capitalist market economy, the rearmament of West Germany and its integration into the Western alliance, and the purging of any concept of class struggle from its official identity. The Marxist student organisation SDS was expelled soon after, along with its intellectual sympathisers. The SPD was to be known as a 'people's party' that had foresworn its working class origins, and many of its leaders preferred to liken it to the American Democrats rather than the fraternal parties in the Socialist International (Willy Brandt's first campaign for the Chancellorship in 1961 billed him as the 'German Kennedy*).
Insofar as the SPD continued to find its [illegible] among trade-unionised working people, its switch from 'Marxist' to populist reform rhetoric could not affect its objective character as the political representative of the working class, and its subjective perception as such by both its supporters and opponents. The real significance of this turn was underlined with the famous programmatic [illegible] speech on foreign policy by the SPD's parliamentary leader, ex-communist Herbert Wehner, in 1960, which was an explicit offer to the CDU of bipartisanship in West Germany's external relations, including those with the East. The 'Deutschland Plan' for negotiated re-unification unveiled only a year earlier was quietly dropped. It was the final recognition by the SPD leadership that while international and German imperialism might be prepared to put up with a mildly reformist government in Bonn, imperialism considered any questioning of West Germany's place in the NATO alliance and the central European status quo as unacceptable. The determination to prove itself a 'reliable partner of our American friends' was the new cornerstone of the SPD leadership's bid for power, the first stage of which it consciously anticipated to be a 'Grand Coalition' with Christian Democracy. The strategy of the historic compromise is not, after all, an Italian invention...
The SPD in government
The plan seemed to work perfectly. By 1966, West Germany was confronted with its first serious economic recession, and the CDU — now without an absolute majority in parliament, and deserted by its liberal coalition partner over a budget crisis — was ready to allow social-democratic ministers to try their hands at a bit of neo-Keynesian demand management. For the ruling class this had the advantages of not only securing trade-union quiescence during the recession, but also of introducing some modernising impulses into the ministerial bureaucracy.
The temporary divergence between the demands of powerful capitalist interests and the ideological concerns of the CDU/CSU became even more pronounced over the issue of Ostpolitik, when the right wing of Christian Democracy blocked the attempts of Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor Willy Brandt to bring Bonn's policy towards Eastern Europe and East Germany into line with the new international climate of developing détente. Previously this policy had consisted of strict non-recognition of the GDR and the breaking-off of diplomatic relations with any country recognising it (except the Soviet Union). The export-orientated industrialists feared losing out to foreign companies in the competition over the lucrative East European markets, but the CDU had become imprisoned by its own Cold War ideology and rhetoric. The outcome of the 1969 election — an SPD-FDP ('social-liberal') coalition headed by Chancellor Brandt — was therefore less than a disaster for the bourgeoisie.
The principal reasons for the break up of the 'Grand Coalition' were to be [illegible] elsewhere. It had [illegible] popular with the SPD's rank-and-file membership and was indeed only narrowly sanctioned by the 1967 party congress. A powerful wave of radicalisation was sweeping through the universities, colleges and schools, increasing the pressure on social democracy to cut itself loose from the senior coalition partner and threatening to outflank it on the left. In September 1969, unofficial strikes erupted in the iron and steel industry, heralding growing restlessness in the working class. The trade unions demanded a bolder reformist course, and the recently legalised CP recruited heavily among students and young workers. To remain in the 'Grand Coalition' would have seriously threatened the SPD's unity and its traditional place in the West German political spectrum as the party of the reformist left.
Brandt duly carried out a substantial turn to the left — a style and rhetoric, if not substance. 'Democratic socialism' found its way back into the speeches and resolutions, and the new government promised that the era of democracy was only just beginning. Renewed economic growth provided the means for a large-scale expansion of education, public services and welfare spending, and a number of progressive legal reforms were carried out. The dominant issue of Brandt's Chancellorship, however, was Ostpolitik, the treaties with Poland and especially East Germany earning him the Nobel Peace Prize and the support of a broad coalition of forces ranging from the Communist Party to modernising liberal reformers. When the Christian Democratic opposition chose this terrain to challenge him in 1972, the SPD won the biggest electoral victory in its history and with 45.8 per cent of the popular vote had become the largest single party in the Federal Republic for the first time. The remainder of the 'social-liberal era' was slow agony and decline: the onset of the 'oil crisis' and economic stagnation removed the financial room for manoeuvre for a further expansion of the welfare state. Pressure from the bourgeoisie (chiefly represented in the government by the liberal coalition partner) for austerity measures and a roll-back of trade-union power led to the replacement of Brandt in May 1974 by the tough-talking right-winger Helmut Schmidt under the pretext of the Guillaume spy affair. In the 1976 election the coalition held on to power by the skin of its teeth, the CDU only just falling short of an absolute majority of the vote. In 1980, the divisions in the Christian Democrat ranks over the controversial figure of Franz-Josef Strauss (the CDU/CSU's candidate for the chancellorship) once again saved the government from defeat, but it was generally seen as only a stay of execution. The FDP's defection last autumn came as no surprise after a long series of public splits over financial and economic policy.
No return to the 1950s
Superficially, the political landscape in West Germany today shows some similarities with the 'Adenauer Era' of the 1950s. A new Cold War between Washington and Moscow dominates international relations, and the Christian Democrats are firmly re-established in government after the worst electoral defeat for the SPD since 1961. Even the terms of political debate suggest a re-run of the 50s, with the CDU emphasising the close alliance with the US as the guarantee of the Federal Republic's security, and the SPD in an uneasy relationship with a peace movement within which the old ideas of a central European nuclear-free zone (Rapacki Plan) have again gained some currency. Certainly the CDU's election campaign this year was consciously geared towards the exploitation of the nostalgia for the good old years of the 'economic miracle', social peace and external security.
But there can be no going back. Adenauer's success of the 1950's was based on a unique set of circumstances that cannot be recreated. Instead of favourable conditions for an expansive boom fuelled by seemingly unlimited domestic and foreign demand for investment and consumer goods, Chancellor Kohl is confronted with the deepest crisis of the capitalist world economy for fifty years, the worst of which is clearly to come. Mass unemployment, falling living standards, and declining welfare provisions are, however, the exact opposite of what the social peace and consumerist depoliticisation of the post-war era were founded on. The years of détente and a new Ostpolitik, the recognition of the GDR and legalisation of the CP, have furthermore eroded the ability of the ruling class to rekindle the kind of anti-communist mass hysteria that paralysed the labour movement for so long. The disarray in the imperialist camp with the relative weakening of the US position and the intensification of inter-imperialist competition, as well as the disintegration of the former Stalinist monolith, have created new international uncertainties to undermine the foundations of the architecture of the European post-war status quo.
The Peace Movement, the Greens and the Organised Working Class
The Federal Republic is therefore now entering into quite unchartered territory. The most visible sign of this today is the peace movement and the election of 27 Greens to the Bundestag. The origins of the Greens go back to the student and youth revolt of the late 1960s. That first wave of radicalisation, ideologically inspired by its rediscovery of Marxism and a search for a re-kindling of the class-struggle traditions of the German workers' movement, spawned an array of (predominantly Maoist) 'revolutionary parties' of the early 70s and the revival of a social-democratic left in the shape of the Jusos (SPD Young Socialists). Both strategies foundered in their own naivety, working class passivity under the conditions of continued prosperity, and the resiliance of the reformist bureaucracy. The defeat of its initial perspectives did not, however, spell the end to the process of radicalisation. Throughout the 70s, and continuing into the 1980s, a very large section of the young generation continued to be politicised by the anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear, ecologist, and feminist movements, while at the same time alienated from social democracy by the course of the Schmidt government. Initially the expression of the growing anti-nuclear power and ecology movements, the Green and 'Alternative' lists finally made their break-through into the arena of parliamentary politics under the impetus of the peace movement.
It would be very wrong however, to equate the Greens with the peace movement of which they are only a part. The Greens represent those sections of the peace movement that have already, at least temporarily, broken with the 'established parties': young first time voters with no traditional political loyalties, the remnants of the old far-left organisations, disillusioned social-democrats and liberals (mainly from professional and white-collar backgrounds). They have their strongholds in the big cities, especially those with large universities, in which an extensive network of 'alternative' social and cultural institutions has created a cohesive 'green/alternative' milieu. The 5.6 per cent of the national vote shows that this is not just a 'fringe phenomenon' of negligible significance: it rather reflects the mass defection of German youth from the established political and cultural values of West German society and as such represents a considerable subjective factor in the unfolding crisis.
But the impact of the peace movement goes far deeper. All opinion polls confirm that a clear majority of the West German population rejects the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in the Federal Republic, including about a third of the CDU/CSU voters. Despite the attempts of the SDP and trade-union bureaucracies to sabotage the peace movement mobilisations from loyalty towards the cabinet of Chancellor Schmidt (who used to boast that it was he who had discovered the need for more European NATO missiles), tens of thousands of working-class activists participated in them, and two-thirds of all SPD district organisations have come out against the missiles. The new SPD leader Vogel's pledge in the March elections 'to do my utmost to make Cruise and Pershing unnecessary', made on huge election posters with the addendum 'in the German interest', are an obvious tribute to these sentiments.
The dynamic of the West German peace movement is to a large extent derived from the peculiarity of the Federal Republic's geo-political situation as the principal military base of the United States and NATO's frontline state in Europe. As the inevitable battleground of even a limited military confrontation in the 'European theatre', Germany faces a holocaust of destruction even by the extensive use of merely advanced 'conventional' or 'tactical' nuclear weapons. This, of course, applies to both German states, and the widespread awareness of this fact, as well as the existence of a peace movement in East Germany, is leading to a growing realisation of a link between the peace issue and the national question. Unlike in Britain, it can hardly be pretended that Germany can somehow avoid the nuclear line of fire while both states remain, albeit 'non-nuclear', members of their respective alliances.
The German peace movement thus implies a fundamental challenge to the European status quo, that is clearly beyond a mere protest movement of the politically heterogeneous and socially marginal (in the strategic sense) Greens. The spontaneous sympathy of large sections of the organised working class for nuclear disarmament and for disengagement from the imperialist war drive spearheaded by the US, needs to be harnessed to the developing resistance to the austerity measures imposed by the new bourgeois government in a period of deepening social and economic crisis. It needs a perspective that points beyond capitalism and Stalinism and their murderous confrontation in which a divided Germany is inescapably caught up.
if the Greens succumb to the strong sectarian pressures from their ranks in their attitude to the SDP in the coming period, irreparable damage could be done. Such pressures are the result of the pronounced unevenness of the radicalisation process in West Germany over the last fifteen years, producing a broad layer of youthful activists with deep feelings of hostility towards what they see as 'bourgeois' social democracy fully integrated into the capitalist system. But social democracy is itself in crisis, torn between the conservative instincts of the bureaucratic party and union leaders and the demands from an increasingly restless rank-and-file for decisive action against unemployment, austerity, and the danger of war. The ideological battle now beginning to unfold within the workers' movement is the decisive battle in the long-term, infinitely more important than the shifting of a few electoral percentage points between the SPD and the Greens. It is a battle which the Greens — and the Reds both within and outside them — can only ignore at their peril.
References
1. See my article in New Left Review No.99, 1976, 'West Germany since the war', pp3-46, especially the postscript analysing the 1976 election result.
2. SPD membership 1947: 875,479. By 1954 it had shrunk to 585,479,
GUNTER MINNERUP is Senior Lecturer in German Politics at Portsmouth Polytechnic and a member of the Labour Party and CND.