The Society of the Federal Republic of Germany

(Last modified October 2008)

This study analyzes the political ideas that have shaped the Federal Republic of Germany in terms of their relevance for the politics of identification as well as from the perspective of political theory. Of special significance for this analysis is the dynamic development of political discourse in the course of the emerging protest movements of the 1960s. Although the new Left with its many undercurrents proved incapable of drafting an alternative design for West Germany’s political and social order, it did effect decisive changes in the country’s political culture. By raising the issue of the legitimacy of Germany’s functioning parliamentary democracy, the left movement served (against its own intentions) as a catalyst in negotiating a new understanding of the intellectual foundations of the West German state. German intellectual and political debates about the state are not only of interest from a historical standpoint, however. Various controversies reveal an essential “reservoir of reflection” (Heinz Bude), that is, an as yet unused pool of theoretical political thinking that warrants reevaluation, whether with respect to the future of the welfare state or to issues such as citizen activism, strategies for enhancing the efficiency of the political system, political justice, or securing civil liberties.

The Federal Republic of Germany was long viewed as an “interim arrangement”, a “state without an intellectual silhouette” (Rüdiger Altmann). While some observers criticized the lack of a culture of political debate in the Adenauer era, the 1960s and 1970s were generally interpreted as the decades that saw the breakthrough of modern Western society in West Germany.

To date, this perspective has been most often questioned by sociologists and social historians, citing evidence that, as early as the 1950s, West German lifestyles began to exhibit characteristic features of Americanization and liberalization. But for an extended period, predominant political ideas and concepts of community remained overshadowed by more technical concepts of the functioning of society. Many shared Ernst Forsthoff’s view that modern industrial societies no longer had a need for “intellectual self-representation” and could do without a normative concept of the state; they argued that it would suffice for the state to fulfill its functional role in coping with social and economic problems. History has shown that an increasing de-politicization of German society—a development endorsed by the political right and feared by the political left—has in fact not occurred. Instead, there was and is ongoing public debate about social cohesion, political integration, and forms of collective identity. The political ideas and perceptions that structure and shape discourses, are the centerpiece of these animated and vital discussions.

In retracing the history of West Germany as a history of political ideas, it would seem useful to employ an ideal-typical, dichotomous model, in which one pole would be defined as Germany’s abandonment of its former Sonderweg, a step imposed upon the country by the Western Allies. The second pole would be marked by a renewal of liberal and democratic German traditions and the successful, autonomous establishment of parliamentary democracy. From this perspective, Habermas’s theorem, which perceives the old (pre-1989) Federal Republic as having opened itself up unconditionally to the West on an intellectual level and interprets 1968 as the prelude to a fundamental process of liberalization, in fact still calls for an argumentative base in the history of ideas.

The intellectual substance of the West German republic—its intellectual foundation or legitimation—can be described in a variety of ways, i.e., from the perspective of the fathers and mothers of the constitution, within the framework of an intellectual debate about the republic, or with an eye to dominant trends in political theory and philosophy.

Many observers have discerned a shift in ideas that has accompanied the transition from the Bonn Republic to today’s Berlin Republic; this study will focus on retracing this shift in the realm of political thought. Analysis of three guiding principles appears to lend itself to the task of decoding political thinking and ideas. The first, examination of images of the state, is based on the intuitive assessment that the state, as a point of reference for political thought, is by no means losing its relevance but that, in contrast to long-standing trends, it will remain the decisive element in defining political community. The second principle to be scrutinized is the role and the self-understanding of the public. Consideration of this aspect stems from the intuitive assessment that expectations about the public have varied greatly in different phases of the history of West German democracy and ranged from the notion that structural transformation was needed so the public sphere could function as a counter-institution to the state “system”, to conceptualization of the public as a correlate to state institutions, to framing the public as the sovereign, with the public’s will serving as the basis for changes in institutional arrangements. The third level of analysis will center on concepts of subjectivity and is stimulated, first, by the assumption that tensions unavoidably arise between ideal schemes for the conduct of life and the proposed role of citizens with their participatory rights and civil obligations. The second thread on this level of analysis refers to A. O. Hirschman and posits that political thought is marked by “shifting involvements”, by commitment and disappointment, with concomitant shifts in conceptual justifications. There is a special irony in the observation that critical analysis of crises and constitutional-patriotic apologias for the German Federal Republic can no longer be unequivocally attributed to a specific political camp but now surface at times on the left, at times on the right.