On Political Firewalls in Liberal Democracies (Andy Markovits)
[My friend Andy Markovits has long been, among his other interests, an important analyst of German society and politics. Here he considers the outcome of the recent German election and some of the wider issues it raises. –Jeff Weintraub]
"On Political Firewalls in Liberal Democracies"
By Andrei S. Markovits
(Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Comparative Politics and German Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
With the election for the Federal Republic of Germany’s national parliament now complete, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) will weigh in as the second strongest party with 20 percent of the vote. The likely outcome is a so-called Grand Coalition comprised of the two parties forming Christian Democracy (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), the preferred modus operandi of the vaunted Angela Merkel era, a paragon of centrist stability epitomizing boredom which perhaps is not a bad thing in our turbulent times. It is certain that the AfD will be excluded from the government, thus confirming the continued presence of what has so contentiously been labeled a firewall, also referred to as a cordon sanitaire, denoting a strict taboo for any of the other parties to approach the AfD as a legitimate partner for any kind of political interaction, let alone a formal coalition.
To some, like US Vice President JD Vance, this exclusion is prima facie evidence for the Federal Republic’ s losing its democratic bona fides. To others, notably a solid majority of the Federal Republic’s voters, the exclusion of this party from the country’s government constitutes one of the stoutest pillars of German democracy, since the very spine of the Federal Republic’s existence remains anchored in a complete rejection of anything harkening to the country’s Nazi past – parts of which, however, obliquely, have come to characterize important facets of the AfD’s identity and appeal.
In this matter Germany’s mainstream parties and the majority of the German public are right, and Vance’s accusations are wrong and tendentious. It may be worth spelling out some of the reasons.
Many undoubted liberal democracies have existed in which certain parties have been excluded from governmental power for many decades due to the long-term political hegemony of another party. Just think of the hegemonic rule of the Social Democrats in Sweden from the mid-1930s until the mid-1970s and in repeated spurts since then, during which the “bourgeois” parties remained in permanent opposition. Nowhere has such a one-party-dominant rule been more evident than in Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party has governed with very few interruptions since 1955. Then there is the American South in which – until the late 1960s and early 1970s – the Democrats ruled hegemonically with the Republicans following suit since then. (I am, of course, only talking about the inclusion of political parties in government there, not the representation of people. Thus, African Americans remained largely outside this party universe, most decidedly until the 1970s and in many ways today as well.)
Let us be clear about the implications: Liberal democracy, in politics as well as in other public realms, demands equality only at the start but not in the results. In the case of electoral politics this means solely that parties have equal opportunities to seek popular support and governmental power through the voting process, not equal rights to govern, which constitutes the ultimate goal in all politics.
In multi-party political systems, new parties sometimes go through transitional periods in which they face informal obstacles and delays in being accepted as respectable coalition partners. Established parties often demonstrate antipathies towards newcomers by trying to exclude them from the accepted arena. Indeed, the now esteemed Greens in Germany confronted such “Beruehrungsaengste” (fears of touching) in the early-to-mid 1980s when even the Social Democrats (let alone their Christian Democratic colleagues) issued clear prohibitions to enter any governing coalition with these unserious hippies on the local and state, never mind federal, level. A prominent Social Democratic politician in the state of Hesse threatened to use a two-by-four against anybody in his party making any attempts to approach any Greens for any purpose. But by September 1999, one of the Greens’ leaders, Joschka Fischer, became the country’s vice chancellor and foreign minister in a coalition with the Social Democrats.
In normal circumstances, one of the mainstays of liberal democratic politics is that all entrants into the race are – at least in principle – potentially acceptable partners in the governing process. Some might be preferable to others, but none are a priori excluded. Neither the Swedish Social Democrats nor the Japanese Liberal Democrats established any firewalls around their opponents. To be sure, all incumbents gerrymander and engage in various machinations to enhance their own power and reduce their opponents’. But those are railroad barriers or locks at best, not firewalls.
Firewalls are generally created by the established parties, and are justified, only if the excluded party’s essence, its ideological core, centers on the destruction of liberal democracy itself. Those are special cases, and Germany’s AfD constitutes one such special case.
The Italians, for example, had good reason to establish a firewall around the Communist Party for thirty years to safeguard the country’s fragile liberal democracy from the ambitions of an actor that wanted to undermine it, until the Communist Party’s own massive change of heart with its Eurocommunist reforms of the mid-1970s when the formerly Leninist – at least Gramscian -- party mutated into a social democratic one. The Federal Republic’s parties have every right, indeed a democratic duty, to make their current firewall stand around the AfD until the party will unequivocally abandon even the faintest of flirtations with National Socialism. For it is solely the legacy of that unique horror in human history – not just any far-right ideology and demeanor, in other words not your garden-variety of current authoritarianism or populism – that renders the AfD unacceptable to govern the Federal Republic of Germany. Nazism remains a non-negotiable handicap in the Federal Republic’s political discourse. The continued existence of Europe’s liberal democratic order demands nothing less.
"On Political Firewalls in Liberal Democracies"
By Andrei S. Markovits
(Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Comparative Politics and German Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
With the election for the Federal Republic of Germany’s national parliament now complete, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) will weigh in as the second strongest party with 20 percent of the vote. The likely outcome is a so-called Grand Coalition comprised of the two parties forming Christian Democracy (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), the preferred modus operandi of the vaunted Angela Merkel era, a paragon of centrist stability epitomizing boredom which perhaps is not a bad thing in our turbulent times. It is certain that the AfD will be excluded from the government, thus confirming the continued presence of what has so contentiously been labeled a firewall, also referred to as a cordon sanitaire, denoting a strict taboo for any of the other parties to approach the AfD as a legitimate partner for any kind of political interaction, let alone a formal coalition.
To some, like US Vice President JD Vance, this exclusion is prima facie evidence for the Federal Republic’ s losing its democratic bona fides. To others, notably a solid majority of the Federal Republic’s voters, the exclusion of this party from the country’s government constitutes one of the stoutest pillars of German democracy, since the very spine of the Federal Republic’s existence remains anchored in a complete rejection of anything harkening to the country’s Nazi past – parts of which, however, obliquely, have come to characterize important facets of the AfD’s identity and appeal.
In this matter Germany’s mainstream parties and the majority of the German public are right, and Vance’s accusations are wrong and tendentious. It may be worth spelling out some of the reasons.
Many undoubted liberal democracies have existed in which certain parties have been excluded from governmental power for many decades due to the long-term political hegemony of another party. Just think of the hegemonic rule of the Social Democrats in Sweden from the mid-1930s until the mid-1970s and in repeated spurts since then, during which the “bourgeois” parties remained in permanent opposition. Nowhere has such a one-party-dominant rule been more evident than in Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party has governed with very few interruptions since 1955. Then there is the American South in which – until the late 1960s and early 1970s – the Democrats ruled hegemonically with the Republicans following suit since then. (I am, of course, only talking about the inclusion of political parties in government there, not the representation of people. Thus, African Americans remained largely outside this party universe, most decidedly until the 1970s and in many ways today as well.)
Let us be clear about the implications: Liberal democracy, in politics as well as in other public realms, demands equality only at the start but not in the results. In the case of electoral politics this means solely that parties have equal opportunities to seek popular support and governmental power through the voting process, not equal rights to govern, which constitutes the ultimate goal in all politics.
In multi-party political systems, new parties sometimes go through transitional periods in which they face informal obstacles and delays in being accepted as respectable coalition partners. Established parties often demonstrate antipathies towards newcomers by trying to exclude them from the accepted arena. Indeed, the now esteemed Greens in Germany confronted such “Beruehrungsaengste” (fears of touching) in the early-to-mid 1980s when even the Social Democrats (let alone their Christian Democratic colleagues) issued clear prohibitions to enter any governing coalition with these unserious hippies on the local and state, never mind federal, level. A prominent Social Democratic politician in the state of Hesse threatened to use a two-by-four against anybody in his party making any attempts to approach any Greens for any purpose. But by September 1999, one of the Greens’ leaders, Joschka Fischer, became the country’s vice chancellor and foreign minister in a coalition with the Social Democrats.
In normal circumstances, one of the mainstays of liberal democratic politics is that all entrants into the race are – at least in principle – potentially acceptable partners in the governing process. Some might be preferable to others, but none are a priori excluded. Neither the Swedish Social Democrats nor the Japanese Liberal Democrats established any firewalls around their opponents. To be sure, all incumbents gerrymander and engage in various machinations to enhance their own power and reduce their opponents’. But those are railroad barriers or locks at best, not firewalls.
Firewalls are generally created by the established parties, and are justified, only if the excluded party’s essence, its ideological core, centers on the destruction of liberal democracy itself. Those are special cases, and Germany’s AfD constitutes one such special case.
The Italians, for example, had good reason to establish a firewall around the Communist Party for thirty years to safeguard the country’s fragile liberal democracy from the ambitions of an actor that wanted to undermine it, until the Communist Party’s own massive change of heart with its Eurocommunist reforms of the mid-1970s when the formerly Leninist – at least Gramscian -- party mutated into a social democratic one. The Federal Republic’s parties have every right, indeed a democratic duty, to make their current firewall stand around the AfD until the party will unequivocally abandon even the faintest of flirtations with National Socialism. For it is solely the legacy of that unique horror in human history – not just any far-right ideology and demeanor, in other words not your garden-variety of current authoritarianism or populism – that renders the AfD unacceptable to govern the Federal Republic of Germany. Nazism remains a non-negotiable handicap in the Federal Republic’s political discourse. The continued existence of Europe’s liberal democratic order demands nothing less.
posted by Jeff Weintraub at 11:38 AM
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