Recently, as part of a small group, I spent a week in Munich, Brussels, and Berlin visiting diplomats, bureaucrats and politicians. Our host was the Munich-based Hans Seidel Foundation, a government-funded organization that is politically independent, butwhich is philosophically sympathetic to the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian conservative party. Its government-sponsored budget of some $50 million per year is about twice that of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
While many issues concern German conservatives, underlying them all is a resurgent pride in the German nation — but a pride expressed in ways far removed from the older, lethal ideology of the pre-war period.
We’re witnessing the remarkable maturation of democracy and civil society in a united Germany. The Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989 removed the last psychological barrier to the development of something approaching if not optimism, then at least the first post-World War II nationalism that Germans have dared express. With World Cup play under way in several German cities during our visit, German national flags flew from apartment balconies and car windows — hardly an oddity in the states, but such public expressions of patriotism among Germans were previously unthinkable.
How this newfound normalcy will affect policy debates is hard to know, but one hopes it will ease the way for Germany’s eventual assumption of responsibilities on the world stage concomitant with its economic weight. This is already the case within the European Union, where Germany pays about a quarter of the budget. Beyond Europe, it would mean an increase in military spending, which currently amounts to only 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 4 percent in the U.S. and 2.4 percent in the U.K. Easing America’s defense burden for Europe is tantamount, as one CSU official told us, to lessening Germany’s dependence on America — a mark of national maturity that needn’t lead to loggerheads down the road.
In fact, in Bavaria, which boasts the healthiest economy in Germany, the rhetoric of CSU leaders is familiar to an American conservative’s ears. Jurgen Heike, an MP in the Bavarian state parliament, was one of several Germans who spoke in terms that would send a blue state liberal into an apoplectic fit, stating that in Bavaria “we have Christian and Western values underlying our party’s values.”
Markus Soder, the secretary general of the CSU, continued the Reaganite language, arguing that higher taxes bring in less revenue, that Germans suffer from an overregulated labor market (a welcome respite from continental statism), and that EU policies that use German euros to make it easy for Bavarian jobs to be transferred to the Czech are “stupid.” For good measure, he added that the ruling Christian Democratic Union is becoming “a little more bureaucratic,” something that the CSU opposes “vehemently.”
A further sign of civil health was shown at the Stasi Museum in Berlin. Archivists have taken extraordinary precautions to prevent Stasi files from being used to blackmail innocents. Uniquely in the history of controlling such material, and in the face of the chaos after the Berlin Wall’s fall, authorities secured all 173 km of files (the product of 270,000 informants). As our lecturer said, “The GDR was always looking to be tops at things, and in the Stasi, they did it.” Today the rule of law ensures that even those who read their own files will find sections blacked out, lest innocents be wrongly impugned, or the guilty subjected to personal vendetta.
Yet German conservatives could learn from their American counterparts in the field of ideas. For Americans can draw on a long tradition of intellectual conservatism that has explored questions of the state, religion, economics, history and political theory. Ask a conservative for a list of important conservative books and you’ll get scores, if not hundreds, of titles.
But ask Germans that question, as I did, and you’ll get silence. They can draw on the long intellectual history of the West, and the Catholic social philosophy of subsidiarity came up. But there is no corpus of conservative classics analogous to what we have in America.
The upshot of this weakness is that German conservatives cannot articulate an intellectual worldview with the acuity they need to push back against their nihilistic and statist opponents, and so must rely instead on battered tradition and mere policy.
As the current state of the GOP (and conservatism in America) shows, there’s no panacea regardless of the size of one’s library. But absent a strong intellectual tradition from which policy is drawn, German conservatives are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.
Winfield Myers is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at Campus-watch.com and Democracy-Project.com.
