Abstract
Citizens are led to believe they have no control over big decisions – and certainly none over the current financial climate. As politicians redefine how the economic crisis is discussed,
In March 2011, I was invited to Portugal for a book promotion. The evening reading and discussion were well attended, the audience was patient. From one moment to the next, however, the friendly, interested and open-minded atmosphere was suddenly transformed by a question from a young man. All at once, we were simply Germans and Portuguese, eyeing each other with mutual hostility. The question was an unpleasant one: Weren’t we – meaning me, a German – doing with the euro and our exports what we had once failed to achieve with our tanks? No one in the audience demurred; on the contrary, an expectant hush descended, as if someone had finally broached the all-important issue. And, as if the whole situation wasn’t bad enough already, I suddenly reacted as expected, in other words, like a German. Offended, I declared that no one was compelled to buy a Mercedes, and that they, the Portuguese, should consider themselves lucky to be getting bank credits at less than the current rate of interest. I could literally hear the newsprint rustling between my lips.
Hadn’t democracy already been badly damaged enough by the financial crisis?
In the commotion that ensued on my riposte, I finally came to my senses. Taking advantage of the fact that I was holding the microphone, I blurted out in my imperfect English that I had reacted just as stupidly as they had, and that we Germans and Portuguese were all blundering into the same trap if we instinctively supported our own team like football fans. How could we be foolish enough to believe that it was about Germans and Portuguese and not about above and below, about those who, in both Portugal and Germany, had brought about the present situation, had profited from it, and were continuing to do so? Weren’t profits being privatised and losses nationalised in Germany and Portugal alike (and not in those countries alone)? Weren’t all spheres of life in both Germany and Portugal being increasingly ‘economised’, that’s to say, privatised, and thus subordinated to the pursuit of profit – and, in many cases, hadn’t this been a senseless, indeed, dangerous, course of action? Hadn’t democracy already been badly damaged enough by the financial crisis and the debt crisis exacerbated?
I can’t pretend that at that point we fell into each other’s arms, but discussion became a renewed possibility, and I was told what the European Union’s budget cuts meant to the audience. The measures left only just enough for the bare necessities, and not even always for those.
Demonstrators protest during Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Lisbon, 12 November 2012
Situations like the one at the reading in Oporto are more or less repeated at other readings abroad or in interviews. Just as I always used to be cast as the East German who had to say something about the conflict between East and West, so I am now reduced to the German responsible for the federal government’s policy and expected to say something about the conflict between Germans and Greeks, Germans and Italians, Germans and Hungarians.
Whenever I speak of differing interests within a country, of social and economic issues and the polarisation of society, this tends as a rule to be adjudged an evasion. It is frightening, the unsuitable criteria with which public debates are conducted, and how unpolitical they have become. If I endeavour to account for this depoliticisation and, thus, the beatification of the status quo, I keep coming back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The glorious year 1989 resulted in new self-evident truths of which I only gradually became aware. For nearly ten years I believed I had exchanged a world of words for one in which only figures counted. It looked as if all constraints had become practical constraints. I myself was lost for words. What were words beside figures? Hadn’t the implosion of the Eastern Bloc entailed the disappearance of ideologies as well, at least in our part of the world?
Now, as I write this, it seems absurd and incomprehensible that any mature adult could have been obtuse enough to believe so. Of course the West depends on words, on arrangements and agreements, on the struggle between different social and economic vested interests – on a social contract. How could I have been so self-deluded! And how hard it has been, as it sometimes still is, to emancipate oneself from this constraint-ideology and ‘alternativeless decisions’, as Chancellor Merkel calls them.
After the Second World War, the Western social contract attained an internationally envied standard, insofar as it applied to the citizens of Western Europe and North America – murderous though it was toward the so-called Third World. That changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The financial crisis has rendered the injustice, nay, absurdity, of our social conditions so obvious that sheer self-preservation had to compel our community to act – I had believed that: indeed, I was convinced of it. Bankers and stock exchange speculators had for decades been making exorbitant profits – at the community’s expense. Too big to fail – the taxpayer was the gambler’s hostage. The dismaying thing, however, was that there were no consequences. The banks’ rules remained unaltered. But what had to happen to stop this despoliation of the community by a minority of a minority? Why didn’t our democratically-elected representatives react and shield the population from these practices? Democracy degenerated into the protective cloak of a de facto oligarchy.
We have the impression that our lives and world events unfold between two factors: the stock market and the weather
What happened then was so simple, so manifest to every eye, that it struck me as superfluous and redundant even to write about it. I was at a loss for words for the second time.
In November 2011, as former Stadtschreiber (an honorary title given to writers) of Mainz, I was invited to a function at the Bundesbank’s head office in the town, an event that symbolised this conflict between evidence and lack of political consequences. Those taking part in the platform debate included a Bundesbank board member, a female professor of economics and a cardinal. The moderator, a respected lawyer and historian whom I much admire, introduced me as ‘the voice of the people’, a phrase I at first took to be obliquely ironical, but which was later repeated in a wholly straight-faced and serious manner. In the brief statement each of us delivered before the discussion, I had pointed out that, among other things, very few of my friends and acquaintances would receive a pension of €800 (US$1,050), at age 65 – indeed, that two-thirds of them or more were expecting public assistance although they’re college graduates and have never actually been unemployed. This being so, I said, no one should be surprised that the public coffers were empty.
I expressed myself similarly during the debate. Since nobody pursued the subject, I got the sneaking feeling that I was totally out of place in the Bundesbank’s reception room – positively non-existent, in fact. Was I really the only idiot in a group of highly intelligent people? Why did their remarks strike me as irrelevant? Or did this impression stem from an inability to understand their vocabulary? In order to reassure myself of my spiritual existence in the room, I addressed the Bundesbank representative directly in a form of self-defence. I asked him why nobody ever spoke of tax increases. The state was always being reproached for its expenditure, but no one ever mentioned its continuously diminishing revenues, its gifts to businesses, to top earners and wealthy heirs. Was this taboo, I asked?
After a brief silence, he replied: ‘But you aren’t correct there, we raised value added tax.’ I was left literally speechless by this lesson in social hardness of hearing and self-assurance from a representative of our community. Unto them that have more shall still more be given, and the whole population picks up the tab.
In conclusion, members of the audience were at liberty to ask questions, almost all of which were levelled at the Bundesbank representative. At the reception afterwards I was highly surprised to receive numerous pats on the back. When I asked the back-patters why they were expressing their approval only now, after the event, when they could at least have contributed something to the debate, I was met with another silence.
In the autumn of 2011, however, the German federal chancellor unexpectedly defined the reality of the matter. For this, Angela Merkel created a term that seemed positively liberating in its enormity: she combined the adjective ‘market-conformable’ with the noun ‘democracy’. She deserves praise for that. Quite apart from its enlightening analogy with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘guided democracy’, the term ‘market-conformable democracy’ gets to the heart of our circumstances.
One doesn’t have to labour an etymological point to recognise that a market-conformable democracy ceases to be a democracy. The merit of the phrase consists in its having found a term for our experiences and rendered them more comprehensible. For we can now formulate the opposite position, that is to say, what is actually needed: democracy-conformable markets. If we wish to survive economically and socially, ecologically and ethically, we need democracy-conformable markets. Actually to call for the primacy of politics today equates in rank to a new declaration of independence, for we have been bereft of the realisation that we can shape the world politically – indeed, we have been lulled to sleep by ourselves as well as others.
In 1989-90 we ourselves lost the notion of an alternative. This is symbolised by many things, for instance German television, on which market reports precede the principal news broadcast. This creates the impression that our lives and world events unfold between two objective factors over which we have no control: the stock market and the weather. Where the weather is concerned, we have gradually learned the extent of humanity’s influence over it. In the case of the market, this clearly has still to dawn on us.