This will be the first in a series of pieces discussing political differences between the US and Germany, with a special focus on the language and culture of politics in the two countries.
As an American living in Germany, and a politically active person at that, American politics is one of the things I am asked about most by the (German) people around me. Likewise, German politics is something Americans frequently bring up with me; less to ask questions or get my take on things, and more often to express admiration for and even wonderment at Angela Merkel. This inevitably comes most often from the more progressive Americans – all the more amusing since Angela Merkel is, for all of her nebulous centrism, a conservative politician.
What strikes me again and again in these conversations is the very different way in which the two nationalities discuss politics, which betrays the very different way they conceptualize even the most foundational concepts of the state, society, and democracy. The translator and political scientist in me can’t help but be fascinated by the differences, and indeed, by the almost completely insular and unique way of talking about politics that the United States has developed. This peculiarity tends to muddy discussions of politics between Americans and people from almost anywhere else in the world, while making the state of the United States harder for even the keenest foreign observers to discern.
Let’s start with a particularly blaring case of American singularity: the classification of the political spectrum in terms of liberal/conservative. In some ways, this is an outgrowth of the first-past-the-post, two-party American system of governance. In many others, it is the result of decades of anti-socialist repression and the eventual rise in the 1930s of the Democrats as a party that anywhere else in the world would be considered “social liberal” (more on this below, and in an upcoming post). In the United States, liberal and left have been understood as synonyms for decades, though this is slowly changing. In Germany, and most other countries, they are considered as nearly opposites. Here, liberals are more like what Americans would call libertarians, whereas the left are socialists and social democrats. After the war, West German politics was largely split between the Social Democrats (center left) and the CDU/CSU, or Christian Democrats (center right/conservatives), with a smaller liberal party (the Free Democrats, notice the clear emphasis on democracy in party names after the Nazi era?) often playing the kingmaker in coalition governments. The liberals in Germany weren’t and aren’t right-wing, given their emphasis on civil liberties and a less activist state, but also definitely not left, giving their pro-business, anti-socialist thinking. An exploration of some other key political terms can help make the nuances clearer. When discussing political issues, Americans frequently characterize them as either “social” or “economic” issues. Social issues, in American terms, include many hot button and often cultural values driven topics such as abortion and other women’s rights issues, LGBT rights, affirmative action and other race-based policy questions, sometimes climate and environmental issues, and the role of religion in public life and law. Economic issues include things like the welfare state, workers’ rights, taxes, and generally public spending in most areas besides the military. This way of classifying topics is totally alien to German political discourse.
In German, soziale Themen i.e. social issues, mean things like social justice, the “social state” (i.e., the welfare state, but conceptualized differently), and socio-economic inequality. Social justice, soziale Gerechtigkeit, often tops polls of Germans’ political priorities, while American social issues, like LGBT rights and abortion, are much less prominent in the German political discourse. Economic issues, Wirtschaftspolitik, would be more narrowly defined in Germany as things such as corporate and business taxes, subsidies, industrial strategies (like the transition away from fossil fuels in industry), etc. In general, political topics in Germany aren’t classified as one or the other, but are discussed within policy fields such as labor policy, environmental policy, energy policy, housing policy, etc.
To muddy the waters even further, the German "social state" is, essentially, a consensus position. The soziale Marktwirtschaft, or social market economy, is the foundational principle of the West German (and now, German) economic system and was propounded by the conservative CDU in the early days of the Federal Republic as both a reaction against the Soviet bloc and, later, as a contrast to the unchecked free market capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon countries. The economy, die Wirtschaft, which in German means something closer to the narrower English term business, would exist to serve society’s common needs and interests. The state, in providing legal and arbitration structures, would help facilitate the economy's working for the good of all through things like Betriebsräte, or works councils for employees to have a say in company management, institutionalized labor unions and employer associations, and structures for sectoral-level agreements on pay and benefits, etc. The Sozialstaat, or social state, would exist to provide universal services or a legal framework for them, such as the hybrid public/private and mostly non-profit health insurance system, and to smooth over the inevitable failures of the market. Again, the fundamentals of this arrangement enjoy near universal support in Germany and among German political parties.
From this cursory glance at key political terms in the two countries, it becomes clear that politics and political parties are very different beasts in Germany and the United States. The American parties are big tents that unite positions and currents that wouldn’t go together in German political parties, while all the prominent German parties hold positions that, in some ways, can only be found on the “fringes” of American politics. In my next blog post, I’ll look more closely at the parties in the two countries, as well as at the phenomenon of polarization and the identity-fication of politics in the US as, I would contend, an outgrowth of the American constitutional framework.
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