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From East Germany to Germany: Between Monzi Economy and Political Economy
Center for German and European Studies
June, 1997 Working Paper 2.49
Abstract
A number of scholars have started to speak of the new divide between eastern and western Germany in terms of "ethnicity." As useful as this analogy is, however, it has the disadvantage of being just that - an analogy. Seen differently, the source of the new cultural divide in Germany is the conflict between two very different, historically shaped moral economics. Despite its Stalinist misdevelopment, the economy of the communist East inculcated a set of egalitarian economic values through everyday practices. For political reasons, the unification strategy after 1991 did not challenge these values but accommodated them. Such a strategy thus guaranteed the persistence and even growth of regional identities in post-unification Germany.
I. Introduction
A number of scholars have started to speak of the new divide in Germany in terms of "ethnicity." The language of cultural markers and stereotypical social exchange that litters the writing on ethnicity has begun to creep into the analytical discourse on Germany. 1 Such a characterization is indeed tempting. Any number of statistical indicators could be used to support such an analysis. Consider, for example, just one statistic: marriages. In Berlin during 1995 there were 16,383 registered marriages. Of this number only 4 percent were "intermarriages" between East and West Berliners. In the same period Berliners married non-Germans at almost 8 times this rate. 2 As useful, however, as the ethnic analogy may be for understanding the character of cultural conflict, it has the disadvantage in the German case of being just that, an analogy. The cultural divide in Germany may be like ethnic conflict, but it is not ethnic conflict.
What is it then? This essay probes more deeply into this question. Its purpose is not to argue that there is something immutably different between East and West Germans. Such essentialist rhetoric is of little use to the social scientist if for no other reason than that identities change over time--sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, but they do change. 3 Rather, what I propose to do is to explain how 40 years of institutional separation created a very different "moral economy" in the East from the West, and how this Eastern moral economy is beginning to change the landscape of politics in Germany.
A word on moral economy. The literature on this subject is now so vast as to constitute a subindustry within the social sciences. Although it is highly diverse in its claims, the notion of moral economy can be boiled down to a few simple propositions. It maintains that economic man is a historically contingent phenomenon, and at best an "ideal type." People tend to make tradeoffs between goods only up to a certain point; thereafter, some things are not "for sale." For moral economists, most people have a fundamental sense of what is just and fair, and that this forms their "bottom line" beyond which exchange behavior will either not be engaged in or, when engaged in, it will be experienced as a moral violation. Furthermore, people will generally tolerate a social order only so long as the "implicit social contract" which lays down the bottom line of exchange is not violated. Of course, what this bottom line is, hence the nature of the moral economy, will differ from case to case. It therefore makes sense to speak of different moral economies in different societies. Interest remains an important category for moral economists but how people act on interests is directly mediated by cultural milieu.
A number of observable implications of this highly abstract principle can be discerned. Let me concentrate on just one: reactions to commodification. Since Karl Polanyi's work, we know that eras of commodification of land, capital, and labor are among the culturally most shocking and politically most volatile because, even though the markets rapid destroy old structures and norms, the terms of the implicit social contract are slow to be worked out. Although Polanyi cast the response to the corn modification of the British economy in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in a kind of mushy functionalism (of "society" "protecting itself' through poor laws, trade tarrifs, welfare states, and currency debasements) that we may no longer find appealing, subsequent authors have easily recast his thought in terms of the ways in which received notions of "fairness" and "economic justice" shape interests in rapidly commodifying contexts. Here we need only mention the work of E.P. Thompson, Barrington Moore, and James Scott. Curiously, I have yet to find a work that applies these categories to post-communist Eastern Europe.
Yet nothing would seem to be more obvious, especially for East Germany. More than any other population in fomerly communist East Europe, East Germans have confronted a sudden and almost complete commodification of the economy. The cultural divide between the East and West, I will argue below, is largely a function of the interaction of two very different moral economies. While most analysts of postcommunism have concentrated on the leninist institutional legacies and the barriers they represent to the successful construction of capitalist democracy, very few have inquired or taken seriously the cultural legacy of communist economics as opposed to politics. Few scholars have discussed ways in which these legacies have contributed to the generation of new postcommunist identities, precisely because the blatant economic inefficiencies of communism had led to its collapse in the first place.
Communism's collapse, however, should not dull our sense for how strongly stalinist economic institutions influenced not only social structures but fundamental attitudes to issues of economic equality, exchange relationships, employment, management, and even political participation. Neoliberal economics, with its assumptions of instantaneous adjustment at both the individual and institutional level to altered incentives, may have kept us from appreciating this politically important fact. The idea that such fundamental areas of human life as housing, schooling, and day care, as well as food and other staples, should be subject to cost-benefit calculation and the market ups and downs does not sit well with most East Germans, regardless of political orientation. Somehow the market, understood in this sense, offends their sensibilities even as they participate in it, understand that there is no practical alternative to it, and are prepared to do precious little to change it. What might be characterized as an egalitarian "moral economy" of communist society appears to have persisted well into the capitalist transition.
Survey research on popular attitudes toward social stratification in postcommunist societies has yielded contradictory results. In two papers using a telephone survey, written shortly after communism's collapse, Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov, sought to show that attitudes toward equality and inequality across nations were quite similar and, remarkably, Russian and US attitudes were almost identical on issues of stratification and income distribution. 4 The assumption (and conclusions) of these studies was that communism did not fundamentally alter attitudes to commodification and inequality, or to the extent that they did, such attitudes would change rapidly under a new incentive structure. 5 Although these issues continue to be hotly debated in the scholarly community, it was only natural that East and West Germany became a laboratory for similar research designs--a laboratory because the two seem to present the perfect control cases for the effects of immersion in different institutional settings on fundamental economic values in (what were before 1945) identical political cultures. Robert Rohrschneider, in several painstakingly researched articles on precisely this topic, has come to the opposite conclusions of Shiller et. al. Using the representatives from the Berlin parliament as respondents in face to face interviews, Rohrschneider finds that regardless of party affiliation, respondents from East Berlin consistently support more egalitarian outcomes, greater governmental control and intervention in the economy, and advocate the value of "solidarity" more consistently than their West Berlin counterparts. 6
The unification strategy has accommodated these differences in basic economic orientations. Unification with the West has permitted a special sort of postcommunist economic policy in eastern Germany. It is at once both a shock therapeutic and moral economy approach. On the one hand, more than any other postcommunist country or region, eastern German industries have been subject to the direct pressures of global economic competition (the results of which are discussed in greater detail below). On the other hand, unlike in other postcommunist countries, social stratification and income inequalities in eastern Germany have remained relatively stable since 1991. Comparing eastern Germany and Hungary, for example, Headly, Andorka, and Krause, using household panel data, found that after the revolution of 1989 income inequality increased very rapidly in Hungary, already surpassing that of West Germany. In East Germany, by contrast, "net income inequality is almost unchanged since communist times and is much below West German levels." The core results of their work is represented in table one. Most surprising, at the height of the unification shock, between March 1991 and March 1992, as measured by the German panel survey, there was no increase in inequality at all. The narrow distribution of net incomes in East Germany is a product primarily of Federal taxes, transfers and subsidies. Although, others have shown that the inequality is slowly increasing in East Germany, the influence of political and social considerations is far greater in East Germany than in Hungary, Russia, or probably any other country in formerly communist East Europe. 7
In what follows, I attempt to explain how it came to this. This requires an inquiry into the origins of differing conceptions of economic and social justice in the East and the West. Because the story of the West is one that has been told before and, by now, is very well documented, I concentrate on the East, using the West only for contrasts. Explaining the current cultural divide, however, also necessitates a deeper. inquiry into the origins of the unification strategy and its impact on East and West Germans. The next two portions of the essay take on these tasks. The tentative conclusion of the essay is that, while the continued cultural divide in German will not lead to the creation of two states, it will, as cultural divides have in other contexts, change the landscape of national politics for good. The politics of unification mean that there is no going back to the old Federal Republic.
II. A two-fold Stunde Null
Memoirs and archives have revealed how difficult and uncertain was the creation of the West German social market economy during the 1950s. It was by no means certain that West German public opinion would tolerate what appeared at the time to be a protracted period of hardship after the 1948 currency reform that ultimately put the country on the path to quite spectacular self-sustained economic growth. It is now easily forgotten how poor most West Germans were in the late 1940s and early 1950s, how little they traveled, and how little they consumed. Consider, for example, a report from a typical newspaper report in 1947 on the physical health of Berlin workers:
We came to the conclusion that the enterprise youth is not gaining but losing weight and that the overwhelming portion of young people are considerably underweight. One of the most shocking cases recently is that of Liselotte W., sixteen-and-half years old, who works in Tempelhof. She is 1.5 meters tall and weighs 26 kilos. Another youth from the same district is 1.69 meters tall and weighs forty kilos. A fifteen-year-old is 1.38 meters tall and weighs 32 kilos. 8
As we now know, the West German 1950s succeeded in transforming not only most people's fundamental political values, but also altered conceptions of social justice that were prevalent in the first post-war years to allow for a market economy to develop. In the years immediately following unification in 1991, Germans looked back to these years as a model for repetition in the East: like West Germans, East Germans could and would eventually make their way to the economic promised land. If the West Germans had built a market economy from scratch in 1945, 50 too could the East Germans in 1991.
Forgotten in all of this is that the East Germans had faced their own Stunde Null once before in this century, in 1945, and were being asked to start from scratch once again. 9 The East German Stunde Null was if anything even more trying than the one experienced in the West. The Soviet occupation authorities behaved atrociously by any standard one might care to mention. 10 In the economy, industrial plant that was not being dismantled as reparations for shipment to the Soviet Union (where a large part of it simply rotted on the rail spurs) was used as a source for reparations from running production. German labor, a highly skilled commodity, was probably regarded as one of the greatest trophies of the war.
But whatever the Soviets' hopes for the traditional German virtues of hard work and discipline in their own zone of occupation, the orientations and behavior of East Germans quickly changed under the impact of the difficult postwar conditions and Soviet labor practices. This is not to say that seventy years of German working-class culture could be wiped out overnight by "sovietization." It could not. Indeed, significant aspects of this culture were not at all incompatible with Soviet labor practices. Well into 1947, for example, the extensive system of vocational training developed during the Kaiserreich and extended into the Nazi period continued to operate, utilizing many of the principles associated with the "company loyalty" school developed in the 1920s and 1930s by the conservative industrial pedagogue Carl Arnhold.
However, "sovietization~ did change things, albeit not in a simplistic way. The history of work in postwar East Germany is less a story of implementing a master plan for sovietization than it is of crisis management. What we see are a series of responses to pressing problems, which, in their cumulative effect, we may more or less usefully term "sovietization." Of course, as in every country of Eastern Europe, the Soviet military authorities precluded the development in East Germany of independent working-class organizations, especially after 1947. But suppressing working-class organizations could not begin to solve all the problems of labor motivation and productivity. Inducing East Germans to work set off a bitter conflict over wages and piece rates. The resolution of this conflict within the confines of the command economy created a new kind of German worker (and working class) with different habits, expectations, and definitions of what is just and proper--with a different moral economy than those characteristic of its predecessor or developing in the West.
As in the West, one finds moving reports in the newspapers of the day of severe malnourishment among young workers. The line between survival and starvation was one easily crossed. The collapse of the financial system, coupled with shortages in every sector of the economy under the weight of reparations payments, rendered monetary wages a weak instrument for tying labor to the workplace: with almost nothing to buy, it made little sense to work for money. Where money did matter, if one had a lot of it, was on the black market. Most East Germans spent several hours per day in the black market and several days each month roaming the countryside in search of food. Initially then, it was not so much a matter of getting East Germans to work as they did before, but rather of inducing them to show up for work at all. In the years following the war, absenteeism remained high and labor discipline lax. Those who arrived at the factory gates, often did so on empty stomachs or severely malnourished.
Of necessity, the economic ethos in this society was one that is strangely reminiscent of James Scott's peasant ("in water up to his neck")--egalitarian, defensive, even cooperative, and geared toward survival rather than the maximization of gain. The institutional expression of this ethic were the spontaneously formed enterprise councils, which, with Soviet toleration, coordinated production and distributed equally to their employees a portion of their production what little food and consumer goods (for barter) they could find. Enterprise councils have a rich history in German industrial relations, extending back to the Weimar period and in some cases before. In the postwar years East German enterprise councils took on two new roles. First, they helped identify and root out active Nazis in industry, although in the case of management, the Soviet record on removing these officials was mixed. Second, with many managers having fled to the West, councils performed the valuable service of getting production up and running again. But composed as they were primarily of Social Democratic and Communist workers, enterprise councils could hardly have been expected to increase labor discipline and productivity with the traditional tools of differential reward and labor segmentation.
It was not until the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948, with the onset of the cold war and Zhdanov's articulation of the "two camps" theory, that the Soviets made their move against the social bases of the postwar moral economy. In October 1947 the occupation authorities issued order 234. In essence the order was a full blown transfer of Soviet-style labor institutions to East Germany. Enterprise councils were abolished or incorporated into centrally directed trade unions. The order also called for a number of social measures to address the most urgent needs of East Germans: industrial safety, strict limits on the use of child labor, longer vacation time for workers involved in physically exhausting labor, "polyclinics" and "nursing stations" in the workplace, improved living conditions for workers, and increased wages for female workers. Most important, enterprises put on special lists (called "234 lists") and received extra deliveries of food for preparation of hot meals served in the workers cafeteria and consignments of industrial consumer goods to be distributed at the workplace. Workers deemed to be especially productive or those involved in hard physical labor received a type "A" meal. Those evaluated as less productive or performing less strenuous tasks received a less caloric and nutritious type "B" meal. This principle was to be used in the direct distribution of consumer goods at the workplace as well.
The order also contained a number of measures to improve labor productivity. First and foremost came the fight against "slackers and corruption." Absentee workers who could not produce a medical excuse could now have their ration cards taken away or, in extreme cases, be assigned to clear rubble from bomb sites, which, along with construction, was among the most poorly paid work and was almost never included on the Order 234 lists of enterprises receiving extra food. Most important on the discipline side, the order called for the reintroduction of piecework (Akkordarbeit) and other forms of productivity-based wages throughout industry. To assist management in raising productivity, Soviet-style "socialist competitions" were to be employed and those individual workers who contributed most to raising productive norms were to be designated "activists" and receive financial and political rewards.
Thus began the process of "sovietization" of the East German labor force. Through a combination of incentives and sanctions, the particular Soviet method of binding ordinary people to their place of work, of refashioning the factory as a social and political, as opposed to purely a political institution had begun. Much of this, of course, was not new to German workers or managers. Siemens and Zeiss had been pioneers in designing social policies internal to the enterprise. Yet, as socially oriented as many German workers and industrialists may have been in the prewar era, they operated in a political and economic environment far different from the one confronting workers and managers in Soviet-occupied Germany. For one thing, the presence of the Soviet military authorities precluded the formation of anything like the independent employer and employee organizations that had hammered out personnel and wage policy in the Weimar era, and now in West Germany. The absence of legitimate interest representation meant that any wage settlement would be viewed by everyone from the outset as suspect, as expression of state policy or, worse, "Russian" policy, rather than as the result of wage negotiations between nominally independent parties.
Beyond the legitimacy question, which of course would never go away, East German management confronted a far different set of incentives than its prewar counterparts. Prewar German industry, for all the excesses of a highly organized internal market, still faced a modicum of domestic competition and the discipline of a highly competitive external market. These conditions no longer obtained for East German industry. Pervasive shortages and Soviet reparations policy all but guaranteed that the entire productive capacity of almost any given enterprise could be sold. Rather than being determined by demand, the success of East German managers was a function of their ability to secure the necessary inputs of production, of which labor was among the most important. It was this factor that yielded to labor a measure of power and ultimately determined the path of East German development.
Under these conditions, when the measures of Order 234 were implemented, the results were surprising and frustrating to both the Soviets and the East German c6mmunist authorities. Type A and B meals were never really doled out as intended; instead, complained one report to the center, workers continued to "eat from the same pot." Where management stiffened its resolve to increase the differential of reward, workers often spontaneously evened out differences by purchasing goods for each other. According to SED reports from enterprises, many foremen could not be stopped from putting all the piecework tickets of any one shift into a common urn in order to ensure equality of reward. Piecework equipment was regularly sabotaged, and piecework engineers and rate busters were often the targets of physical threats and intimidation. In short, what James Scott would call "everyday resistance" hindered the successful implementation of a plan by the authorities for a crypto-marketization of industrial relations in what was still an egalitarian moral economy.
The workers were assisted by management who were under pressure from both the Soviets and the evolving East German state authorities to produce at whether the cost (a typical sign of Sovietization as well). Management's behavior was crucial, for however intrepid the resistance of ordinary people, once the Soviets wanted a policy there was no real stopping it. What management could and did do, however, is to corrupt the entire Taylorist apparatus set up by the Soviets, and continue to reward workers relatively equally. Most managers even used the onset of piece work to raise wages beyond what they should have been. The East German Communists and the Soviets wavered in their response to this retreat by management. Occasionally they attempted to make a run at the norm question, as in during the rise and demise of East German Stkhanovism (called the Hennecke movement) in the late 1940s), but usually this amounted to little more than lip service because the causal relationships were too difficult to disentangle and it was unclear who exactly should be blamed. By turning what was supposed to be an economic measure into a sociopolitical one, East German managers were behaving quite rationally and shored up their position in a sellers market for labor.
This cat and mouse game between ordinary East Germans and the State continued unabated until 1953, when the regime took a quite serious run at the norm and wage question--interestingly against the advice of the Soviets who had "advisers" located in all strategic offices of the East German planning bureaucracy. Such runs were thought to be periodically necessary because wage competition between enterprises for scarce labor tended to increase solvent demand for consumer goods and the money supply beyond what was considered healthy. The plan to raise output norms might once again have been undermined at the enterprise level had it not also been combined with price increases in transportation costs, consumer goods, and health care. The result was the first mass protest in the history of Soviet occupied East Europe---over 500,000 people protested in 272 cities throughout the country--and wage demands quickly escalated to political demands, all of which could only be put down with Soviet tanks.
The June 17, 1953, strikes, and the aftermath in the weeks to come, clearly shook up the East German leadership as well as the Soviets. Although SED leader Ulbricht managed to keep his job (barely, we now know in retrospect), the June events had frightened him. In order to buy labor quiescence, the SED, with Soviet approval, continued to corrupt the entire Taylorist apparatus set up for measuring old norms and implementing new ones. Gradually the outlines of an implicit agreement (or "social contract") between the workers' state and the working class began to take shape: production could rise so long as norms remained low and wages high, relative to productivity. Industrial unrest did reappear sporadically throughout the 1950s, as the regime tried time and again to manipulate wages and piece rates. But enterprise party organizations and management had little interest in creating unnecessary industrial conflict and both tended to cave in to whatever demands workers might make. Rather than attempt to change this moral economy, communist authorities from very early on capitulated to it, and this gave ordinary East Germans an extraordinary degree of "blackmail power" against the regime.
Throughout the 1950s wages rose faster than productivity in virtually every sector of industry, a problem that the leadership would repeatedly attempt to rectify, albeit with little success. 11 Never again would any East German leader attempt to implement development policies by asking for sacrifice from the population. East German leaders remained frightened of East German workers throughout the 1950s (which is why the Politburo built itself a specially guarded, and stocked, estate at Wandlitz) and even after the wall was built. As an older generation of East Germans resumed its place and a new generation entered the work force after 1945, both developed habits, orientations, and interests that were different from those of the working class of prewar Germany and what was starting to take shape in the West. The work ethic and culture of the East German working class had been completely refashioned. In the absence of a capitalist labor market, the egalitarian impulse developed in the early postwar years could not be broken as it was in the West.
The long run impact of this moral economy was to preclude any meaningful economic reform. As it happens, the only period of economic reform in East German was the 1960s, and this was headed off as soon as it became apparent that its continuation would require raising prices for consumer goods and transferring workers away from inefficient enterprises (the latter issue caused a mini-riot in the coal mines of Zwickau). By 1974, the State Planning Commission noted that officially set wages had lost whatever stimulative function they might have had. In many industries, wages had not changed in fifteen years; in metallurgy and machine building twenty years. Pieceworkers increased their wages through easily overfulfilling weak piece rates. With the specter of the workers uprising in June 1953 still haunting the SED twenty years after the event, party and management refused to touch the issue. In consequence, piece rates became hopelessly outdated. In VEB Mikromat, for example, an electronics enterprise in Dresden, piece rates had not changed since 1956 and, by the 1970s, were usually met at a rate of 160 percent.
Ignoring the center, management informally set wages as it saw fit. In 1974 a mere one-quarter of wages fell within the centrally determined guidelines, and in industry and construction only one-tenth. Notwithstanding official rules requiring significant wage differentials within an eight-tiered scheme, in practice wage differentials remained small. According to one report, 21 percent of unskilled workers, 40 percent of skilled workers, and 47 percent of highly qualified specialists earned between 3.5 and 4.5 marks per hour. The average aggregate figures can be seen in figure two. As illustrative as these undifferentiated figures are, they nevertheless conceal some especially egregious cases of wage leveling in certain branches of the economy. In a number of enterprises, combines, and even entire industries, it was quite common for the average worker to make more than a foreman. In the machine tools and heavy machine industries, for example, an average worker took home 63 and 50 marks respectively more per month than his immediate superior.
III. Development and Dependence
One thing that stands out about the economic commentary on German unification is how polarized the commentators are. Experts tend either to predict an inexorable march toward relative economic equality between East and West, based on the growth rates of the past 5 or 6 years, or an unstoppable decline into a new German Mezzogiorno. 13 This is not the place to elucidate the asssumptions and logic of these competing analyses: obviously the political stakes are high. Let me, however, lay out what appear to be the most general trends.
While the economic policies of the other ex-communist countries shift back and forth between marketization and social protection, as politicians and populations learn to discard ideological formulas in favor of pragmatic solutions to problems of marketization, west German largesse has enabled the five new states to sustain shock therapy over an extended period despite the significant social costs. Clearly East Germany has had more "external" assistance than any other ex-communist country. From the time the GDR ceased to exist and joined the Federal Republic, on October 3,1990, until the Autumn of 1995 nearly a trillion Dmarks of public money, have flowed from the west to the east.
Western assistance has softened the shock considerably. Even so, the transition has not been smooth, nor has it gone according to plan. Predictions made at the time of unification, that the time needed for the east to catch up with the west was about five years, have been continually pushed into the future. Part of the explanation for the faulty forecasting was an underestimation of the economic disparities between east and west; few west Germans had a good grasp of the real economic situation in the east. But part of the reason was also a rather naive belief in the power of the "market" in the west, a belief buttressed by eight years of solid economic growth before unification. Such an illusion was also facilitated by a mythologized history of the 1950's during which Germans bootstrapped their way to prosperity. Ignored in all of this was the true nature of the German "economic miracle" which was in fact driven not only by the market but also by a complicated set of non-market institutions that evolved slowly, mostly by trial and error, over a period of ten years during which the standard of living remained low and currency restrictions remained in force. Six years after unification, however, most German politicians have jettisoned facile comparisons with the post-war era. Describing a federal report on the eastern German economy written in October 1995, for example, federal economics minister Gunter Rexrodt announced that no one could say when the east German economy would reach the level of the West. "We are saying that five years after German unity and the introduction of the social market economy great progress has been made. But we're only half way there. There is still the second half of the way and that will also be a difficult road." 14
The German experience in the east suggests that, even under the most favorable conditions, when support exceeds anything given Western Europe under the Marshall Plan after the second world war, constructing capitalist institutions of self-sustained growth from scratch is an experiment in many ways just as ambitious as the communist one that just failed. This lesson may be obvious but is one that reinforces what has been maintained by theorists of economic modernization: success in economic development is not only, or even primarily, dependent on the amount of capital available to an economy but, rather, on the economic institutions it has in place to utilize the capital it has at its disposal. 15 Capital and other resources may be transferred relatively quickly, especially in the 1990's, but the institutions and social structures designed to absorb and use them do not lend themselves to rapid transfer.
In 1990 most east Germans wanted unification for a very simple reason. Whether measured in terms of living standards or political and social freedoms, socialism was a failed experiment; amalgamation with the most successful capitalist country in the world, West Germany, simply made sense as the best and most painless route to prosperity and freedom. With the choice thus put, a clear majority of east Germans voted for parties supporting rapid unification in the first free national election held in the GDR's history, on March 18, 1990. After that date, things moved quickly. By July 1990, an economic, monetary, and social union between the two countries was in place, and by year's end the GDR ceased to exist, its territory incorporated into west Germany as five new states within the German federal system.
Six years later, the results are certainly impressive, especially if one ponders the counterfactual, "what would east Germany have looked like without unification." Since Between 1992 and 1995 the economy in the new German states grew between 7 and 10 percent per year, temporarily making the Germany's east the fastest growing region in Europe. In the last three years, however, this torrid rate of growth has fallen off considerably East German productivity, which before unification had stood at about a third of West German levels, now stands at about half. Rudimentary economic infrastructure, such as roads, rail links, and telephone communications in the new states have been vastly improved by a steady stream of government investment. 16 Such overt signs of progress, however, do not tell the whole story. For one thing, they mask very low starting points. Quite apart from the dismal state of the east German economy before unification, the immediate impact of unification between 1990 and 1992 was to unleash a depression in the east, the magnitude of which surpassed all expectations. Unable to compete with the West after the currency union (overnight this measure created a fourfold increase in the costs for east German goods and services) and subject to rapid privatization under the supervision of the German privatization agency, the Treuhand, East Germany industry collapsed. 17 Table three tells the story from industry and manufacturing, in which four out of five jobs have been lost since 1990, as well as other sectors. Unification has meant an unprecedented kind of forced occupational mobility. Very few east Germans today work at the same jobs as five years ago. While such mobility might be common in the United States, it is neither common nor welcome in Germany. 18
Table three here
Table four shows aggregate unemployment rates since 1991. In assessing this second table it must be noted that the figures do not include those on government funded retraining programs, make work programs, short-time work, or early retirements. If they did the numbers would be closer to 30 percent, and in some areas higher. Notwithstanding this caveat, two items stand out. First, the real losers of unification are women. In fact, two thirds of all unemployed east Germans are women. 19 Despite some success in bringing down male unemployment in 1994-95 (though not in 1996), little headway has been made in reducing female unemployment from an uncomfortably high level. As a result of these new pressures, the east experienced an unprecedented and much publicized decline in the birth and marriage rate immediately after unification, as young women delayed starting families until they found their footing in the new social order. 20 (There is some evidence that the situation is now starting to "normalize."). Second, aggregate unemployment rates started to bottom out only in the first half of 1994, well after the economy started to turn around. On the fifth anniversary of unification, official unemployment in the east hovered at approximately 14 percent with significant regional variation. The latest figures (February 199#) put unemployment at over 18 percent.
Table four here
This latter observation--rapid economic growth in a stagnating (or even collapsing) labor market--suggests that the stabilization and turnaround of the East German economy has had little to do with sustained, "domestically" driven growth. Indeed, if one looks a little deeper, it is easy to see just how dependent on the West the East German economy continues to be. In 1995, the estimated 158 billion marks in transfers East Germany ended up receiving from the federal government, other Under, the European Union, and social security amounted to more than 25 percent of the resources available in east Germany for consumption and investment. Whereas east German demand for goods reached about DM 610 billion in 1995, only DM 380 billion of goods were produced there. Trade flows tell a similar tale. In 1994 east Germany bought DM 255 billi6n from the west, while selling a mere DM45 billion in return. There is not one major East German product that has a market throughout the Federal Republic; those that have managed to survive do so at a regional level. Despite high level commitments of major German producers to "buy East," only about 10 percent of east German production is sold in the west and even less makes its way onto world markets. 21 Thus the "balance of trade" remains heavily tilted in the west's favor.
Much of the capital has been spent on consumption and, as table one also suggests, much has flowed into construction. Besides the building of new homes and apartments, a wave of commercial and retail construction is driving most of the east German recovery. According to one expert, however, the region simply does not require much of what is being built. For example, between 1990 and 1995, DM 50 billion were invested in metropolitan Leipzig, mostly in large shopping centers and the like. Meanwhile 17 percent of commercial real estate remains empty. 22 If the five new states are to be anything more than sales markets for West German firms subsidized by large governmental transfers of wealth to the east German population, some sort of industrial policy must be put in place.
The central problem in the new German states is that the de-industrialization which took place in the first years after unification has not been overcome. Measured against western standards, east Germany was overindustrialized before unification; now however it is clearly underindustrialized. Approximately one million people today work in industry in the east; by western standards this number should be 3.4 million. The rapid growth in the service sector after unification corrected what had been a typical weakness of a command economy. But further growth in this sector will depend on demand for services from industrial enterprises in the regions. It will also depend on the willingness of western firms investing in the east to use locally based service providers rather than relying solely on their tried and tested teams of external consultants, programmers, and market research from the west. Illustrating this problem, the head of a market research firm in Rostock complained to me that "since almost all large investment comes from the west, breaking into market research depends on developing connections with western firms who, in all honesty, have no need for new partners in the east. The fact of the matter is that West Germany and Europe produce more than enough to cover demand in east Germany and for that reason our situation is completely unlike that in the west after the second world war."
Given the absence of large capital holders in the five new states, industrial investment will necessarily come from western Germany and other developed capitalist countries. Much of east Germany's future will thus depend on how attractive it is as an investment site. In comparison with other post-communist countries, eastern Germany enjoys a highly stable political and institutional environment for investors. It is surprising then that the record since unification is mixed. While some areas, such as Dresden and Leipzig have been successful, others have not. One problem continues to be labor costs. Fearing downward pressure on wages from cheaper eastern workers, German trade unions quickly dominated the eastern landscape and have consistently put upward pressure on Eastern wage settlements. But with a persistent disparity in labor productivity, raising eastern wages rapidly up to the level of the west, rendered unit labor costs for potential large investors even more threatening than they already are in west Germany (approximately 80 higher than in the West). Describing the impact of high east German wages in the context of a globalized labor market in 1994, German economist Fred Klinger characterized the situation dramatically, "Worldwide there is, by far, no more comparable production location that is simultaneously so expensive, so productively weak, and infrastructurally so weakly equipped. " 23 Thus despite a good start after unification, productive investment has begun to lose pace.
High unit labor costs deter not only large corporate investors, they also make it difficult for small and medium size business to stay afloat. The wave of new medium sized firms that sprouted up after unification are currently undergoing a crisis of solvency; the majority are going bankrupt, a phenomenon not unusual in itself but alarming when one considers just how small the east German Mittelstand is compared to the west. As the subsidies and tax breaks from the federal government that are intended to promote enterprise in the east run out over the next few years, one can expect the bankruptcy rate to increase substantially.
With the Treuhand having finished its work of privatizing enterprises at the end of 1994, many Germans have the sneaking suspicion that despite impressive gains in construction, infrastructure, and consumption, reestablishing a base of productive industry throughout the new states will not come about without some sort of regional economic policy. This is slowly becoming the consensus at both the Federal and the Land level. Yet even with such a consensus, it is not clear whether Germany has either the political will or economic capacity to continue to pour in resources to the east at the rate of the past five years. Unification has not only created new problems, it has also brought old ones to a head more quickly than expected. In particular, the German welfare-state, a staple of national integration since Bismarck's time, will most likely continue to be downsized in the coming years, as the Federal government searches for ways to defray the costs of high unemployment, industrial restructuring, an aging population, and economic uncertainty in the new states. The flexibility and adaptability of German-style organized capitalism is currently being pushed to the limit by the costs of unification. 24
For this reason, most economists now predict that levels of development in the new German states will be far more differentiated than in pre-unification West Germany. 25 One can already see the contours of this differentiation. Whereas unemployment levels in Dresden are already lower than in such crisis ridden western cities as Bremen and Wilhelmshaven, such traditionally backward areas of east Germany as Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania or Brandenburg, where the old communist government made some effort to even out the differences, will probably resume their status as sparsely populated and poor areas. 26 More than a generation ago Albert Hirschman argued that small differences in levels of development tend to reinforce the backwardness of the backward region and the advantage of the advanced region because small differences quickly accumulate into large advantages. 27 Although postwar Germany policy managed to even out regional economic differences through administratively intricate financial transfers, this policy was designed to work among regions with economies at roughly the same level of development. Extending the policy eastward after 1990, however, has put a severe strain on the German budget which, if continued, will necessitate either higher taxes or significantly lower social benefits for Germans today and in the future.
IV. Persistence of Regional Identities: A long run impact?
Even though east Germans are eating better food, receiving better health care, buying more consumer durables, living in better apartments, traveling abroad more frequently and to pricier destinations, and breathing better air at home, many still complain that the skills and communal habits acquired under socialism have been devalued by the transition to capitalism and a Western culture that belittles the lives lived in the GDR's 40 year history. This is true even for the vast majority of east Germans who continue to say that unification was both a good idea and a necessary step. West Germans, for their part still supportive of a unified Germany, if somewhat Irritated at the cost, recognize too that neither political nor economic unification are substitutes for nation-building. As one west German admitted in a conversation in autumn 1995: "My positive feelings about unification do not contradict the fact that from the standpoint of basic values I still probably have more in common with Danes, Frenchmen, and the Dutch than with most east Germans."
Undoubtedly the strains of unification have exacerbated the cultural divide that was already in place when unification occurred. Most Germans have the uneasy feeling that unification has somehow changed everything; there is no going back to the old Bundesrepublik. Often overlooked in the literature is how unification has changed not only east Germany but also the west. The changes are subtle but important, and they range from the mundane to the strategic. The future of such bedrocks of west German political stability as the welfare state and Germany's strict subordination to the US lead in foreign policy are now quite open to debate.
Notwithstanding these new challenges to western Germans' source of identity, they pale in comparison with the changes experienced in the east. Public opinion in the east is volatile and difficult to gauge from the polls. As already noted, the vast majority of east Germans continue to judge unification with the west to have been a good idea. Few would want to go back to "really-existing socialism." There is nevertheless a widespread feeling among east Germans, much more widespread than expressed in the public opinion polls, that something is wrong with the new order that has descended upon them. Such amorphous sentiments cannot be explained by relative deprivation; after all, measured purely in terms of living standards east Germans are the true winners of communism 5 collapse. Rather they are related to the sudden and almost complete commodification of the economy. Even though most east Germans earn more money and consume better products, the idea that such fundamental areas of human life such as housing, schooling, day care, as well as food and other staples, should be subject to cost-benefit calculation and the vagaries of the market does not sit well with most east Germans, regardless of political orientation. Somehow the market, understood in this sense, offends their sensibilities even as they participate in it, understand that there is no practical alternative to it, and are prepared to do little to change it. The "moral economy" of communist society appears to have persisted well into the transition period.
West Germans have very little understanding or sympathy for this moral economy; understandably so, since addressing its core elements would mean dismantling an order that has given them an enviable standard of living. 28 Such fundamental differences in opinion between east and west Germans complicate the task of nation-building. Differences on issues as diverse as what to do about the former Stasi files, or the character and role of the successor party to the communists, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), illustrate that the nation-building in Germany is an act of cultural construction that will take more time and effort than economic unification. Differences between east and west will persist for some time. Not surprisingly, political elites have been quick to adapt. While the major political parties are careful not to play the east off against the west (the notable exception here is the PDS, which does precisely this), politicians of all persuasions have learned to pitch their messages differently depending on the regional audience. Successful politicians and administrators usually have dual cultural competencies that allow them to swim in both eastern and western waters. When they do not, they do not survive long. 29
The elections of 1994 provided a litmus test of sorts for unified Germany. During this Superwahlijahr (super election year) not only were Germans asked to elect a new Bundestag, but also to vote in a number of state and communal level contests--in all, nineteen elections. 30 West Germans, who had never been asked at the ballot box whether they wanted unification, could use the opportunity to vent their frustrations with the costs of unification, which at the very least amounts to a yearly 7.5 percent personal and corporate income tax surcharge. East Germans, after years of experiencing an idealized capitalism vicariously through television, could now vote on what they thought of "really-existing capitalism."
The results of the election were rather underwhelming. Although the Social Democrats (SPD) managed to capitalize on voter anger in several regional and local contests, improving economic news at the beginning of 1994 and a general sentiment that at the federal level there really was no alternative to the Christian Democrats, brought Helmut Kohl back to power for what was thought at the time to be his last term in office. Even in the troubled east, the CDU's leader Helmut Kohl, who has now dominated German politics longer than Konrad Adenauer, was perceived to be a symbol of political security and as someone who is so committed to German unification that he would provide resources to the new federal states on nationalist grounds. In the end, the CDU secured a narrow margin of victory. It lost a small percentage of its 1990 voters and the SPD gained a small proportion. The big difference between west and east German voting behavior was in the performance of the smaller parties which under Germany's proportional representation system have a relatively good chance of capturing seats. One party in particular, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which markets itself as a party of free enterprise, has been a crucial coalition partner in every CDU government since 1982 (and with the SPD before that year). In 1994, however, the FDP lost a good part of its clientele in the west, and it completely collapsed in the east, receiving just 3.5 percent of the vote. Given the weak development of the east German business class and the absence of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a native east German, as the head of the party, few east Germans saw much of interest in the Free Democrats. Similarly, the Greens, who had done poorly in the 1990 elections, fared much better in the west in 1994, easily clearing the five percent hurdle in nearly every state level election as well as in the federal campaign. But in the east they lost much of their support from 1990, ending up with a mere 4.3 percent of the east German vote in October. Whereas the FDP had trouble finding a chic upper middle class constituency in the East, the Greens had trouble finding a solid "post-materialist" constituency among East German voters, who still had much more quotidian matters to think about.
The largest divergence between east and west Germany, however, was the performance of the PDS, the successor to the old communist party. While receiving a paltry 0.9 percent of the western vote, the PDS consistently booked nearly 20 percent of the east German vote at both the state and federal level (and 34.7 percent in East Berlin). Such high levels of support for an "anti-system" party that is still uncomfortable with its own de-Stalinization is a source of quiet concern to most Germans. The PDS campaign was cleverly formulated and implemented. The party portrayed itself as a "socialist alternative" to all the other parties, one that could represent the ideals and interests of its old communist clientele, while simultaneously fighting for the interest of those who felt somehow disenfranchised by unification. In addition to an unanticipated strong vote among young people, the fact that 27 percent of white collar workers and 35 percent of civil servants voted PDS suggest that party loyalty runs deeper than expected, even among those east Germans who had successfully negotiated the transition. 31
Whether the PDS is able to sustain it strength in the east, expand its voter base into the west, or simply fades away as the material and spiritual difficulties of unification become less salient, remains an open question. Some evidence suggests that it will be a part of the east German political landscape for some time to come. 32 First, the PDS has an usually persistent clientele. Four fifths of its 1990 voters remained loyal to the party in the 1994 election. Such a level of party loyalty puts it above any other party in the east. Almost 70 percent of its voters were long time members of the party, which suggests that in an era of declining party identification, the PDS constitutes an important exception. Second, the social characteristics of PDS voters indicates that changes in the economic or social conditions in east Germany will not change their party loyalty. They tend to have above average education levels; to be highly alienated politically and distrustful of the Federal Republic's political institutions; and are overwhelmingly "socialist" in orientation, believing that the GDR had more good than bad points. It is possible that such a nostalgic outlook (or as Germans now call it Ostalgie) will pass as conditions in the east improve, but it is more likely to be more a matter of time, as a new generation comes to accept the new Germany as inevitable and natural.
Apart from voting behavior there appears to be a long-term sense of disappointment in the East with the institutions of representative liberal democracy. Commentators on the left have tended to attribute this malaise to a nascent discursive political culture that was pushed aside by the professionals after the heady days of 1989. There is probably something to this, but, I want to argue here that, as preceding analysis suggests, one needs to look deeper into the East German past in order to why so many people feel this way. In a recent article, for example, a German psychologist maintained that although few East Germans would want to return to really existing socialism, the de-facto blackmail power of the population in the GDR gave them a sort of immediate access to power ("if you don't come and fix my heating, I won't vote in your rigged elections") that is missing in a representative democracy, where power is necessarily indirect and distant. 33 In the East German workplace, with its continuous cycles of party, trade union, and educational meetings, politics was experienced not only as something oppressive (and even laughable) but also as something that was, as the Germans say, "skin near." Politics in the new order is experienced as something distant and irrelevant and the PDS has profited from this at the local level by cultivating a strategy of grassroots politics--the only party to have succeeded in doing this in the East.
Conclusion
Although East Germans have improved their material quality of life, they continue to feel a lack of "recognition" for the distinctive moral economy that they brought into unified Germany. Political theorists, such as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, have recently argued that the "need for recognition" runs as deep as that other bedrock of interest based political analysis--the need for self-preservation. 34 If their analysis is correct, then the mode of unification, which cast aside forty years of East German history while at the same time preserving the economic equalities that were the basis of that history explains with remarkable acuity the nature of the continuing cultural divide in Germany today. Such divisions and boundaries can be easily "ethnicized" and taken advantage of by political entrepreneurs. Germans will surely not be politically divided again in the manner of pre-1989, if only because the elites on both sides of the old borders are, for the most part, committed to making unification work. In a "Europe of regions," however, the kinds of regional tensions in culture, interests, and identity may easily erode what were considered after 1991 to be sovereign inevitabilities.
The strategy of unification which accommodated the old communist moral economy appears to have helped perpetuate the divide between East and West in unexpected ways. It is not clear that an alternative strategy of unification, that of leaving the East to fend for itself in a market with high tarrifs, would have worked much better. While it might have altered fundamental attitudes to economic inequality, it would also probably have produced more unrest. We do know, however, that the new divide, whatever its ultimate causes, is slowly changing Germany for good. First, regional variations in development, will probably grow in the years to come as the budget is stretched to the limits by the costs of unification that remain approximately 4-5 percent of West German GDP. Second, the need to compete politically in the East will probably alter the structure and governance of the major parties. If the PDS survives or thrives at the local level eventually decisions will have to be made on acceptable forms of cooperation (this is already on the agenda of the SPD in a number of the new German Lander) because six years after unification it remains the strongest party in the East. How this will affect the structure of power in the Bundesrat remains a matter of speculation. Finally, the divide between East and West is forcing most West Germans to realize that the hope of going back to the old West Germany has been cut off for good.
Footnotes
Note 1: Marc Howard, "An East German Ethnicity? Understanding the New Division of Unified Germany," German Politics and Society, 13(37), 1995, pp.49-70. See also the conclusion to Andrew Janos' contribution to the convenor group. Back.
Note 2: "Die Ost-West Ehe bleibt auch weiter die Ausnahme," Berliner Zeitung, August 9, 1996, p.16. Back.
Note 3: It should be noted that neither Howard nor Janos accept an essentialist definition of ethnicity. For an approach in this vein, see the work of Anthony Smith. Back.
Note 4: Robert Shiller, Maxim Boycko, and Vladimir Korobov, "Popular Attitudes towards Free Markets: The Soviet Union and the United States Compared," American Economic Review, vol.81, 1991, pp.385-400; "Hunting for Homo Soveticus:Situational versus Attitudinal Factors in Economic Behavior, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, I, 1992, pp.127-181. Back.
Note 5: Marshall Goldman criticized the Shiller et. al. studies in Lost Opportunity: Why Economic Reforms in Russia Have Not Worked, New York: Norton, 1994), p.18. "It is hard to take such surveys seriously when the interviewing is done by telephone." Back.
Note 6: Robert Rohrschneider, "Cultural Transmissions Versus Perceptions of the Economy," The Sources of Political Elites' Economic Values in the United Germany," Comparative Political Studies ,"29(1), 1996, pp.78-104. Report from the Laboratory: The Influence of Institutions on Political Elites' Democratic Values in Germany," American Political Science Review, 88 (4), 1994, pp.927-941. Back.
Note 7: Bruce Headly, Rudolph Andorka, and Peter Krause, "Political Legitimacy versus Economic Imperatives in System Transformation: Hungary and East Germany, 1990-93," Social Indicators Research, vol.36, 1995, 247-273, quotation is from p.261. See also Das Parliament, Januaryl7/24, 1997, p.1. Back.
Note 8: Tribune,March 3, 1947. In Dietrich Staritz, Die Grundung der DDR (Munich: DTV, 1987),p.206-7. Back.
Note 9: This section draws on my book, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany 1945- 1989, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Back.
Note 10: Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), especially chapter 2, on rape. Back.
Note 11: Twelve years after the June events, for example, when the management of the Oberspree Cable Works tried to adjust piece rates, a report of the Committee for Labor and Wages lamented that "the workers declared that if new piece rates were introduced, they would take up work in another enterprise. Five workers took the discussion about the use of new rates, which would not have led to any wage reductions, as cause to quit." Back.
Note 12: Gordon Marshall, "Was Communism Good for Social Justice: A Comparative Analysis of the Two Germanies," British Journal of Sociology, 47(3), 1996, pp.397-420; J. Hunick and H. Solga, "Occupational Opportunities in the GDR: A Privilege of the Older Generations," Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, 23(2), 1994, pp.237-253; H. Mayer and H. Solga, "Mobilitat und Legitimitat. Zum Vergleich der Chancenstrukturen in der altern DDR und der Alten BRD order: Haben Mobilitatschancen zu Stabilitat und Zusammenbruch der DDR beigetragen," Kolner Zeitshcrift fur Sozio1ogie und Sozialpsycho1ogie, 46(2), 1994, pp.193-208. Back.
Note 13: In a recent issue of Das Parliament, the time frame for economic equality between East and West was put at 20-25 years and that the current levels of transfers will last that long as well! 17/24 January, 1997, p.1. Back.
Note 14: Germ-news. September 27, 1995. Back.
Note 15: Chalmers Johnson, Miti and the Japanese Economic Miracle, (Stanford, 1986). Back.
Note 16: Whereas in 1988 only 17 percent of East German households had telephones, corresponding to the level of Crete, between 1990 and 1993, 2.3 million new lines had been installed, with the expectation that the West German level would be attained by 1997. Manfred Wegner, "Produktionsstandort Ostdeutschland," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 17/94, April 29, 1994, p.20. Back.
Note 17: In 1991 an American economist, George Akerlof, proposed that the shock be further cushioned by temporarily continuing support for uncompetitive enterprises which would shield them from "foreign" competitors and predatory investors. His advice was never given any serious thought in policy circles. George Akerloff, Andrew Rose, and Janet Yellen, "East Germany in from the Cold: The Economic Aftermath of Currency Union," BrookingsPaners on Economic Activity, no.1, 1991. Back.
Note 18: Helga Welsh, "Four Years and Several Elections Later: The Eastern Political Landscape after Unification," in David P. Conradt et. al., Germany's New Palitics, (Tempe, Arizona: German Studies Review, 1995). Back.
Note 19: Elke Horst and Jurgen Schupp, "Aspekte der Arbeitsmarktentwicklung in Ostdeutschland," Deutschland Arcbiv, vol.28, no.7, (July 1995), pp.737-742, for more detail on recent developments in the East German labor market. Back.
Note 20: Nicholas Eberstadt, "Demographic Shocks in Eastern Germany 1989-1993," Europe-Asia Studies, vol.46, no.3, 1994. Back.
Note 21: Hans-Peter Brunner, "German Blitz-Privatization," Transition: The Newsletter About Reforming Economies, vol.6, no.4, April 1995, p.13. Back.
Note 22: Herbert Henzler, "Der Aufschwung Ost had noch viele matte Stellen," Suddeutsche Zeitung, September 10, 1995. Back.
Note 23: Fred Klinger, "Aufbau und Erneuerung: Uber die institutionellen Bedingungen der Standortentwicklung in Deutschland," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 17/94, April 29, 1994, p.8. Back.
Note 24: Calculated at between 120 and 140 billion D-marks per year, the total support of the West for the East is between 4 and 5 percent of the West's GDP. Back.
Note 25: From a socio-demographic perspective, this also marks a return to the prewar pattern of emigration, in which German governments had historically allowed poor areas to stagnate and encouraged the poor in these areas to emigrate to the West. Today this has again more or less become the pattern in Germany Back.
Note 26: Der Spiegel, 36/1995. Back.
Note 27: Albert 0. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development, New York, 1958), pp.185-211. Back.
Note 28: Thus the tone of irritation among Western commentatQrs during the debate over whether to write a new constitution that took place immediate before and after unification. Back.
Note 29: Even the ruling CDU is now increasingly split between its eastern and western branches. In Saxony, for example, CDU politicians have challenged the official statistics on transfers from western to eastern Germany. In particular they have taken to arguing that what is considered "normal" federal spending in the western Under, is often counted as "transfers" in the new Lander. When counted as a whole, the Saxons charge, Bavaria currently receives more federal subsidies to its economy and cultural institutions than Saxony; "Etwas hochgerechnet," Der Spiegel, no.22, May 26, 1997, pp.41-42. This battle over statistical accounting procedures is especially interesting because it is the first sign that the ruling coalition is split not merely along the traditional north/south lines but increasingly along "east/south" ones as well. Back.
Note 30: Of the already enormous literature on the 1994 elections, worth examining are Matthias Jung and Dieter Roth, "Kohls knappster Sieg,"; Jurgen Falter and Markus Klein, "Die Wahler der PDS bei der Bundestagswahl 1994,"; and Ursula Feist, "Nichtwahler 1994," all in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 51-52, December 23, 1994. In English, see the excellent series of articles in Conradt et.al., Germany's New Politics. The following discussion draws on these various studies. Back.
Note 31: Gerald R. Kiemfeld, "The Return of the PDS," in Germany's New Politics, p.209 Back.
Note 32: The following evidence is drawn from Falter and Klein, "Die Wahler der PDS," p.24. Back.
Note 33: Lydia Lange, "Warum so viele Ostdeutsehe von der reprasentativen Demokratie enttauscht sind," Die Zeit, Janurary 10,1997, from Die Zeit website. Back.
Note 34: Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Axel Honneth. The Struggle for Recognition, (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Back.
