|
|
|
Email this citation
European Integration and the Question of National Sovereignty: Germany and Sweden, 1945-1995
*
Univ. of Calif. Berkeley Center on German and European Studies
According to Ole Wæver, a leading student of the travails of the "New Europe," Western Europe is probably the part of the world that currently exhibits "the most advanced case of border fluidity and transgression of sovereignty." 1 So dramatic are the processes underway that they have led otherwise prudent political scientists to turn to the trendy idiom of "postmodernity," meaning in the context of IR theory first and foremost "post-sovereignty." Thus John Ruggie has argued that what he sees as "the unbundling of territoriality" - i.e. the incipient decoupling of sovereignty and (nation)state - constitutes "nothing less than the emergence of the first truly postmodern international form." 2 Similarly, Saskia Sassen notes that in the process of globalization the notion of a "national economy" has come to be replaced with that of a "global economy." As a consequence, she argues that while sovereignty and territory very much "remain key features of the international system," they have been "reconstituted and partly displaced onto other institutional areas outside the state. Thus, she concludes, "sovereignty has been decentered and territory partly de-nationalized." 3
Indeed, with the move towards an "ever closer" union, all of the member-states of the EU have had to face increasing tensions between pro- and anti-Europeans. However, responses to these challenges to national sovereignty differ dramatically from country to country, ranging from Swiss and Norwegian refusals to even join the EU, via legendary British insularity and intransigence within the union, 4 to the relative Euro-enthusiasm in the "heartland" countries like France, Germany, and the Benelux. I will chiefly be concerned with Germany and Sweden, however, and more specifically I will attempt to show how historically rooted, and fundamentally divergent, conceptions of the "German/Swedish nation," on the one hand, and of "Europe," on the other, inform and delimit the contemporary debate in significant ways. While Swedish and German imaginings of the "Europe" by no means exhaust the supply of variegated Euro-utopias (or distopias), the differences between them nonetheless suggests the enormity of the challenge facing the architects of European integration. Thus, while there is much talk of internally similar blocks of countries, often marked as "Northern" vs. "Southern" European, a comparison between Sweden and Germany quickly lays to rest any notion one might have of a coherent Northern European idea of Europe. 5
Germany is, of course, one of the original members of what is now known as the EU. Its original membership was tied to the allied effort to reconstruct Germany in the image of the democratic, capitalist West after the war. Within a larger vision of European peace and prosperity there existed a desire to tame and contain Germany; indeed, whereas we are today used to thinking about the EU as a market-community - a giant Zollverein - the original moves towards integration, anchored in the Franco-German alliance, were grounded in security-driven arguments. This impulse from without was mirrored in a wish among leading German politicians and public intellectuals that Germany "lose itself" (the Nazi past)- and/or "find itself" (the humanist, cosmopolitan Germany of Goethe) - by merging with and dissolving into Europe, while at the same time being allowed to play a major role within the common European political and, particularly, economic structures. Adenauer, a West-oriented Rhinelander, explicitly rejected Germany's "Prussian" past, and sought to promote a Christian-Democratic Europe within which Germany could find its natural place. The disappearance of Prussia - the engine of German unification - as well as the choice of Bonn as the new capital were both aspects of this fundamental shift in German identity, as was the division of Germany which effectively further "de-Prussianized" (West) Germany. 6
Sweden, on the other hand, joined "Europe" only recently (January of 1995), and then only with a slim majority of the population voting "yes" after a heated and divisive (and still ongoing) debate. 7 As in Norway (and to a lesser extent Denmark and Finland), a considerable part of the population opposed, and continues to oppose, joining Europe and giving up national sovereignty and the celebrated neutrality policy, thereby compromising an allegedly unique democratic and egalitarian tradition. The opposition to Europe can be seen in terms of a reversal of the German desire to become Europeans; because Swedish national identity has been organized around the idea that Swedes were more, not less, "democratic," "progressive," and "egalitarian" than other nations, the discourse on Europe was - and is - far more likely to express anxiety over the "specter of Europe" than confidence in the "promise of Europe." This has been especially true for those located leftwards on the political spectrum; Scandinavian political culture is characterized not only by the enduring dominance of the Social Democrats, but also (and this, I would argue, is no mere coincidence) by the fact that nationalism, such as it is, is largely a left-wing rather than right-wing phenomenon. 8
While security concerns and the "peace-argument" continues to play an important role, it is also evident that with the fading memory of the Second World War, the receding threat of a Third World War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the process of economic and political integration has increasingly come to be complicated by concerns over "national identity." To some extent the emergence of neo-nationalism is one expression of the increasing split between the elites, who tend to be persuaded by integrationist arguments, and the masses, who are both less "European" in their outlook/identity and more prone to feel threatened by unemployment thought to be linked to "globalization." (One might want to compare to Buchananite economic nationalism/populism.) Thus the political climate has recently pushed to the fore the latent conflict between the EU "project" and the survivance of the nation (to invoke a current and appropriate Quebecois figure of anxiety).
It is in this new, post 1989 context, that an understanding of how historically rooted conceptions of national identity inform the politics of "Europe" becomes critical. Thus, neither the opposition by Swedish leftists nor the pro-European attitudes of the German Social Democrats and Greens, to which we will return, can be fully appreciated without first considering the traditions within which they operate. Indeed, it is my argument that while the "true" character of any nation is eternally contestable, it is equally true that the range of "national narratives" is, as a matter of fact, limited, and that furthermore these tropes tend to be quite stable and enduring even as they mutate over time. Thus it is possible to identify motifs, themes, values, and prejudices which are central to conceptions of national identity. These take on the character of "discursive regimes" which, acting through repetition, narrow the discursive field within which political utterances that resonate - i.e. 'succeed" in political terms - can be formulated. Next I will first outline a few key narratives that continue to define the rules by which the political game is played in Germany and Sweden, and then proceed to suggest - in a preliminary and tentative manner - how these narratives have been invoked in the political debates during the post-war period.
In Sweden national self-understanding and political discourse is dominated by the legacy of Swedish "national socialism;" the construction of the "people's home" after 1933 and the policy of neutrality and non-alliance during the world-wars and the Cold War era. The national narrative has been one which has emphasized Sweden's unique, virtually "essential" propensity towards democracy, freedom, and equality, institutionalized in the welfare state and celebrated both abroad and at home in terms of the "middle way" and the "Swedish Model." A crucial component of this narrative is a deeply rooted centralist statism, at the outset based on a King-Peasant alliance profoundly suspicious of "aristocratic" privilege and equally hostile towards "difference," localism, and federalism, all of which tend to be associated with "inequality." These attitudes are also expressed negatively in a long-standing discourse on (Southern, Catholic) Europe which is understood as the bulwark of neo-feudalism, papism, patriarchy, hierarchy, disorder, and inequality.
The origins of this national narrative go back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century, though important elements can be traced back even further. However, we may safely begin by pointing to the historian and romantic poet Erik Gustaf Geijer, in whose works on Swedish history the Swedish national myth was forged with enduring power. The main protagonists of his story was the free Swedish yeoman peasant - Odalbonden - and the King. Together they fought the good fight for personal and national freedom against the foreign powers and domestic lords who were bent upon enslaving the uniquely free Swedish peasant, on the one hand, and on submitting the nation to foreign rule, on the other. 9 The central historical figure was Engelbrekt, the leader of an uprising against the Danes in the 15th century, who led an army of peasants in a successful war against the Danish lords, and who subsequently - according to legend - organized the first Swedish parliament in 1435. In this schema, patriotism coincided with a love of personal freedom. The political and social rights of the peasants were associated with the "soul of the people" and thus the national and the "democratic" came to be inextricably fused.
This myth - and I have merely sketched the outlines here - soon found its way into popular literature and history text-books. By the early twentieth century it had come to set rather narrow limits to possible appropriations of "the national" in Swedish politics. Thus - and here I summarize an argument I have made at length elsewhere 10 - when the Swedish Social Democrats "discovered" the nation 11 after the collapse of the Second International and their inclusion into the nation after the suffrage reforms of 1920, they soon found that the extant national narrative was eminently assimilable to their own political agenda. By the mid-1920's leading Social Democrats were elaborating a slightly mutated form of the Geijerian trope, one which they briefly, before Hitler's movement was widely known in Sweden, referred to as "national-socialism." 12 Thus they explicitly attached themselves to the traditional historical discourse, arguing, as Per Albin Hansson, the leader of the party put it, that "Engelbrekt and Gustav Vasa - the two great liberators of the people - became for us in school the ideals, the mighty freedom-fighters to whom we looked up and whom we wanted to follow." 13 That is, here was a tradition of individual freedom and national independence in which the Social Democratic workers' movement merely formed the last link:
The concept of freedom has over time been extended, lordship and oppression has been broken down in new areas, new folk-groups and classes have successfully fought their own freedom-fight, won equal citizenship-rights, liberated themselves from slavery and slave-mentalities. Figures have been added to our gallery of heroes, a few older ones have perhaps been pushed aside, but others remain. It is warranted to speak of a tradition of freedom in our country, independent of the changes in society. 14 (Also see figure #1)
Figure 1:
Thus, he concluded "our Swedish people is essentially democratic. It loves freedom and hates oppression." That is, democracy in Sweden was not simply a matter of dry constitutional arrangements; it was nor "mere" Verfassungspatriotismus. Rather:
It is with every reason that we Swedes are proud of our country. It is a country of folk-freedom and folkligt self-government, where democracy is rooted not merely in the constitution, but also in our traditions and in the disposition of the folk. 15
These words were spoken during the early 1930's, just as the Social Democrats and the Peasant Party formed a lasting popular/populist alliance under the banner of Folkhemmet - the home of the people. In this concept the historically rooted identification of the national with the democratic came together with singular force in what came to be the central organizing metaphor of the national-socialist, Swedish welfare-state.
What about nationalism of the Right during this period? The (very) short answer is that while there were attempts to compete with the Social Democrats they ultimately failed, and did so, I would argue, precisely because the national myth in its concrete substance effectively pre-empted the possibility of a radical right-wing, anti-democratic nationalism along German lines. Instead, what we see developing in Sweden at this time is an internationalist Right that is for the free market, pro-private property, and an advocate of individual (first and foremost property) rights. 16
With the economic and political success of the post-1933, Social Democratic Sweden, coupled with the simultaneous collapse or crisis of democracy elsewhere, one can also note the first attempts to posit Sweden (and the Nordic countries at large) as a model for the rest of the world. Already by 1935 Per Albin Hansson could be heard declaring that "Democratic Norden can serve as a model for people in other parts of the world," 17 and one year later Marquis Childs mythologized this notion of a "peculiarly" democratic Sweden in one of the internationally most influential books ever published about Sweden, namely, Sweden - the Middle Way. 18
Before we follow this narrative into the post-war period, let us first turn to the "German story." In many respects the German tradition is richer, or at least more complex. This is hardly surprising given its bewildering political history. Still, German nationalism too is grounded and concretized in certain identifiable narratives that taken together form a coherent discursive field. The central fact, which serves as the point of departure for all German nationalisms, is the absence of political unity. (This is, of course, in stark and significant contrast to the Swedish case.) This absence of a unified, centralized state provoked two types of nationalist responses. One, which we can trace back to Herder, ends up "inventing" the idea of nation-as-culture. In the case of Herder himself, this took the form of a radical anti-statism, and a celebration of what we today would call cultural "difference," a grand vision of a universal Völkergemeinschaft ("community of peoples") living in peace in what best could be described as a universal civil society, i.e. a non-statist order held together somewhat mysteriously by a kind of organic social glue that Herder named Zusammenwirken, which he contrasted with the Volk-deadening "Machine-State" of the then emerging, modern, "French," notion-statist Europe. The other impulse was to combat the political fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire by way of mimicry of France. Thus the utopia of one, politically unified Germany emerged during the Napoleonic Wars, embracing the nation-state as the ideal form. This völkisch nation-statism was initially associated with the democratic left, which cast the idea of a democratic Germany against the existing Kleinstaaterei, the loose system of authoritarian, petty states which were associated both with national division and political backwardness. In one form or another - be it in an economic liberal nationalist form as in the case of List, or in a more cultural-romantic shape as in the case of Jahn, or with an eye to the Swedish political system as in the case of Arndt - this liberal-völkisch, nation-statist nationalism was to dominate until 1848. 19
The failure of the liberal Revolution/Unification of 1848 was, as many historians have noted, a major water-shed. Disgusted leftists, led by Marx, declared the German Character to be essentially and hopelessly "philistine," petty-bourgeois, and unfit for political emancipation (in contrast to the French, with their tradition of political revolution). The liberals turned from liberal nationalism to national liberalism - shifting the emphasis from (the German) nation to (the Prussian) state, culminating after the 1871 unification in their support of Bismarck. In the wake of the Bismarckian unification followed the rise of the Prussian narrative of Germany, most famously associated with the prominent historian Treitschke who celebrated Prussian-German virtues and the teleology of "iron and blood."
However, the making of Germany was a far more subtle process than one of simply Prussianizing Germany, especially after the failure of the Kulturkampf directed against Catholic Germany. Rather, the ultimate solution of the German question under Bismarck was essentially to build on the pluralist, federal tradition associated with the Holy Roman Empire and Herder but under strong Prussian imperial leadership. Thus Second Empire Germany was never "nationalized" in the sense that France was during the First and Third Republics, with its systematic destruction of the traditional pattern of provinces and local traditions, and the turning of "peasants into Frenchmen." Instead, the individual Länder not only continued to exist (if consolidated into larger and, according to then current liberal theory, more viable units) but retained far-reaching powers, and, all things said, the central, federal government remained relatively weak. As historians have shown, the magical, organizing concept for German nation-building during this period was not the Nation or the Volk, but rather the Heimat. The latter idea - roughly translated as "homeland" - allowed for a concentrically expanding process of identity formation, from local Heimat, through the Land as Heimat, to Heimat Deutschland. 20
The Vaterland, on the other hand, was at the core of the Prussian narrative, the state-building enterprise celebrated by Treitschke. According to this national myth, Germany's destiny was to be built, through war, under Prussian leadership, from Frederick the Great to Bismarck. Associated with this conception of German national character were the German, soldierly virtues that have come to be synonymous with Prussian Germaness: piety, honesty, duty, obedience, orderliness, flair for organization, will to discipline, and so forth. With the rapid and highly successful industrialization these virtues were "civilianzed," mutating into a modernized version of the Prussian character, casting Germany as the Economic giant/miracle, and the German as the efficient and obedient worker-bee.
In Germany the dominance of the Prussian national narrative presented the left with a dilemma similar to the one faced by the Swedish Right. In fact, the national tradition proved a dubious source for an inspiring left-nationalism. On the one hand, German national character came to be seen as "unpolitical," and lacking in democratic essence and overflowing with "the Prussian spirit, the spirit of Unterordnung [submission]," as German and Austrian Social Democrats would repeatedly lament during the crucial decades prior to Hitler's successful appropriation of the national-socialist rhetoric. 21 On the other, history suggested that the German story was - from the leftist point of view - an essentially tragic one, providing precious little prospect for a heroic reversal of fortune. Thus the failure of 1848 was linked to the lost Peasant's War of 1525; 22 Engels, in his book on the Peasant's War, castigated the peasants for their "provincial narrow-mindedness," and concluded by noting that "he who, after the two German revolutions of 1525 and 1848, and their results, still dreams of a federated republic, belongs in a house for the insane." 23 The "sane" - Marx and Engels - turned from the agenda of national and political revolution to that of international, social revolution; from emancipation as national citizenship to emancipation as universal manhood in the post-revolutionary, post-statist, and post-national, universal civil society of socialism.
But the classical Marxist solution to the problem of "German misery" was not the only one proposed by German and German-Austrian Social Democrats. In a return to an up-dated, Herderian conception of Völkergemeinschaft, the Austro-Marxists - Otto Bauer and Karl Renner in particular - elaborated a theory of nationality (in certain respects similar to Lord Acton's) in which the "national question" (ever pressing in Austria-Hungary) was resolved by decoupling state sovereignty from the cultural autonomy of the nation. Thus an order was envisioned in which the European nations would be united politically and economically, while granted full rights to cultural and linguistic autonomy. This idea was encapsulated in the notion of the so-called "World-Switzerland," effectively a utopian prefiguring of the EU. 24 Thus these Social Democrats embraced the nation, including very much the German one, yet looked for a larger political and economic structure which would defuse the dangerous thrust of German nationalism and also allow for the legacy of confederalism in Germany. While this was a scheme that spectacularly failed to stir the imagination of the Germans during the 1920's and 1930's, it was to reappear with renewed force after the Second World War, and to be at least partially realized in the guise of the EU.
Central to current predominance of the neo-Herderian, federalist trope, so suggestive of its failed "World-Switzerland" pre-cursor, as the organizing metaphor is, the collapse of its potent historical alternative: unitary, völkisch nationalism. With the Hitler State, German völkisch nationalism was discredited in all but a few eyes (those of the intransigent radical right): a near consensus around the "World-Switzerland" position was formed which continues to constitute the basis for the pro-Europe position in Germany. As we shall see, however, this pro-European, federalist vision comes in a conservative as well as a leftist variant. It is also a consensus which has been challenged by a post-1989 so called "new democratic right" that seeks to reassert the legitimacy of German national sovereignty and reject the Adenuer-to-Kohl commitment to a United States of Europe.
Turning to the most post-1945 period, the Swedish post-war debate was at first dominated by the confident, ascendant phase of the Swedish Model. Retaining the notion of democratic exceptionalism, the Social Democrats nonetheless modernized the image of the Welfare State; the emphasis on the historical link to the free peasant receded in favor of an emphasis on Sweden's development from "poverty to affluence" 25 into the prototypical modern society. Utopian social engineering and a growing role of the state as the liberator of the individual and the guarantor of equality and autonomy supplanted the celebration of national democracy. Having said that, it is also clear that these shifts, while important in understanding the character of the Swedish welfare state and the design of its social welfare policies, did not alter the fundamental perception of Sweden as the home of democracy and equality.
Indeed, even the Conservatives came to accept the classical reading of the Swedish national character as became abundantly clear when the Carl Bildt, the leader of the Swedish Conservatives, in 1986 once again retold the old story during his acceptance speech at the time of his nomination as the new party boss: "Certainly much has changed during the past centuries. But it is important to point to that which is eternal, to the values and ideals that are rooted in our thinking and in the soul of the people." And, once again, these values were those of personal freedom, "in a country that never experienced slavery;" the pride of national independence, in a country "where foreign occupying armies have not marched the streets of the capital for over half a millennium;" and the love of the land, of a people whose roots are still among the "peasants and fishermen."
While Sweden has continually been cast in the familiar trope of democracy, equality and social solidarity, "Europe" was more or less explicitly pictured, especially by the Social Democrats and the Left at large, in terms of the so-called "four Ks:" konservativa europa, kapitalets europa, kartellernas europa och det klerikala katolska europa (Conservative Europe, the Europe of Capital(ism), the Europe of the Cartels, and the Clerical, Catholic Europe). In fact, the specter of Catholicism and papism is the source of constant worry for Swedish Social Democrats and secular leftists in general. As one Swedish historian has dryly noted, commentaries on the "continent" written by leading Social Democrats often read like they were written during the Thirty Years' War. 26 Thus, during the 1930's one Social Democrat, Sven Backlund, could burst out that "all that which was sick, perverse, and oriental and that found expression in liturgies and sacraments did not, thank God [sic!], fit the Nordic folk-character," 27 a theme also embraced with enthusiasm by Arthur Engberg, the minister of church-matters 1932-1939. Indeed, as late as the early 1960's it was still common to contrast "Nordic" democracy with the Catholic tradition that was said to present an obstacle to progress, and to compare the Swedish welfare state with the EC, concluding that the latter was a collection of states "with a more primitive form of social organization than ours." 28
Gunnar Myrdal, for example, noted in an influential 1962 book called "We and Western Europe" that:
It is above all the securely Protestant countries that have progressed economically and all other ways........ In so far as political democracy can be thought of as part of "European culture," then we must remind ourselves of its weakness in the countries south of Scandinavia on the European continent with the possible exception of Holland (although the division between Catholics and Protestants is problematic and among other things is expressed in the fact that the country for long periods of time lack a government). That democracy is far more self-evident, unshakable and efficient in the Anglo-Saxon immigrant countries and in Scandinavia we all know. 29
The book by Myrdal, co-authored with two other leading Swedish experts on economic and political issues, close to the Social Democratic party but independent enough to speak with a certain non-partisan authority as well, was one central contribution to the first wave of debates in regards to Sweden and the European Community/Union. Against the backdrop of British and Danish moves to leave EFTA and join the EEC, an intense debate ensued within Sweden, and most importantly within the Social Democratic party (which totally dominated the political scene), LO (the national union of labor unions), and the labor-movement at large. Given the centrality of the export market to a Swedish economy dominated by large, internationally oriented industrial giants, the Social Democrats were well aware of the dangers of protectionist isolationism. Against this stood concerns over the sacred Swedish neutrality policy, a language "neutral" enough to conceal what were more loaded contentions with respect to the fate of Nordic virtues in a Europe dominated by Catholicism and Capitalism. Thus, amidst sober assessments of the economic pros and cons of membership or association with the EC, one finds the type of politico-cultural pronouncements cited above in the case of Myrdal. In another important contribution to the 1962 debate, an economist, Claes-Erik Odhner, commissioned by LO to analyze the question of EC membership, notes the wider context within which the economic debate is located. Referring to the values that make up the "basic political and social attitudes" of a political culture, Odhner alerts the reader to a contemporary Europe, "dominated by conservative governments," wedded to what he calls, citing the Norwegian academic Ragnar Frisch, the "unenlightened rule of capital." Many of the European countries, he continues, do not fulfill even the most "elementary requirements for qualifying as democratic systems." 30 Furthermore, the religiously and politically fragmented working-class movement, he argues, would seem to call in question the prospect for a "progressive political, economic, and social development." 31 This pessimism when it came to a continental counterforce capable of battling the "strong power of unenlightened capital" notwithstanding, Odhner nonetheless accepts, however reluctantly, the fact that, as he laconically remarks, "Sweden is in Europe." Thus he suggests that time may in fact be on the side of those who argue for a more assertive policy, taking the European Bull by the horns in an attempt to shape rather than defensively react to the process of European integration. In this position Odhner anticipates the realist if ultimately unenthusiastic decision by the Social Democrat, some thirty years later, to apply for membership in the EU in the name of market access and "co-rule."
At the time, however, the pro-Europe forces were overwhelmingly concentrated in the political right in Sweden, among the economic liberals in the Liberal and Conservative parties, for whom the EC was associated with limits to the growing presence of the Swedish state in an era of high welfare-statism, with lower taxes and less constraints on the private sphere at large. On the Left, the voice of someone like Enn Kokk, writing for an independent socialist association called Laboremus, was far more representative in rejecting the EC while in the name of economic realism advocating a limited form of free trade association, on the one hand, and "true" internationalism, on the other.
Echoing Myrdal and Odhner, Kokk emphasized the "undemocratic" character of both the EC member states and the structure of the EC itself. Painting a portrait of a conservative western Europe, where even nominal socialists and social democrats are found wanting, Kokk recounts the details of how capital and papism rule in West Germany, Italy and France. In Germany Big Capital dominates, with influential lobbies in Bonn and Brussels, huge corporate profits, (too) low taxation, Kokk emphasizes and adds for good measure that "corruption seems to be widespread." 32 Furthermore, denazification has not been carried out with any degree of enthusiasm, he writes, and German nationalism remains unchanged; even Willy Brandt is going soft when it comes to demands by the German Vertriebene (refugees) from the lost eastern territories. Indeed, German Social Democracy has lost much of its radicalism and socialist authenticity, Kokk feels, disapprovingly quoting from the party program according to which the SPD "in christlicher Ethik, im Humanismus und der klassichen Philosphie verwurzelt ist" [is rooted in Christian ethics, humanism and classical philosophy]. Similarly, the political culture of "arch-Catholic" Italy, dominated by an alliance between the Christian Democrats and the Fiats and Olivettis, as well as that of Gaullist France, are determined to be worryingly lacking in "democracy." Indeed, in France the political situation is so bad according to Kokk that the extent to which "France is democratic even in the liberal sense" is rather uncertain. 33 Even in the Benelux countries the tendency is the same, with, again, "the Catholics obstructing the work of the labor movements," and all manner of ethnic and linguistic confusion reigning, compounded by the presence of refugees from former colonies, the latter in itself a testimony to a dubious past with respect to the democratic heritage. 34 Thus, in conclusion, Kokk feels that the emerging picture of contemporary western Europe is dyster (gloomy) indeed:
Today's Franco-German combination, an alliance between General de Gaulle and Dr Adenuer at the forefront of a Catholic, conservative and capitalist western Europe is a disquieting creation. Today western Europe is, in spite of the "dynamic" EEC, a politically dead landscape. 35
The debate that took place in Sweden during the early 1960's eventually faded when the Swedish government elected not to follow Sweden's EFTA partners - Great Britain, Denmark and Norway - along the path that lead to application for membership in the EEC/EC. However, with changing economic and political conditions in Europe and the world after 1989 - particularly with the sense that Sweden had reached an economic dead-end and now suffered from a deepening crisis - the decision to apply for membership in the EU was made by the Social Democratic government on October 26th, 1990. With this followed an intense political battle leading up to the referendum on EU membership in November of 1994, a debate characterized by a dramatic resurgence of the left-nationalist narrative. As one author put it in a 1992 book-title, the lines were drawn in a struggle that pitted "the People's Home against Europe." 36
During the campaign preceding the referendum over EU membership, the left-wing, "No!"-side argued vehemently against giving up national sovereignty, conjured up vivid images of the cultural differences between Sweden (and Norden), on the one hand, and Europe on the other. The left-leaning organization, "Nej till EG" ("No to the EC"), relished in linking prostitution, drug-liberalism, sexism, elitism, and the "democratic deficit" with the EU. As the titles and images of the pamphlets distributed during the 1993 campaign suggest, "Europe" is equated with being a "bordello" or "a women's trap," and "Brussel-power" (i.e. the power of a bureaucratic elite) is contrasted with "folkstyre" ("rule of them people"). (See figure 2-4) Against this specter of papist, elitist and sexist Europe is held either Sweden and the nation-state, or the image of "Norden," as a "natural" cultural community and as a viable alternate form of economic association. Thus Göran Greider, a leading voice of the anti-EU forces within the Social Democratic party, declared at one point that "I believe in the nation-state," arguing that "democracy assumes a sense of community." By contrast, he argued, creating a so-called "European human being" amounts to nothing "but the setting loose upon the world yet again the unruly beast' associated with the pre-democratic times prior to the French revolution and the construction of the modern, democratic nation-state. 37 Of course, both Greider and others noted the problem with xenophobic and ethnic nationalism associated with the Right in various countries, however, tapping into the national narrative that we have traced above, Greider and other anti-EU critics emphasized that nationalism comes in "good" as well as sinister forms. Thus Rolf Karlbom, an historian at the University of Gothenburg, writes in an anti-EU broadside that those who accuse the No-side of narrow nationalism miss the point that Swedish national identity - and thus Swedish nationalism - is historically linked to democracy, solidarity, and humanity. "There is no reason," he notes, "to be ashamed of Swedish history. It is not a matter of national romanticism or of chauvinistic patriotism to point out that next to Switzerland, Sweden has the most ancient tradition of popular rule." Quoting approvingly from a pamphlet from the 1930's, Karlbom suggested that the this propensity for "people power" amounted to a deeply rooted spirit of the people." 38
| Figure 2: | Figure 3: |
|
|
| Figure 4: | |
|
Along similar lines, Jörgen Bengtsson, a founder of the organization "Alternativ till EG," argued that Norden - as opposed to the EU - was a "natural" gemenskap ('community" in Tönnies' sense of Gemeinschaft), with a common history, culture, religion, linguistic affinities, economic development, etc., etc. Norden, he claimed, "constitutes a folklig community and is relatively speaking ethnically homogeneous,' where people "think more or less the same, have the same lifestyle and temperament, have a sense of belonging together, and have a similar view of important human and social questions." 39 Specifically, "Norden stands for a unique social model," one that involves a taxation financed, universal welfare state, high level of general education, a tradition of egalitarianism, a strong position of women and minorities, active labor market policies, and a well developed tradition of folkstyre (rule of the people). 40
The "No-to-EU" organizations constitute a movement that by no means has given up its struggle after the very close referendum. The vote saw the Social Democrat as well as the Center party (the former Agrarian party) split down the middle between "modernist" yes-voters swayed by the largely economic arguments made by the Union leadership and the Party elite, on the one hand, and the "traditionalist" - like Göran Greider - who viewed the EU as little more than a "club for the executives of the multinational corporations" and a fundamental threat to the welfare state and the "Nordic" social contract. Recent polls indicate that were there to be a re-vote today, the Swedes would have followed the Norwegians (but without the oil) into a renewed effort at "national-socialism" combined with some kind of free-trade agreement. During a recent visit to Sweden, I witnessed, as one indicative example, an anti-EU demonstration in Stockholm during which symbolism drawn from Gustav Vasa's struggle against Danish overlordship and Engelbrekt's fight against feudal oppression of the "little people" was put to prominent use.
It should be noted, however, that the nationalism of the left is not simply rooted in essentialist notions of a democratic Swedish "soul-of-the-people," but this conception, often assumed rather than overtly stated, is fused with a leftist statist position that links social equality, national solidarity, and individual autonomy to the presence of a strong state. That is, in sharp contrast to Germany, the social contract on which the welfare state is built, is one between individual and state at the expense of the intermediary institutions of "civil society," such as the family, private and voluntary organizations. The latter are associated with demeaning private charity, unequal patriarchal relations, informal (ab)uses of power, etc., i.e., the "usual suspects," the "Catholic" vices. In other words, what is significant about Swedish left-nationalism is that it is a particular form of nation-statism (as opposed to a cultural, ethnic nationalism) and to boot a very Rousseauian variety that, from the individual's point of view, can be termed "statist individualism." 41 Indeed, a central paragraph from the Social Contract could well serve as the motto for the Swedish welfare state:
The second relation is that of the members of the body politic among themselves, or of each with the entire body: their relations among themselves should be as limited, and relations with the entire body as extensive, as possible, in order that each citizen shall be at the same time perfectly independent of all his fellow citizens and excessively dependent on the republic - this result is always achieved by the same means, since it is the power of the state alone which makes the freedom of its members. 42
While this position is one that tends to alarm readers of a more liberal (in the classical sense) bent, it is for many Swedes, as indeed it was for Rousseau, part and parcel of an outlook that holds personal servitude - as a domestic servant (in Rousseau's case) or more generally as being subject to the capricious power of families, churches, charities - to be much the greater evil than the formal, distant, impersonal, politically controllable power of the state. 43 This is all assuming of course - and this is indeed, as we have seen, an unquestioned assumption in the Swedish case - a viable, accountable, dependable democratic system, and preference for a substantive notion of democracy as opposed to a liberal, "procedural republic" along US lines. As we now turn back to Germany, we will find that this is far from the assumption automatically made by German leftists who are not only suspicious of any talk of "healthy" German nationalism, but also tend to view statism - the "colonization" by the state of civil society - with a critical eye. Thus both Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe, to name a few, have used the idiom of "new social movements" and "civil society" to construct a critique of the (welfare) state. In Sweden, on the other hand, it has been the "bourgeois" parties on the right - the Conservatives under Bildt, the tiny Christian Democratic party, some Liberals, and particularly the writers associated with the conservative-libertarian think tank Timbro - who have tried to mobilize the rhetoric of "civil society" - with its origins in pre-1989 oppositional movements in the former Communist world of eastern Europe - to associate the Swedish welfare state with the totalitarian regimes to the East and the dangers of excessive State power and Big Government. These politicians also see EU as one way to dismantle the Social Democratic welfare state through the European back-door, in contrast to the Social democrats who harbor fantasies of being able to refashion Europe at large in the image of Social Democratic Sweden. Thus left-wing opposition to Europe is rooted in both worries about a lack of a egalitarian, democratic tradition in Europe south of Denmark, and in a concern that harmonization of social policies will spell the end of Swedish style statist individualism in favor of the dreaded Christian democratic alternative, returning the individual to the care and capriciousness of civil society.
In contrast to this enduring Swedish legacy of nation-statism, the collapse of German völkisch nationalism led to a revival of both federalism and the idea of the state-less, cultural nation which would come to inform both notions of "Germany's" proper place within the larger European context and the question of how to organize German internally. In fact, the 12 year period of Nazi rule are the only years that Germany has ever been organized as a centralized state, 44 and in the aftermath of the Nazi experience, a consensus was formed that mixed elements of the Conservative, Catholic "subsidiarity principle" with Leftist Internationalism in the spirit of "World-Switzerland." Indeed, it is remarkable how little attention the federalist tradition has received at the hands of historians, understandably mesmerized by the enormity of the Nazi rule of horror. Still, given the centrality of this tradition to the future of Europe, it may well be time to call for more serious attention to be paid to this legacy, in the spirit of Mack Walker's important but in many ways singular book - German Home Towns. 45 As many historians have pointed out, doing German history in terms of its failure to be like England or France is not likely to be fruitful, but nor is an obsession with the past roots and future specters of the Nazi period.
To be sure, there exist minor currents of both left-nationalism 46 and, better known for obvious reasons, extreme-right nationalism of the ethnic, völkisch variety. All in all, these tendencies, and the former hardly counts at all, have served more to galvanize the anti-nationalist left, liberal middle, and moderate right than it really has presented a threat to the stability of German democracy. In spite of the shrill accounts of surging neo-nazism in the German and international press and, more ominously, recent attempts by a "New Democratic Right" to elaborate a pro-national sovereignty, "healthy" German identity alternative to the CDU tradition of Westbindung and europeanization, Kohl's and Adenauer's pro-European vision still rules. On the other hand, it is also clear that within the broad post-war consensus, it is this Conservative, Christian Democratic conception, founded on the twin pillars of subsidiarity and federalism-of-the-Länder, that has come to dominate over its leftist double rooted in rather more fuzzy notions of Kantian internationalism and neo-Herderian multiculturalism.
In the immediate post-war period, however, a consensus across the SPD-CDU spectrum around a federalist solution was not obvious. On the contrary the Prussian Kurt Schumacher and the Rheinlander Konrad Adenauer embodied the split between the federal and unitary state options whose histories we sketched out above. Schumacher favored a democratic-socialist variation of the nation-statist theme, a kind of return to the pre-1848 position of the liberal and democratic nationalists. He viewed with suspicion the CDU embrace of the principles of subsidiarity and federalism and worried that a strong position of the Länder would in fact make the reconstruction of Germany more difficult. Thus he promoted an Einheitsstaat albeit with far reaching decentralization and self-government at the local level. 47 Adenauer, on the other hand, happily broke with the Prussian mold, and decisively moved to westernize Germany within a broader vision of a western Christian Europe based on the principles of subsidiarity and federalism and the firm anchoring of Germany in an alliance with France and, ultimately, as a member of a United States of Europe.
Part of Schumacher's alleged "nationalism" was rooted in his clearly stated dislike of a westernization/europeanization that was inextricably linked to what he felt was a Faustian deal with (American) capitalism. Indeed, it is hard to separate Schumacher's anti-capitalism from his purported "nationalism." Certainly his oft-quoted reference to Adenauer as "Bundeskanzlers der Allierten" must be seen in this perspective, since the SPD and Schumacher incessantly emphasized their west-orientation. As Schumacher said in the Bundestag in 1949, "We Social Democrats have always unambiguously decided for the human and cultural style of the West." 48 Indeed, the representatives of the capitalist-bourgeois interest were in fact mere "nationalist from yesterday," posing as "Neo-Europäer" in the interest of profit, in the future to be unmasked as "the nationalists of tomorrow." By contrast, what the SPD wanted was a "true" internationalization of Europe, and by way of reference to the position of the 1925 Heidelberger Programm, the SPD explicitly called for a "Vereinigten Staaten von Europa." As was the case for the Austro-Marxists and the Weimar SPD, such a solution would also solve the "national" problem of divided Germany, especially poignant for a Prussian like Schumacher who in fact wanted a reunification according to the 1937 borders, or at least as close to these as possible.
At any rate, the success of Adenauer's Westbindung-politik in combination with Erhards Soziale Markwirtschaft policy, along with SPD's definitive turn to centrist reformism after the Bad Godesberg Party Congress in 1959 (and those references in the new party program to "Christian ethics" that so rankled that Swedish Socialist cited earlier), effectively created a broad consensus around the European solution to the German question. One might, of course, see Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik as a kind of after-glow of Schumacher's insistence that the unification process not be sacrificed on the alter of Westbindung and Capitalism, and certainly Brandt's stirring speech at the eve of unification in 1990 leaves little doubt about his German patriotism. Still, this was not a nationalism that in any way stood in opposition to his Europeanism, and like Schumacher earned his right to embrace the German nation through his many years in the Nazi prison-camps during the war, so Brandt's exile during the war and particularly his kneeling in Poland gave him particular leeway to express national(ist) sentiment.
On the other hand the anti-capitalist, anti-western rhetoric of the early Schumacher era found new expression among the 68'ers and the Greens, for whom American capitalism, NATO and the EC blended into one major force to be combated. At the same time, in spite of attempts by figures like Herbert Ammon, Peter Brandt, Wolfgang Venohr and Martin Walser to foster a debate over "left-nationalism" in the late 70s and early 80s, these were marginal forces. The complaint by leftists writers over a missing leftist national identity, why the leftists "never show the national colors at their meetings," nor put down flowers at the Hermanns-Denkmal, were largely passed over in silence by leftists whose anti-capitalism resolved into an equally universalist embrace of world-revolution. 49 In so far as we can speak of a left-liberal nationalism among mainstream thinkers, it would, of course, be the Habermasian Verfassungspatriotismus. However, with its connotations of en explicit rejection of the romantic sensibility associated with nationalism, and a lack of any developed notion of a special German national narrative to incite even a modest amount of passion, Verfassungspatriotismus tends to rate right up there - to paraphrase Delors - with the internal free market as a symbol unlikely to stir much collective, popular enthusiasm.
With the fall of the wall and the ensuing unification, the context for national and European politics changed dramatically, and we will now turn to the most recent debates on the left and right in reunified Germany. What we can observe is a certain dynamic which on the one hand opens up space for a new, national right to emerge and on the one hand, pushes the left, and most spectacularly the Greens under Joschka Fischer, to unambiguously embrace a pro-European position and shed their cold-war rhetoric which had cast the West and the East as more or less equally bad.
The founding moment for this dynamic can be seen to be the famous shift in the chanting of the Leipzig crowds during the hey-day of the Wende when the democratic slogan Wir sind das Volk was transformed into the national slogan Wir sind ein Volk. This fingered a sensitive spot among those always on the ready to pick up on any völkisch tendencies at the popular level; fears that soon were to be confirmed by beatings and burnings of foreign workers. Thus the names of Rostock, Mölln, and Solingen came to signify the revival of German ethnic nationalism and in turn stimulate a whole genre of rather alarmist writings from the left, the liberal middle, and the "European" wing of the CDU.
Margarita Mathiopoulos' influential book - Das Ende der Bonner Republik - dramatized the sense of loss and anxiety over the new Berliner Republik already obvious in the debate over where the new all-German Capital was to be located. 50 In this work Mathiopoulos gave voice to a common fear on the left that the dreaded "German nation was awakening" yet again 51 and that the Verfassungspatrioten were now wantonly abused by an emerging nationalist Right. Among the many writers that struck a similar tone were Dieter Oberndörfer 52 and Günter Grass, 53 among others. 54 Even the CDU politician Friedbert Pflüger took, in his 1994 book, Deutschland driftet (Germany adrift) the "end of the Bonn republic" theme and connected it to what he refers to as "eine neue Konservative Revolution" a revival of the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar period, the body of writing and political mobilization on the Right that has been thought to have created the legitimating climate in which National Socialism could incubate and grow. Analogously Pflüger worried about what he calls the "virus" of nationalism that must be checked before it spread through the body politic.
Pflüger's book is dedicated to the memory of Adenauer, and he means by this to place himself squarely within the Christian-European tradition that he identifies with Adenauer and Kohl. By contrast, he directs the readers' attention to the dangers of the "new right" that he associates with the new conservative revolution. Who are these new righters? In fact they are quite identifiable as a group, associated on the one hand with Nolte and the conservative side of the Historikerstreit and, on the other, with the publisher Ullstein. A few articles, debates and books in particular have been associated with this new group and its attempt to legitimize a new national-democratic position in the German mainstream political debate. Thus the 1992 anthology by a trio of Nolte disciples - Rainer Zittelmann, Karlheinz Weißmann and Michael Großheim - entitled Westbindung, along with the 1994 volume by Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht - Die Selbstbewusste Nation - signaled the serious arrival of the New Right. 55
The writers in these volumes attacked not just the anti-nationalist left, but more importantly the CDU "modernizers," including Pflüger as well as Kohl's main ally, and until 1989 the general secretary of the CDU, Heiner Geißler. Geißler in particular was accused of being a "systematic social-democratizer of the CDU" out of touch with hard core Christians, patriots, small business people and Vertriebene (refugees). Symptomatically, their volume on the "self-confident nation" was - in sharp contrast to Pflüger's memorialization of Adenauer - dedicated to the patriots of 20th of July 1944 and the 17th of June 1953, suggesting both the national orientation and the Nolte-inspired equalization of Nazi and Soviet responsibilities in the general totalitarian assault on civilized Europe, implicitly granting (their conception of) Germany a place among the victims of such totalitarianism.
The new rightists argue that it is time for Germany to become more like a "normal" European nation-state, loosen its self-denying, self-loathing ties to the West, reassert its lost national sovereignty, reject the Maastricht Treat and the idea of the European Union. This position is an explicit challenge to the policy of the moderate center of the CDU, led by Kohl whose view it is that the national identity is properly balanced by regional ones, on the one side, and a European one, on the other. Indeed, the latter theme was played masterfully by Kohl who managed to both enthuse the East Germans with his instrumentalized nationalism - his promise to turn the new states "within a few years into flourishing areas" - and to calm the fears of anxious European to the West and the East. Thus he ended his speech on the eve of the day of Germany unity, October 2, 1990:
I ask all Germans: Let us prove ourselves worthy of our common freedom (...) The young generation in Germany - unlike any previous generation - now has every opportunity for a whole life in freedom and peace. We know that our joy is shared by many people in the world. They ought to know what moves us in this moment: Germany is our fatherland, united Europe is our future. 56
Similarly Geißler emphasized that his German identity was but one aspect of a broader identity whose even more important components were those of being a Christian and a democrat, and Pflüger too, as we already noted, made his allegiance to the Adenauer/Kohl position perfectly evident. However, even as Kohl remains as much committed to the European idea as he retains power at the helm of the CDU, there are signs of change. Geißler, for one, lost his position in 1989, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Kohl's potential successor, has made what some interpret as tentative moves in the "new right" direction, moving in, according to some observers (like the Social Democrat Glotz) to fill the national-conservative space left open after the death of Franz-Joseph Strauss and the retirement of Alfred Dregger. This was picked up by Weißman during a key debate over the new right in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the spring of 1994, and even though Schäuble made a point of distancing himself from Weißman, the affinity was obviously there if in a more moderate form. 57
This new climate pushed the Greens firmly into the European camp, symbolized by Joschka Fischer's 1994 book Risiko Deutschland, in which he dramatically poses the two alternatives of "Westbindung or a return to the national, great power politics and striving for German hegemony." 58 At the same time - looking at this from a Swedish point of view - it is remarkable just how oblivious the Greens and the Social Democrats seem to be to the legitimate and necessary role that a sense of national solidarity plays in the survival of any democracy, let alone a welfare state. Indeed, it is very ironic to read the analyses of the German new rightists as they echo Swedish leftists insistence on the need for national sovereignty as central to democracy and national solidarity. To be sure, the German new right is more interested in a strong state that will keep law and order internally and the immigrants out, whereas the Swedish leftists emphasize the emancipatory character of the Swedish welfare state. Yet, one comes away being struck by the lacuna at the heart of German leftist democratic theory; they still have to answer the crucial question whether democracy can exists without some form of nationalism, some type of civil religion . Unfortunately, the current surge in right wing nationalist discourse has only further enforced the naive internationalist rhetoric of the European, Verfassungpatrioten, if anything playing into the hands of the new "democratic" right of Pflüger's neo-conservative revolution. Lambasting, on the one hand, what Peter Glotz in one recent book refers to as Der Irrweg des nationalstaats, 59 and celebrating, on the other, an anticipated Kantian Weltbürgerschaft via an intermediary European citizenship, as Habermas, is all fine an well in the abstract, but tends to beg the question of how to create and sustain a emotive sense of solidarity and community in such a utopian world of communicative rationality. Habermas, for one, puts great faith in "the new electronic massmedia" which he feels will finally realize the Weltöffentlichkeit (global public sphere) that Kant had projected at the time of the French Revolution; "der weltbürgerliche Zustand," Habermas concludes, "ist keine bloßes Phantom mehr." 60
Of course, as this paper would argue, this flight of fancy is no accident given the difficulty for German leftists to conceive of a positive national identity, rooted in a suitable and resonating national narrative. What is more astounding is their theoretical error in confusing nationalism at large with what is a particular variation of German national discourse: the racist, völkisch one. There is a hysterical tone to much of the writing of the holier-than-thou German left that makes it unable to see either the pre-1848 German nationalism in a clearer light, or appreciate the power of the federal tradition which, thankfully, has been put to good use by Adenauer and Kohl. (Even if some of us may be somewhat less enamored with the "Catholic" dimension of the CDU appropriation of this legacy.)
The construction of post-war, federal Germany has in many respect continued in the Bismarckian tradition of supporting traditional, conservative, patriarchal structures within a hierarchical order, from Family to Heimat to State, and, finally, the Federal Republic. Indeed, the Catholic notion of subsidiarity, has come to dominate not just thinking within Germany, but it has become the central organizing principle for the EU at large. The beauty of the German federalism, with is sensitivity (at least theoretically) to the autonomy of the individual Länder, is that it is extendible to EU as a whole without reducing the entire project to a mere customs union (as the British would want) or attempting to impose a politically suicidal form of centralism along French lines. 61
Thus, in facing the coming of what many see as a new political order characterized by a splitting of national sovereignty along "neo-medieval," or "post-sovereign" lines in an era of "fractal politics," there are reasons to suspect that German political culture is far better equipped than is the Swedish one to deal with the prospect of "European citizenship," on the one hand, and a national identity construed in strictly cultural terms, on the other. Because this split, if problematic, is a long-standing and familiar one, one can well imagine Germans of both the Left and the Right being comfortable in some version of a European federation based on the principles of subsidiarity and/or "World-Switzerland." Indeed, as we have seen, prominent figures on the German left, like Jürgen Habermas, are actively pushing for a European-wide republic, on the one hand, and a decentralized democracy at the level of "civil society," on the other.
For Swedes, at least those located to the left politically, the situation seems far more bleak. As many observers have pointed out, Swedish national identity is tightly linked to the welfare state, and here the emphasis is equally on "welfare" and "state." A decoupling of nation and state would appear to be wholly foreign to the Swedish political tradition; indeed it would be hard to even formulate in intelligible terms. As critics of Swedish "statism" like to point out: in Swedish language the terms nation, state and society are virtually synonymous. For those on the Right, the prospects are rosier; the denationalization of Sweden would seem to promise an escape from the narrow confines of Swedish egalitarianism. Thus, whereas the European question is unlikely to divide the German nation, it is very much more likely to do so in Sweden
Notes:
*: A revised draft of a paper presented on the November 22nd, 1996 meeting of the Convenor Group on "Europe East and West -- Challenges to Sovereignty from Above and Below" sponsored by the Center for Slavic and East European Studies and the Center for German and European Studies at UC Berkeley. Back.
**: Department of History, Barnard College/Columbia University. Back.
Note 1: Ole Wæver, "Identity, Integration and Security: Solving the Sovereignty Puzzle in EU Studies" in Journal of International Affairs, vol. 48, no. 2 (Winter 1995), 1. Back.
Note 2: John Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations," International Organization, vol. 47, no. 1 (Winter 1993) pp. 171 ff. Back.
Note 3: Saskia Sassen, "On Governing the Global Economy," draft of the 1995 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, 34. [Later published as part of Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.) Back.
Note 4: Andrew Roberts' recent bestseller, The Aachen Memorandum (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1995), is good - and funny - example of English paranoia when it comes to the supposed threats posed by European integration. Roberts describes, from the vantage point of the year 2045, the conspiracy which destroyed British national sovereignty and created the United States of Europe. The corrupt, bureaucratic Euro-superstate is contrasted with the heroic English traditions of freedom and national independence. Back.
Note 5: The North/South dichotomy is, of course, but one example of how observers have attempted to categorize divisions within Europe/EU. The most obvious one is the East/West distinction, sometimes complicated by the notion of a Mitteleuropa. Others include variations along the lines of Esping-Andersen's analysis of the "three worlds of welfare capitalism" - the Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, and Liberal Democratic models - and yet another one is what Michael Shackleton has referred to as the "Three Ways of Life" competing for supremacy within the EU: "individualism, egalitarianism, and hierarchy," associated with differing political cultures in, for example, Great Britain, Continental Europe, and Scandinavia (Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 29, no. 6, 1991). Back.
Note 6: The Unification of 1990 upset this balance - and we will analyze shifts in the National Sovereignty-vs.-Europe later in this paper. However, although the old GDR was reconstructed along seemingly traditional lines as Länder, it is notable that Prussia was not revived as a Land. Back.
Note 7: Recent polls indicate that the Swedes are more unhappy with the EU than any other member state. Back.
Note 8: At the same time Social Democratic Sweden has been quite "internationalist;" very active in the UN, a large donor in the Third World, etc. However, while this may appear to be a contradiction, it is in fact a form of internationalism that fits rather well with a nationalist approach within Europe. While global internationalism poses little threat to national sovereignty, European integration does so in a very tangible way. Back.
Note 9: As with many other national myths, this is a story that contains a measure of truth. The Swedish peasants were indeed unique in that they not only retained the land, escaped feudalism and serfdom, but even retained political representation both at the national level - as the fourth estate - and at the local, village level - in the form of self-government. As Michael Roberts has put it: "It may well be true that the idealization of the yeoman peasant by such writers as E.G. Geijer has been proved to have but a shaky historical basis,' yet in the final analysis "it is still safe to say that the peasant in mediaeval Sweden retained his social and political freedom to a greater degree, played a greater part in the politics of the country, and was altogether a more considerable person, than in any other western European country." Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), 4-5. Back.
Note 10: Lars Trägårdh, The Concept of the People and the Construction of Popular Political Culture in Sweden and Germany, 1800-1933. Unpublished Dissertation, UC Berkeley 1993. Back.
Note 11: Interestingly enough in the context of a German/Swedish comparison, the Swedish Social Democrats were significantly influenced by the Austromarxists' - Otto Bauer and Karl Renner in particular - theories of nation and nationality. However, they understood these theories mainly as an embrace of the principle of the nation and largely dispensed with the Austromarxists federalism which involved a crucial decoupling of nation and state. Instead, the Swedish Social Democrats were, and remain, enthusiastic "nation-statists." Back.
Note 12: The notion of a "national socialism" is particularly associated with the leader of SSU (the Social Democratic youth organization), Richard Lindström. Back.
Note 13: From a speech given in 1933. Per Albin Hansson, "Frihet och Självtukt" in Demokrati (Stockholm, 1935), 132. Back.
Note 15: Per Albin Hansson, "Tal till Sveriges flagga" in Demokrati (Stockholm, 1935), 138. Back.
Note 16: In the extended version of this paper I will elaborate on this point. Back.
Note 17: Per Albin Hansson, "Nordisk demokrati" in Demokrati (Stockholm, 1935), 220. Back.
Note 18: Marquis Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936). Back.
Note 19: Völkisch nationalism of the democratic variety is finished with the failures of 1848. It is redefined and purged of its democratic element, privileging ethnos over demos but retains the emphasis on a unitary (rather than federalist) conception of the German Volk, and eventually takes on a distinctively racist, anti-Semitic connotation after 1870. Held at bay by legitimist, Prussian centered, statist patriotism until the end of the Old Regime in 1919, it explodes as the nationalism of the Weimar period, ending with its terrible fulfillment under the Nazi regime. Back.
Note 20: See for example Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Alon Confino, "The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871-1918" in History and Memory, vol. 5, no. 1 (1993). Back.
Note 21: Quote is from E.v. Aster, "Nationale Romantik" in Die Gesellschaft, no. 240 (1924), 242. Back.
Note 22: Interestingly, the national myth-makers of the GDR returned to the Peasant's War, the Wars of Liberation, and the 1848 Revolution as key moments for the writing of a "good" German history, one that culminated in the GDR. This has been admirably documented in the current (spring 1997) exhibition in Berlin on the making of GDR ("Parteiauftrag: Ein neues Deutschland"). Back.
Note 23: Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (New York: International Publishers, 1966). Back.
Note 24: The key text is Otto Bauer's Nationalitätenfrage und Sozialdemokratie (Vienna, 1907), but Renner and Bauer also wrote frequently in the major journals of the German and Austrian Social Democratic parties, such as Der Kampf and Die Gesellschaft. A selection of English language translations is available in Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode, Austro-Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1978). Back.
Note 25: The title of an influential collection of essay, edited by an American historian of Sweden: Steven Koblik (ed), Sweden's Development from Poverty to Affluence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975). Back.
Note 26: Bo Stråth, Folkhemmet mot Europa (Stockholm: Tiden, 1992), 209. Back.
Note 27: Sven Backlund, "Hakkors på blå botten utmaning mot svenskfana" in Arbetet, 21 September, 1933. Back.
Note 28: Tord Ekström, Gunnar Myrdal and Roland Pålsson, Vi och Västeuropa (Stockholm: Raben & Sjögren, 1962). Back.
Note 30: Claes-Erik Odhner, Sverige i Europa (Stockholm: Raben & Sjögren, 1962), 72. Back.
Note 32: Enn Kokk, "Världen, vi och Västeuropa" in Förändringens vind by Föreningen Laboremus, (Stockholm: Raben & Sjögren, 1962), 130. Back.
<
Note 36: Bo Stråth, Folkhemmet mot Europa (Stockholm: Tiden, 1992). Back.
Note 37: Göran Greider, "Jag tror på nationalstaten" in Kritiska Europafakta, no 26 (1993), 16. A pamphlet published by "Nej till EG." Back.
Note 38: Rolf Karlbom, "Lång svensk folkstyrelsetradition" in Kritiska Europafakta, no 26 (1993), 14. Back.
Note 39: Jörgen Bengtsson, Ge Norden en chans! (Give Norden a Chance!), Alternativ till EG skriftserie, no 1 (1993), 12-13. Back.
Note 41: This is a notion that I have coined and elaborated upon in a separate essay, "Statist Individualism: On the Culturality of the Nordic Welfare State" in Bo Stråth and Øystein Sørensen (eds.), The Cultural Construction of Norden (Oslo: University of Oslo Press, forthcoming 1997). Back.
Note 42: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York, Penguin, 1968) 99. Back.
Note 43: For a sustained analysis along these lines see my essay on "Statist Individualism," note 41 above. Back.
Note 44: Disregarding the GDR. Back.
Note 45: Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). Back.
Note 46: Peter Brandt and Herbert Ammon, in particular, has made a concerted effort to establish a left-nationalist position. In the extended, final version of this paper I will include a discussion of his position and that of a few others who inhabit this minority position in Germany. See Peter Brandt and Herbert Ammon, eds., Die Linke und die nationale Frage (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981) and also a brief discussion of this phenomenon in Hans Mommsen, "History and National Identity: The Case of Germany in German Studies Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (Feb. 1983). Back.
Note 47: For an analysis of Schumacher's view on the new German nation-state, see Dieter Groh and Peter Brandt, 'Vaterlandslose Gesellen:' Sozialdemokratie und Nation (München: C.H. Beck, 1992), 233 ff. Back.
Note 48: Quoted in ibid., 249. Back.
Note 49: Quote is from an article written by Hermann Peter Piwitt, discussed by Friedbert Pflüger in Deutschland driftet (Düsseldorf; Econ, 1994), 115. Back.
Note 50: Margarita Mathiopoulos, Das Ende der Bonner Republik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1993). Back.
Note 51: "Die deutsche Nation erwacht" is the title of one of the chapters of Mathiopoulos' book and it alludes, of course, to the famous Nazi slogan of the Weimar Republic. Back.
Note 52: Dieter Oberndörfer, Der Wahn des Nationalen (Freiburg: Herder, 1993). Back.
Note 53: Günter Grass, Rede vom Verlust (Göttingen: Steidl, 1992). Back.
Note 54: Also see Hajo Funke, "Jetzt sind wir dran:" Nationalismus im geeinten Deutschland. (Berlin: Aktion Sühnezeichen, 1991). Back.
Note 55: Rainer Zittelmann, Karlheinz Weißmann and Michael Großheim, eds., Westbindung: Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland (Frankfurt/M; Berlin: Ullstein 1992) and Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht, eds., Die Selbstbewusste Nation (Frankfurt/M; Berlin: Ullstein 1994). Back.
Note 56: From a television address on the "Eve of the Day of German Unity" - October 2, 1990 - reprinted in Richard T. Gray and Sabine Wilke, eds., German Unification and Its Discontents: Documents from the Peaceful Revolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 261. Back.
Note 57: For a discussion of the FAZ debate of 1994 and more generally the emergence of the New Right critique of the CDU middle, see Franz Oswald, "Integral and Instrumental Nationalism: National-Conservative Elite Discourse: The 'What's Right' debate of 1994" in Debatte, no. 2 (1995), 24 ff. Back.
Note 58: Joschka Fischer, Risiko Deutschland: Krise und Zukunft der deutschen Politik (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994). Back.
Note 59: Peter Glotz, Der Irrweg des nationalstaats (Stuttgart, 1990). Back.
Note 60: Jürgen Habermas, "Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität: Überlegungen zur europäischen Zukunft" in Nicole Dewandre and Jacques Lenoble, eds, Projekt Europa. Postnationale Identität: Grundlage für eine europäische Demokratie (Berlin: Schelsky & Jeep, 1994). Back.
Note 61: More disturbingly is the enduring incapacity of the German Bundestag to reform it citizenship laws. The persistence of jus sanguinis and the refusal to grant dual citizenship has created a large population of guestworkers and immigrants that lack basic civil rights. Back.
