Freedom's Children
The Berlin Wall has collapsed. But a chorus of criticism is shaking and blocking the West. Are we a society of egoists? One might almost think so if one reviewed the slogans echoing through the public sphere: the dissolving of solidarity, the decline of values, the culture of narcissism, the egoism trap, entitlement thinking, hedonism. Franz Kamphaus, the Catholic Bishop of Limburg, Germany, writes:
Every moment on the infinite playing field of freedom is accompanied by crises of relationships, the renunciation of loyalties and cracks in the chain of tradition. Does a person who wants to live out his freedom ultimately only live out himself? Will modern societies fail from their atomization, their exhaustion of solidarity?'
The enemy stereotypes of the East-West conflict are relinquished and replaced by the diagnosis of neo-Spenglerism that solidarity is exhausted. The environmental crisis comes to mind here. Modern society lives from natural resources that it has consumed and destroyed, but also from moral resources, which it is equally unable to renew. The transcendental `values ecology', in which communalism, solidarity, justice and ultimately democracy are `rooted', is decaying.
In contrast to that, the sceptic of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote as long ago as 1848 that `fighting against freedom means fighting against God himself' (Tocqueville 1945). What might that wanderer between the worlds of the feudal and democratic ages have meant by this? A self-authorization of the individual was characteristic of European modernity from the very beginning. Its origin does not lie in capitalism, not even in humanism and certainly not in the `death of God' (Nietzsche), but in the world of changing religious experiences of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, as well as in the discovery and the release of the power of reason in Greek philosophy.
A few chapters later in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, one finds this sentence, which is hardly less shocking to many people today: `The Americans battled individualism, the fruit of equality, with freedom, and they have vanquished it' (1945: 591). Applied to the present debate, this implies that the symptoms of the `me generation' cannot be opposed with less freedom; they must be opposed with more freedom, but political freedom. Freedom, if seized and actively filled out, fosters commitments in the public space and is thus the exact opposite of the neoliberal idolization of the market.
This prescription, opposing decline with public freedom, is so important because it is in such dramatic opposition to the view almost dominant today that modernity needs, indeed uses up, ties (Dahrendorf's `ligatures') which it cannot itself renew. In this conception, modernity is inherently counterproductive. It permanently undermines its indispensable moral prerequisites. This self-concept of modern society (and its philosophy and sociology) is completely false. Christianity and political freedom are not mutually exclusive, but mutually inclusive, even if this builds an insoluble contradiction into the Christian traditions.
The point is to give a simple, comprehensible answer to a complicated question. The question is: what is modernity? The answer is: not just `instrumental rationality' (Max Weber), `optimal use of capital' (Karl Marx) or `functional differentiation' (Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann), but supplementing and conflicting with these, it is political freedom, citizenship and civil society. The point of this answer is that meaning, morality and justice are not preordained and, as it were, extraterritorial variables for modern society. Quite the reverse is true. Modernity has an independent, living and simultaneously ancient and highly up-to-date well-spring of meaning in its midst: political freedom.' The latter is not exhausted by daily use; instead, it bubbles up with greater life and vigour. Modernity accordingly means that a world of traditional certainty is perishing and being replaced, if we are fortunate, by legally sanctioned individualism for everyone.
Just stay at home:
young people practise a highly political
disavowal of politics
We Western Europeans are not living in a crisis of culture, and certainly
not in a decline of values; instead, we are threatened by something much
`worse'. Our words of freedom are beginning to become deeds in everyday
life and are thus calling into question the bases of our previous coexistence, which relied on the precondition that we would only talk of political freedom, not act according to it. The `catastrophe' is therefore that we must understand, acknowledge and put up with more and different types of freedom than those foreseen in the picture book of democracy as spoken of and promised, but not lived up to. Being freedom's children thus means that we are living under the preconditions of internalized democracy, for which many of the concepts and formulas of primary modernity have become inadequate.
No one knows how the traditional authority structure of the family can be connected to the new demands for freedom and self-realization for men and women. The high divorce rates and the figures on singleperson households all speak this language.
No one knows how individualism and Christian faith can be reharmonized. And yet sociologists demonstrate that, along with individualization, the willingness to exist for others, indeed to believe, is growing and not disappearing.' No one knows how the needs of mass organizations (political parties and trade unions, but cities and communities as well) to obligate the individual are compatible with claims for self-participation and self-organization. No one knows how this immense variety can be mobilized and concentrated for politically necessary decisions.
We are therefore `suffering' from freedom and not from a crisis. More precisely, we are suffering from the unintended consequences and expressions of a now customary increase in freedom, which was invoked at least on the level of lip service. Kant and Hegel were the first in Germany to set foot firmly in the land of modernity. We owe them the insight that even `concretizing freedom' is a revolution, albeit a quiet one, occurring because the foundations of the previous social order must be renegotiated.'
If this interpretation can be supported, then the talk of a `decline of values' contains something else, namely the fear of freedom, including the fear of freedom's children, who must struggle with new and different types of problems raised by internalized freedom. How can the longing for self-determination be brought into harmony with the equally important longing for shared community? How can one simultaneously be individualistic and merge with the group? How might the variety of voices which vie within each of us in a confusing world be combined into a political statement and action pointing beyond the present day?'
The spaces in which people think and act in a morally responsible manner are becoming, on the one hand, smaller and more intensive in that they comprise one's own immediate surroundings, and here the demands increase to the point where they cannot be fulfilled. On the other hand, they are becoming more voluminous and difficult to manage, even immune to any action at all. Young people are moved by that which (established) politics largely rules out: how can global environmental destruction be resolved? How can the death of hope signified by unemployment, a threat to prosperity's children, be prevented and overcome? How can one love and live, with the threat of AIDS? All these are questions that slip through the screens of the large political organizations. The consequence is that freedom's children practise a highly political disavowal of politicians.
They hate organizations for their formalism and their convoluted and dishonest call for `selfless' commitment, and they practise the kind of voting with their feet that was so profoundly underestimated some time ago by the leaders of East Germany. They simply stay at home. The members of Britain's Conservative Party have already reached a very venerable average age of over 60. One of these days, people in Germany will also have to face up to the question of whether grandpa's mega-organizations will really be justified in their lament over the `decline of values' when the last member resigns.
Those who want to get involved go to Greenpeace. According to a survey of the German Youth Institute, more than 60 per cent of young people consider the environmental activists credible. The parties, on the other hand, rank right at the bottom of the scale in the same survey, in eighth place, well behind trade unions, the press and the church. The scepticism of young people applies to parties of all stripes. While 6.8 per cent of the members of the (conservative) Christian Democratic Union were under 30 years old in 1991, the same group accounted for only 4.9 per cent in 1995. In the same period, the average age of CDU members rose by two to nearly 54. The typical Social Democrat does not look much younger. He too has almost half a century behind him. Only 7.4 per cent of his comrades are under 30. The (middle of the road) Free Democratic Party is also losing more and more of its younger generation. Its youth group has lost more than 2,000 members since 1991.
All parties are suffering because the me generation may participate in demonstrations and in circulating petitions, but it finds the business of organized politics, with its debates on agendas and proposals, intensely boring. `The loyal party soldier, who first pastes up posters for years and finally manages to make it into the town council, is a dying species,' says social researcher Helmut Jung.'
Young people have finally discovered something for themselves, something to make adults panic: fun, fun sports, fun music, fun consumption, fun life. But politics, as currently practised and represented, has nothing at all to do with fun. On the contrary, it acts like a dead-certain killjoy, and hence young people are unpolitical, according to superficial impressions and in their own understanding, but in a very political way. Freedom's children regroup in a colourful rebellion against tedium and obligations that are to be complied with without reasons being given for them and even if no one can identify with them.
Thus there is a subterranean connection between wanting to have fun and grass-roots opposition, which has so far been little noticed but which constitutes the actual core of what one could call the 'politics of youthful antipolitics'. Those who (whatever their intentions) refuse to care about institutionalized politics (parties, organizations, etc.), but playfully follow the attractions of, for instance, advertising, are unintentionally acting very politically by depriving politics of attention, labour, consent and power. Ultimately, one can spare oneself the detour through membership meetings and enjoy the blessings of political action by heading straight to the disco. There is no need to raise the issue of power long-windedly by actual attendance. It gets raised, and more effectively so, the more decisively, mutely and numerously young people simply stay away.
Freedom's children sometimes betray a winking awareness of this subliminally very effective connection, its subversive energy and irony, which would be more at home and better expressed in the art of the novel than in sociology. Everyone, the elite of the institutions as well as the young people, seems to sense that this policy of conforming withdrawal calls the system into question, once it is practised consistently enough.
This is how and where freedom's children display an unarticulated 'double strategy'. They are an actively unpolitical younger generation because they take the life out of the self-involved institutions and thus force upon them the Hamlet question: to be or not to be? This Western variant of 'antipolitics' (Gyorgy Konrad), which also opens up the opportunity to enjoy one's own life with the best conscience in the world, is supplemented and made credible by a self-organized concern for others which has broken free from large institutions. Freedom's children practise a seeking, experimenting morality that ties together things that seem mutually exclusive: egoism and altruism, self-realization and active compassion, self-realization as active compassion. Ultimately this amounts to questioning the monopoly of the custodians of the public interest on defining the public interest.
Robert Wuthnow (1997) shows that all modern societies would collapse without voluntary activities for others (see also Wilkinson 1997). Eighty million Americans, roughly 45 per cent of those above the age of 18, are involved for five or more hours a week in voluntary service for charitable purposes. In monetary terms this amounts to some 150 billion dollars.
The astonishing thing is this: for more than 75 per cent of the American population, solidarity, willingness to help others and concern for the public interest have a prominence equal to such motivations as selfrealization, occupational success and the expansion of personal freedom. The real surprise is that self-assertion, enjoying oneself and caring for others are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually inclusive and strengthen and enrich one another. Insight into this seemingly paradoxical situation is blocked by four prevailing fundamental assumptions in public and scholarly debate:
1 The equation and confusion of commitment with membersbip - if membership lists are the only things that show commitment, then non-members are of necessity egotists;
2 The self-sacrifice assumption, that only by ignoring oneself can one live for others;
3 Silent help or the bousewife syndrome, conveying that the dignity- of serving others is that it remains invisible, that is, unpaid and unacknowledged, done at the behest of others who are in control;
4 A clear separation of roles between helpers and needy - it never occurs to anyone that those who commit themselves to others also need help and receive it from their service, that perhaps the enrichment might lie precisely in the experience of mutual helplessness.
If one puts together these four assumptions of the equation of commitment and membership, the principles of selflessness and invisibility and the image of the heroic helper-and-nothing-but, then one has (albeit in a rather crude distortion) the intimidating image that forces freedom's children to flee organizations. The latter equate commitment with selflessly performed service. Accordingly, the individual becomes anonymous in hierarchical dependency, a foot soldier in a `public interest army', a mere executing agent in predetermined `sacrificial' cases.'
The much maligned
decline of values is generating new
value orientations
for the second modernity
At heart, we are thus concerned not with a decline of values but with a conflict of values, with two images of society, politics and democracy which are different in style and content. Those who lament the decline of values are very much up on their high horses as they complain about the `ungrateful society' and the ungrateful younger generation who are simply unwilling to recognize how well our institutions (and those who control them) are managing everything. Many young people (one must be very careful with generalizations, because these are freedom's children, after all) find themselves confronting completely changed global situations and problems, on both the large and the small scale, in their own life milieu and in global society. The adults and the institutions they direct have no answer to these because they have never experienced them and do not take them seriously. Freedom's children `find they face a world that no longer falls into two camps, but rather into a vast group of fracture lines, cracks and gaps among which no one any longer knows the way. The future has become multidimensional; the patterns of explanation offered by older people are no longer effective .... There are many more riddles than solutions and even the solutions, looked at more closely, prove to be sacks full of riddles.'`'
The danger of the new diversity is not the alleged confusion it brings. It lies in the inability of political parties, trade unions, churches, organizations and so on to deal with this increased diversity. Those in charge must give themselves a kick in the pants: stop demonizing individualism, which has already become a reality, and instead acknowledge it as a desirable and inevitable product of democratic evolution. They should realize that this is an expression of the Western heritage. Only then can one convincingly ask what political orientations and degree of accommodation are emerging in the individualized and globalized society of the second modernity.
What astonishes and angers me is that the conservative wailing about the alleged decline of values is not only completely false, it also obstructs the view of precisely the sources and movements from which can be created a readiness to take on the tasks of the future. The much demonized decline of values actually produces the orientations and prerequisites which, if anything can, will put this society in a position to master the future.
The basic idea is that without the expansion and strengthening of political freedom and its social form, civil society, nothing will work in the future. In this regard, it is important first of all to recognize that changing values and acceptance of democracy go hand in hand. An inner kinship exists between the values of self-development and the ideal of democracy. Many of the findings that research into the changes in values has brought to light, such as the spontaneity and voluntarism of political activism, self-organization, the resistance to formalism and hierarchies, contrariness, tentativeness, as well as the reservation of getting involved only where one can remain in control of the activity, may indeed collide with the party apparatus, but they certainly make sense in the forms and forums of civil society.
One can elaborate this in relation to a number of challenges. The major figures in the study of values (Helmut Klages and Ronald Inglehart, Gerhard Schmidtchen, Daniel Yankelovich, Robert Wuthnow and Helen Wilkinson) all agree that the change in attitudes does not amount to an inflation of material demands. On the contrary, the old and apparently eternal pattern of `more income, more consumption, more career, more conspicuous consumption' is breaking up and being replaced by a new weighting of priorities, which may often be difficult to decipher, but in which immaterial factors of the quality of life play an outstanding part. What does this imply? For one thing, control over a person's `own time' is valued higher than more income and more career success, because time is the key that opens the door to the treasures promised by the age of self-determined life: dialogue, friendship, being on one's own, compassion, fun and so on.
This means that the struggle over the distribution of material goods, which still monopolizes public and social scientific attention, has been undermined for some time by a struggle over the distribution of scarce immaterial goods that can hardly be offset by (expressed in) money, such as rest, leisure, self-determined commitments, the love of adventure, interchanges with others and so forth. In the endangered ways of life of our highly civilized world, these are gaining urgency and attractiveness.
In the age of the self-determined life, the social perception of what constitutes `wealth' and `poverty' is changing so radically that, under certain conditions, less income and status, if they go hand in hand with the opportunity for more self-development and more ability to arrange things personally, may be perceived as an advance and not a setback. This should not be celebrated without reservation, since it is certainly the underlying cultural perception explaining why the dramatic exacerbation of material social inequality has . . . so far! . . . been accepted without a political outcry. Conversely, however, this shows an unexpected opportunity to turn less into more: material sacrifices are tolerable if they go hand in hand with a guaranteed increase of self-developed society. A freedom society, not a leisure society, could perhaps allow us to say good-bye to growth-oriented labour society.'"
People are better adapted to the future than are social institutions and their representatives. It is important to recognize that the secular change also creates the preconditions for mastering it, but preconditions (and only partial ones at that), not a guarantee. The decline of values which cultural pessimists are so fond of decrying is in fact opening up the possibility of escaping from the creed of `bigger, more, better' in a period that is living beyond its means ecologically and economically. It is particularly the apostles of the status quo who grumble that individualization means egocentrism; this expresses more about themselves than about those whom they claim to criticize. While in the old values system the ego
always had to be subordinated to patterns of the collective (also always designed by individuals), these new orientations towards the 'we' create something like a cooperative or altruistic individualism." Thinking of oneself and living for others at the same time, once considered a contradiction in terms, is revealed as an internal, substantive connection. Living alone means living socially
Research also shows that, in contrast to the distortion implied by the term 'dog-eat-dog society', tolerance for other types of people and marginal groups, whether foreigners, homosexuals, handicapped people or the socially disadvantaged, has steadily increased as values have changed (see Klages 1996). An epoch in which global society finds itself disturbingly refracted in personal life is finding in the alleged 'decline of values' precisely the willingness to appropriate external things which, as Georg Simmel shows, gives birth to the miracle of the new.
One final example: it is often asserted in gloomy tones that today's `mobile people' have become devoid of commitments. A recent study of singles (not a group, but a category that comprises a number of very heterogeneous situations) shows that mobility is indeed highly valued. The idea of having to practise a `lifetime profession' is considered a burden rather than something desirable, while change, in work as well as in relationships, is considered natural and desirable by many. Who could fail to recognize here that one core promise of modernity, mobility, is being turned against another, the ideal of a lifelong profession as internalized in primary modernity? No one is saying that this can occur painlessly and succeed without contradictions. One does not need to read tea leaves, however, to recognize that the structural transformation creates preferences that enhance the status of the imperative to deal with diversity and mobility.
Here too, one sees that the age of the self-determined life is not populated entirely by people demanding benefits, people quarrelling, making trouble, shirking. Quite the contrary, orientations and priorities come into being here that surreptitiously meet the challenges of the second modernity. Personal responsibility, self-organization and personal politics are getting an enlightened and realistic chance to redistribute responsibility and power in society, but this opportunity must now be seized by a politics that is hitting its limits in every respect.
The poet Holderlin may have believed that danger is the mother of salvation, but none of the rest of us should be swept away by such sentiments. For freedom's children encounter a world in which prosperity, once considered certain, is eroding. Even though some would like to deny it, it remains true that freedom presupposes security, as shown most impressively and emphatically by T. H. Marshall in his famous study on Citizenship and Social Class. Accordingly, the former prime minister of Spain, Felipe Gonzales, observes: 'Freedom is, generally speaking, not a primary striving of people, but something people seek when their other needs have been met . . . I believe that security is the primary emotion, so that we are closer to the instinct of animals . . . When security is lost, the sense of freedom becomes weak and fragile.'''
The faster and more thoroughly social transformation changes the operating principles of living, working and running a household, the more probable it is that people will feel overburdened and the more the fear of freedom will spread. Thus studies show that more and more people consider their life and well-being under threat, even though the number of violent crimes (in Germany) is not increasing, but stagnating at a relatively low level or even decreasing slightly. It is important to distinguish between crime and fear of crime, which does not feed on crime itself but on the general feeling of uncertainty (see Hitzler 1996).
'The more freedom we have, the more troublesome and threatening it seems,' writes Zygmunt Bauman (1996). 'I believe that people today are not so much concerned with the need to belong to a community as with liberation from the compulsion of constantly having to choose and decide.' Where freedom becomes a cage, many choose the freedom of a cage (new or old religious movements, fundamentalism, drugs or violence).'
How is one to understand this paradox of 'imposed freedom', which so many are seeking to escape? A self-determined life is not a selfchosen form of existence, but rather a structural principle based on the entire society and it can be influenced only to a limited extent. 'Programmed individualism' is the slogan, which becomes more comprehensible if one connects Kafka's world-view to that of Sartre. The age of the self-determined life is produced by a dense fabric of institutions (law, education, the labour market and so on) which 'condemn' everyone 'to freedom' (Sartre) on pain of (economic) disadvantage."
The crucial point is that paid labour, the cornerstone that integrated people socially and materially into society, is eroding in the context of 'institutionalized individualism; (Parsons). Unemployment no longer threatens only marginal groups, but also the middle sections of society, even groups (such as doctors and executives) which, until a few years ago, were considered the very quintessence of middle-class economic security. Moreover, this is happening on such a massive scale that the difference between unemployment and threatening unemployment is becoming insignificant to the affected parties. To understand the extent of this transformation of the foundations of modern society (`reflexive modernization'), it makes sense to distinguish three phases of development since the Second World War.
For the first phase (extending into the 1960s) the necessity and obviousness of rebuilding a destroyed world meshed together with the fear that what had been achieved might again collapse, and consequently classical virtues such as willingness to sacrifice, diligence, self-denial, subordination and living for others mutually reinforced one another.
`The short-lived dream of eternal prosperity' (Burkart Lenz) could be the key phrase for the second phase, which reached into the 1980s. The earned wealth was considered certain; the `side-effects' (the environmental crisis, individualization), which call the foundation of primary modernity into question, were repressed (by the established order) and brought to public awareness by varying protest movements. Political freedoms developed then and radiated out into the overall society.
In a third phase, which I have described as the `global risk society', there is a return of uncertainty, which did not just shake public trust in the ability of key institutions of the industrial world, of business, law and politics, to tame and control the threatening effects they produce; there is also a sense that, across all income groups, prosperity biographies become risk biographies, losing their social identity and material faith in future security.
Against the background of economic decline, the dominant fear is now
that the prosperity once considered secure could collapse. People have
lost their orientations and have reached the conclusion that it might make
sense after all to think about the future. They worry about their chances
in the labor market, the level of their income, the four walls around them,
the education of their children and the security of their old-age pensions.
(Yankelovich 1994)
When advanced capitalism in the highly developed countries breaks up the core values of work society, a historic alliance between capitalism, the welfare state and democracy shatters. Democracy arose in Europe and America as a `democracy of work' in the sense that political freedom relied on participation in paid labour. The citizen had to earn a living one way or another in order to fill the political freedoms with life.
The consequence is that `citizens mobilize more and more often and more and more self-confidently against rowdies of both right and left, against criminals, against disruptive and annoying elements, against drug dealers and hustlers; and against their own anxieties for the future,' writes Ronald Hitzler (1996). A citizens' initiative movement for security and order appears to be succeeding the environmental, women's and peace movements and setting off on its own `march through the institutions'. Here, conversely, the risks of freedom, that is, of liberality and the decline of standards, are denounced and self-help and other remedies are being put into practice.
We have to shout to be heard by neoliberals worldwide, given their ignorance of historical experience: the market fundamentalism they worship is a form of democratic illiteracy. The market does not have an inherent justification. This economic model is capable of surviving only in an interplay of material security, social-welfare rights and democracy. Counting only on the market implies destroying democracy along with the economic mode.
Emphasizing this publicly is one thing, but opening people's eyes to the realities is something quite different. Large and growing groups of the populace are excluded inside modernity from the prerequisites for making a living and the safety nets of modernity. The crucial point is not only that radical collapses and splits are occurring or impending, but that these are brought about against the background of fully established modernity as a `modernization of modern society'. The key issue is therefore: how do self-confident citizens who are aware of their freedoms react when they see the security of their world tottering and see themselves subject to radical inequalities?
In this third phase in the 1990s, cutbacks of fundamental rights, fear of the future and demands for and awareness of freedom coincide. This is the constellation that gives birth to the ugly citizen (see Beck 1998). Where it is necessary to put up with threatened or lost social security in a milieu of perceived political freedom, civic virtues turn ugly and aggressive.
The face of the second modernity will therefore not resemble the ideal image of the citizen in all his or her kindness and beauty. Instead, it will be necessary to bid farewell to wide-eyed hopes for an ideal marriage of self-organization and reason, not out of some culturally pessimistic sense of inevitable failure, but as an ever-present possibility. This loses its terror when one sees that precisely the abuse of freedom is freedom's most reliable indicator.
Anyone who would like to know how free a country and its people are should not look only at the constitution and should leave debates in parliament and governmental programmes aside. Instead, attention should be paid to how people behave with respect to excesses of freedom (pornography, criminality by `foreigners', violence among young people); if they react with composure, then freedom is in good hands.
It is a simple statement, but none the less true: freedom also has an ugly side. This is not a refutation, but a proof of freedom, of its really human, that is to say fallible, dimension.
Political
responses: neoliberalism, communitarianism and
cosmopolitan republicanism
What political responses are struggling with one another here? To mention just the keywords: neoliberalism, communitariamsm, protectionism.
The neoliberals of the world have most clearly gathered their ranks under the banner of the market and are rehearsing an attack on the crumbling foundations of primary modernity, such as the welfare state, the nation-state, trade union power or `ecological inhibitions on private investment'. The consequences are fatal for the individual as well as society, because an antihuman image of humanity is being elevated here to the status of a foundation for social intercourse. Social exclusion becomes the rule. Success in the market ultimately decides existence or non-existence. Consequently, adaptation becomes the highest goal of character formation. The political concept of society fades or disappears."'
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recommends that anyone professing allegiance to neoliberalism be set down by helicopter in the ghettos of the outcasts in North and South American cities. He is certain that, after at most a week, such a person would come back as a convert to the welfare state.
The opponents of the neoliberals, the communitarians, march against the flag of the market with that of the community, and most powerfully, interestingly enough, in those countries where neoliberalism has raged the longest and most devastatingly, namely the USA and Great Britain. Markets and contracts, according to the intellectual code here, do not create any social cohesion in and of themselves. They require and use up the active identification of citizens with their communities as `social mortar'. In that sense, the communitarian movement can be understood only as a movement in opposition to the `neoliberalism of greed'. But while the new idolizers of the market act, and very effectively at that, the communitarians are satisfied in essence with cosmetic measures. They are attempting in the final analysis to exorcize the evil of egoism with a sanctimonious rhetoric of community spirit, a home remedy from grandma's medicine cabinet which, as we know, costs nothing and is worth every penny.
Many communitarians confuse moralizing with analysing. They forget that there is not just the danger of too little community, but that of too much as well, as the history of Germany in this century notably attests. The German-born American historian Albert O. Hirschman writes:
During the Weimar Republic there was often complaining in Germany about the lack of certain social qualities that a society was supposed to have according to the understanding of the times. A sense of mission, a feeling of belonging together and a certain warmth - in short, community spirit - were missed. The Nazi movement owed its success in no small part to its promise to satisfy these alleged `needs' in abundance by creating a newly strengthened Volksgemeinschaft.'
The majority of the communitarians take the existing institutions as a constant and thus misunderstand that these are being changed down to their very foundations by reflexive modernization (see Beck 1996; Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994).
The (still) silent majority of protectionists is meandering aimlessly in the no-man's-land between the neoliberals and the communitarians. Despite widely varying political objectives, the protectionists are united in the attempt to defend the old world-view and order of battle intellectually and politically against the onslaught of the realities of the second modernity. Beneath the surface layer of agitated debates on globalization, an all-party coalition of protectionism is forming. The conservative protectionists bemoan the decline of values and the loss of significance of the national. The left-wing protectionists are shaking the dust out of the old costumes from the class struggle just in case they might be needed. The green protectionists are discovering the charms of the nation-state and its range of weapons for defending environmental standards against the encroachment of the global market.
The irony is that Germany, occupied with itself and the problems of unifying West with East Germany, has thus far largely slept through these warring solutions: neoliberalism, communitarianism and protectionism. Rather than hopping on to a train that other countries are already leaving, it could therefore now tie together opposing movements, articulate them and convert them into practical politics. I would like to call this continental European position the cultural policy of a cosmopolitan republicanism and characterize it by five principles.
First is the new significance of the individual, with whom the right and the left, all varieties of communitarianism and the environmental movement have such difficulties. Second is the centrality of cosmopolitan agents, identities, networks and institutions. Third (and only apparently contradicting this) is the new significance of the local, the magic of place in world society. The two latter aspects run deeply against the grain of those who view the national and the nation-state as the non plus ultra of (primary) modernity. Fourth, there is the crucial significance of political freedom, that is, an active civil society, for the cohesion and selfresponsibility of democracy beyond labour society, as well as for how it might become possible to respond to the ecological crisis. Fifth is the concluding insight that derives from all of this, the necessity for deepseated institutional reforms, indeed a reformation of primary industrial modernity that would affirm diversity and `cultivated conflict' (Helmut Dubiel). A few explanations of these points will be given using the example of municipal politics.
In the late 1930s, two Jewish emigres in Paris are discussing their plans. One wants to emigrate to Uruguay. `So far away?' asks the other in astonishment. `Far away from where?' the first man replies. The fate of the rootless, the homeless and the stateless bursts forth in this question, as Hannah Arendt has depicted so incisively. Especially in global society, the citizen needs an (imaginary) place. But the problem of what that means is now coming up again, since place must be defined directly and autonomously in global society, while the national framework loses its significance (see Albrow 1996a).
`City' and `citizenship' have more than just an etymological kinship. Civil society and political freedom have their social origin and their locus in a tangible local area. Strengthening civil society therefore implies strengthening local politics and identity, strengthening cities against the national centres. Large cities can no longer be just destinations in a shunting yard of the great problems. Everyone shifts everything imaginable and unimaginable on to cities and there is even a lovely word for it: the mature citizen.
The revaluation of the local as a response to globalization will therefore not be possible without reform of, for instance, municipal finances, and a revised distribution of power and problems between national and local politics. Are there models and conceptual targets for this in political philosophy and theory? Indeed there are.
If one asks us Germans for our admission ticket to the democratic age, we do not have a French, an American or even an English revolution to show off, but we do have Immanuel Kant. Our revolution occurred in the realm of thought, bears the noble name of Critique o f Pure Reason and can gather dust in bookshelves. If one blows away the dust and begins to read, one notes with some displeasure that, to put it ironically, Kant, our officially licensed philosophical revolutionary, was outside the boundaries of our constitution. He took on himself the freedom to label parliamentary democracy `despotic', because the principle of representation contradicts the self-determination of the individual. `Among the three forms of the state, democracy, in the strict sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism,' because it is the foundation for an executive power in which `all, who indeed are not all, decide against one who agrees or dissents, which is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.''' This is the German way of revolution led by its `purest reason'.
I consider this contrast between national majority democracy and a cosmopolitan republicanism of the local to be one of the crucial themes being placed on the agenda in the transition to the second modernity by a grand coalition of necessity and reason. The shrinking labour society, the overburdened and unaffordable welfare state, but also the terrible efforts, in the truest sense of the word, that are demanded of us all to alleviate the ecological crisis in that new focus of globalization, all of these overtax the nation-state and institutionalized politics based on it. How then can the political system - parliament, parties, government be unburdened and how can the self-responsibility of civil society be supported and expanded? How can these two sites and regulative agencies of politics share the load of future problems and power and still be attuned to one another? No one will be able to avoid this question. The answer is: only by upgrading the local area of democracy, the towns and cities.
All of this presumes, among many other things, a repoliticization of municipal policy, indeed a rediscovery and redefinition of it by mobilizing programmes, ideas and people to make the incomprehensible and impossible real and possible, step by step.''
I am afraid that civil society is in such poor repute among politicians partly because it does not meet the efficiency standards of a professional politician. A rational-democratic self-misunderstanding of politics lies concealed here and must finally be expressed. Politics must not be merely rational in a democratic society, it must also be emotional. Efficient solutions are important, but so are passions, the ability to listen, justice, interests, trust, identities, and conflict when necessary; these involve, moreover, materials that are objectively so complex that the concept of the single optimal path which still haunts so many minds is completely illusory.
Politics is language, language is politics. Someone who wishes to inspire must speak inspiringly. This reveals a close relationship between art and politics. Language is what has remained for us. Community spirit, which many obviously miss so painfully, is formed only in the symbols created and reaffirmed in public speaking and listening. That is why the technocratic plastic speech of so many politicians is a cancer on democratic culture. Language is the site and the medium for creating and caring for the social sphere. We live in language. And who would care to live in the utterances of politicians? Not even politicians themselves, I fear.
Like so many other things, it has become unclear what really constitutes a 'city'. The criteria for creating an identity, such as a river, a group of historic buildings, the seat of government, a cathedral or other features that refer to a specific geographical point, have lost meaning because of the intensification of mobility, travel and information. Even cities can no longer rest in the security of a firmly emplaced geographical identity. They must be reinvented, as it were. Inventing does not mean designing on a draftsman's table; the public image of a city, its identity, which determines so many other things, must instead be created, shaped and coloured as a magic intoxicated with and tested by reality. Municipal politicians, at least the good ones, are urban magicians who shape the identity of their city, in competition with others, by public stage management, the development of urban projects and urban architecture.
What is considered an attractive and identity-fostering symbol in this regard is by no means arbitrary. An opera house might work, but not a six-lane multilevel highway intersection or a radio tower with a revolving restaurant on top. Low crime rates might be useful, but they do not create magic in and of themselves. A nuclear fusion reactor for research purposes that provokes international mistrust would probably also have the opposite of the intended effect. On the other hand, exemplary solutions to urban problems are certainly capable of developing such a magical attraction. One need only think of the idea of a zero-emission industrial park, in which factories are so interlocked that one reuses the wastes of another, as has been done in the United States. In this way, the frog no one wanted to kiss turns into a sought-after prince.
we are living
Two epochal processes above all others, individualization and globalization, are changing the foundations of living together in all spheres of social action.`" Both only superficially appear to be threats; they force but they also permit society to prepare and reshape itself for a second modernity. People are not to blame for the immobility; indeed it is essential to recognize that cultural individualization and globalization create precisely that historical orientation and those preconditions for an adaptation of institutions to a coming second modernity that are obstructed by the institutions (or those controlling them). The problem is obstacles in perception. Thinking has to change. The conservative bemoaning of the decline of values (in all social camps) is not only self-righteous, it is also stricken with historical and empirical blindness. In Germany we have managed to put two dictatorships behind us, both of which stood under the motto: `you are nothing, your class is everything.' Against this background, the amount of individualization that has been achieved is a decided advance. This is all the more true since it is completely false to equate individualization with unpolitical behaviour, indifference and egoism. Instead, the conceptions of what is political and what is not are changing. We are dealing with `freedom's children', for whom the traditional patent remedies for living together (in marriage, parenthood, family, class and nation) have lost their practicability.
The two key concepts that characterize the situation after the collapse of the East-West enemy stereotype in what is now `democracy without enemies' are ambivalence and vacuum. Ambivalence designates the simultaneity of relief and fear, initiative and fear. The loss of clarity is the paralysing thing, intellectually and politically. In quite superficial terms, there has never been such a remarkable increase in the number of liberal democracies, in the East but also in the south of the world. It is too quickly forgotten that a thoroughly militarized system of orthodox communism imploded peacefully. At the same time, however, nationalism, wars and civil wars have re-erupted everywhere. In Europe, the madness of `ethnic cleansing' is winning victories and founding states. Even dyedin-the-wool pacifists find themselves forced to reconsider the connection of freedom, human rights and war. Is there a right or a duty to go to war when human rights are being barbarically violated? Where does this have a limit? In Europe? Are genocides in Africa and Asia in the blind spot of this new `global domestic policy'? Will we have to choose in the future between two unbearable alternatives, shocking indifference or global wars for human rights?
Vacuum means that even the victorious institutions of the West, NATO, the free market, the welfare state, multiparty democracy and national sovereignty, can no longer be taken for granted historically; indeed, they have lost their historical foundations. What is NATO without its anticommunism? The growth economy and consumer society with the knowledge of their ecological destructiveness? The welfare state in the global competition of the world economy and in view of the erosion of the old standard labour relationship? Multiparty democracy without its milieu of social and moral consensus? The nation-state in the network of global economic, ecological and security policy dependencies?
Taken together, ambivalence and vacuum mean that the system is not simply hopeless, it is also more open than ever, intellectually and politically.
From: Ulrich
Beck, Democracy Without Enemies. New
York: Polity Press, 1998.