20 Jahre neue Bundesrepublik: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten ed. by Gerhard Besier (review)

The events of 1989 ended the Cold War, but the many issues left unresolved in Europe gave rise to new problems. For the countries of the former Soviet bloc, the problems loomed especially large as they sought to establish new political and economic systems, to forge new international alliances, and to gain entry into multilateral institutions (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union). For Western countries, the post–Cold War era was marked above all by a shift in attention away from Eastern Europe toward the Middle East, especially after September 2001. Yet one Western country confronted the problems of post-socialist transition not just in its backyard but in its living room: Germany. The reunification of Germany (some critics prefer to speak of annexation) meant that the challenges of structural adjustment and political transformation were handled mainly via the export of existing West German institutions and structures into the newly incorporated East.

This collection of essays, derived from a conference of the same title held at the Technical University in Dresden in 2010, tries to assess the progress of reunification and the changes it has wrought in both halves of Germany. Roughly, the individual essays can be divided into three categories. Two synthetic historical essays (by Konrad Jarausch and Peter Brandt) open the book, seeking to frame the first two decades of the “new” Federal Republic in the more general history of the past. A series of essays deals with perceptions of the new Germany among important neighbors and partners (the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United States). The remainder of the essays cover specific areas of transformation in reunified Germany. Topics range from the fate of former East German elites to the “de-tabooization of the military” to the revival of Christian identity politics.

Inevitably, the strength and quality of the individual chapters vary, but the more fundamental distinction to be drawn among them is between those that analyze the changes (and challenges) of the past twenty years and those that seek to make polemical and often rather partisan interventions into ongoing debates. The problem with the polemical essays is not that they are polemics but that they are abbreviated, decontextualized, and in many cases deeply ahistorical polemics. So, for instance, both Rudolf Hickel and Michael Klundt, in their respective essays on economic transformation and poverty, bemoan the German move to neoliberal economic policies and the resulting increase (per Klundt) in income inequality and absolute poverty. Both essays propose a return to Keynesian economic management and a revival of greater welfare-state support for low-income Germans. Whatever the merits of these proposals, neither essay really addresses their feasibility, because neither explains why neoliberalism gained traction in the first place. Klundt, for example, argues that “the federal government’s tax policy deliberately privileged and deregulated finance market speculation over real economic investment” (p. 207). Why? The only explanation on offer is ideological. Neoliberals pursued neoliberal policies because they believed in neoliberalism. This is not an explanation; it is a tautology.

The turn to neoliberalism was hardly a uniquely German phenomenon. From the U.S. perspective, the German embrace of neoliberal reforms—deregulation, reductions in government welfare spending, free trade—seems rather more modest than in other areas of the world. More fundamentally, what Hickel and Klundt fail to acknowledge is that the neoliberal turn took place in a historical context when precisely the kind of welfare state Keynesianism they advocate was largely discredited because the economy was fundamentally transforming as energy prices spiked, information technology began to have an impact, and the first wave of globalization set in. After the financial crisis, the time might have come to revive the older approach, but if that case is to be plausible, one would have to show how economic circumstances have changed in such a way that they make Keynesianism plausible again.

The more historically minded essays—by Jarausch and Brandt in particular—are more persuasive, in part...