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7 ecuring the ew rajectory, 1949–55 lthough the events of 1947–48 had de‹ned a new occidentalist trajectory for postwar German reconstruction, they had not guaranteed its future survival. A “turning point” only appears as such in retrospect; viewed prospectively, all that appears are instantaneous moments of contingency (Abbott 2001b: 248).1 Even after the turning point, there were still moments during which the trajectory could have been derailed; if it had been derailed, we would probably not speak of the events of 1947 and 1948 as a turning point in the ‹rst place. Like the notion of a “rhetorical commonplace,” the concept of a “turning point” is ideal-typical, serving as a way to organize information and make sense out of a series of events. That a turning point appears in retrospect is a result of the success of the various occidentalist-tinged efforts in securing the new trajectory after the Berlin Airlift. This was far from inevitable; there is nothing about the Berlin Airlift itself that dictated one or another course of action. There were other socially plausible ways that the Berlin Airlift, and the Soviet Union’s actions in the eastern zone of occupation, could have been understood; the continued presence of opponents to the occidentalist legitimation strategy illustrates the point. What remains to be shown is how the occidentalist strategy achieved a position of dominance in public debate—a dominance so profound that it became quite commonsensical for future political actors (Katzenstein 1997b: 9). This dominance should not be seen as a shift in the “political culture” of 196 1. This is much like a “streak” in a professional sport like baseball: viewed retrospectively , a streak is a sequence of events forming a clear pattern (such as reaching ‹rst base successfully in many consecutive games), while if viewed prospectively, the same events result from a number of contingent circumstances (such as a ball glancing off of a ‹elder’s glove, or someone failing to pitch as effectively as they ordinarily would). Seidel 1988 provides an excellent discussion of Joe DiMaggio’s record ‹fty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 that highlights this peculiar aspect of social trajectories. either the BRD or the United States. Political culture explanations focus on the subjective internalization of justi‹cations over time, such that politicians at a future point in time are constrained by the beliefs that they have inherited from the resolution of previous episodes (Berger 1996: 327; Duf‹eld 1998: 26–27, 34). The process is cumulative, so that the resolution of successive episodes produces a “gradual emergence of a robust . . . foreign policy consensus ” (Banchoff 1999: 174) driven by “the weight of past political choices” (Katzenstein 1997a: 254). The problem with political culture explanations is not so much that they are wrong as that they are not really explanations. Noting that a particular course of action is consistent with a particular set of beliefs is a useful contribution, but this is not the same thing as explaining why a set of beliefs persist over time—or even why a particular set triumphed over others at a given moment. Political culture explanations, in common with other types of identity explanations that treat identities as settled ideational commitments (Bially Mattern 2004: 52), rely on a stable background of shared meanings in order to explain the resolution of contemporary debates, and as such are not particularly helpful for explaining the emergence of that consensus in the ‹rst place. In addition, political culture accounts tend to rely on a kind of punctuated equilibrium model of social change in which moments of ›ux are succeeded by more settled times of relative calm. Thus we have pluralistic security communities generated by shared ideas about belonging together that were presumably worked out at some point in the past (Adler and Barnett 1998); similarly , we have postreuni‹cation Germany behaving in ways that are at variance with the predictions of realist and liberal IR theory and refraining from asserting itself in various contexts, and doing so because of the political culture previously institutionalized within it (Duf‹eld 1999; Katzenstein 1997b). It remains unclear in such accounts precisely how this transition from contestation to working within a stable cultural framework takes place. The problem is compounded when the “cultural framework” in question is conceptualized as being composed of subjectively internalized beliefs, since measuring the consensus presumed to characterize settled times becomes practically impossible.2 It is better, therefore, to stop looking for those mythical moments during...

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