State of emergency and the 'death of consensus': whither Germany?
In Conversation with Prof. Stefanie Middendorf, University of Jena
Hello there — it’s been a while. I’m excited to bring you something slightly different today, ahead of a longer piece coming soon which will catch you up on the chaos of the last few weeks in German politics. Today, I’m finally able to share a conversation I had a few weeks back with Stefanie Middendorf, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Jena and incoming Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School of Changing Global Orders.
Professor Middendorf is a leading scholar of the concept of ‘emergency governance’ in the last century in Europe. As you’ll see, we had a broad-ranging conversation, covering the budget crisis which has since led to the collapse of the German government, the Zeitenwende, and China.
I was particularly keen to hear Stephanie’s thoughts on the predicament Germany finds itself in, and how the concept of ‘emergency’ has an almost constant feature of the current German republic, especially when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy. We also spent a lot of time, following Phil Tinline’s lead, talking about the idea of consensus, how it has broken down in Germany and Europe generally in recent years, and why it is becoming increasingly difficult to re-form it in the face of everything. We sat down to speak a few weeks before the collapse of the Ampel coalition, but I think recent events might have made it all the more topical. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Bis bald—RW.
RW: Stefanie, I was wondering if you could give a brief history of the concept of emergency, and how that emerges as both a rhetorical device and as an organising principle in modern government. Would you start that story in 1918/19?
SM: Actually, I think we’d need to go back to the Roman dictatorships! I’d say it’s a twofold history. One part stretches back to antiquity, in the sense that there’s a person or an institution which is given specific powers on a temporary basis and limited scope, with the assumption being that these powers will be taken back after a while. There are rules which govern and end these extraordinary powers. This can be a really important function for democratic self-defence, actually. The other dimension of this is to do with revolution and warfare, and would start in at least the c19th, where we see revolutionaries and warring states whose extraordinary powers in war stretch into peacetime. There’s also an important colonial dimension to it. But it’s after the First World War that all these elements come together into an idea of ‘crisis governance’, with temporary empowerment of certain agents. The economic and financial crises crystallize these strands, and they turn these originally military powers into something much more wide-reaching in line with an expanding scope for state action in this period.
RW: I suppose the key issue throughout that entire history is the slippage in the use of extraordinary powers between ‘genuine’ emergencies and non-emergencies. With a much broader concept of emergency, it’s eventually hard where emergency ends and ‘just’ a problem begins. And perhaps that’s where Germany is now: the term is so overused in fiscal debates that it’s become meaningless—more on that later perhaps.
Where and when does the current paradigm of emergency powers start?
SM: I would start around 2001 with the US PATRIOT Act post-9/11, but also in France with the Etat d’Urgence which were called periodically throughout the 20th century. The financial crises after 2007 and the corona pandemic were other important steps, of course. As a result, today we find in Germany a specific intermixing of the political, legal and financial within the language of emergency.
The concept and language of emergency is literally inscribed in the rules of the debt brake. You have to claim an extraordinary situation of emergency in order to legitimize new debt. This is the logic of the debt brake: everyone is forced to claim their own cause to be an emergency to enable its funding. But the tricky thing is that the SPD was part of the coalition which passed the debt brake into constitutional law. So we’re not talking about a contest between pro-debt and anti-debt groups in German politics, at least not until recently. It is not only the language of emergency that is inscribed into financial policy, but also that political questions actually become legal questions. It seemingly ends the discussion by turning it into a legal, constitutional question. But that obviously doesn’t work (as you could observe recently when the Ampel coalition failed), so now we’re back to the political question of what our money is invested in, what the procedure is for finding a compromise, if not a consensus, on what the most pressing issues are. Is it climate crisis, Ukraine, social inequality, global problems? This can’t be solved by constantly clinging to a language of emergency. It doesn’t give you an answer, all it does is legtimise a certain way of dealing with situations. Calling something an emergency doesn’t solve it. Using this all the time just signals that politics isn’t working.
RW: How much of this do you think is a feature, rather than a bug, of the Federal Republic? I read Phil Tinline’s book The Death of Consensus over the summer, and in it he argues that our guiding principles in government are shaped more by our nightmares than our dreams. I think it’s pretty clear that the design of Germany’s constitution is preoccupied with the nightmare of ‘democratic excess’, and that includes inflation, drawing on the experiences of the first half of the 20th century. But the emerging new nightmare, midway through the 2020s, seems be a constant lack of growth and looming deindustrialization, and that will presumably change the priorities of state action.
SM: You’re right in saying that inflation as democratic excess is a recurrent ‘ghost’ in German thinking. But it’s worth saying that there is a real point to that which is informed by the past. The impact of hyperinflation and of the sovereign default in 1945 was deeply personal: people lost everything in these crises, and they had an enduring legacy. The question is we have to ask is: who loses most in those moments? It’s easy for us to “say let’s skip that nightmare” and talk about reshaping our attitudes towards debt — and I agree that fear is not a good guide for decision-making — but we have to consider what debt means, and who pays the price for it in the end. What are the historical experiences that people have and how does that inform their contemporary attitudes? I don’t mean the people in the Bundesbank, but ordinary people like my grandmother.
What I also find interesting is that when I began my research on the history of debt and financial history after 2008, the image of debt was extremely negative, not only across the board politically, but also on a social level. But then it changed. With the pandemic, and then the Zeitenwende, the idea of taking on debt to invest our way out of issues became popular again, with the impression being this would solve issues within a year or two. It’s really interesting how public expectations and the image of debt has changed so quickly.
RW: Yes. I feel like as I’ve been thinking about the way things are unfolding, I keep coming back to Keynes’ phrase, ‘anything we can do we can afford’. This seems like the perfect rallying cry for those looking for an exit from neoliberalism. It seems to be the animating drive behind the Draghi Report, for instance.
SM: The crucial question though, especially on the European level with Draghi, is: who is ‘we’? And how do we agree on what we want to ‘do’? How do we legitimize that agreement? We must answer these questions first before we can do anything at all. When you get onto the European level, it’s totally different conversation to the national level.
RW: We’re back into the ‘problem’ of democratic politics again. We’re discussing this in quite a rarified way, probably much like people in Brussels do. But as you said, part of the reason why Germany opposes the type of action like that advocated by Draghi is because it’s unpopular with the German public, too. You can see that in the way that people in the papers continue to talk about ‘southern’ indebtedness, most recently in the context of the Unicredit-Commerzbank affair. You know, the whole “Do we really want to hand this key institution of the Mittelstand over to the Italians? They can’t be trusted with our money” attitude. If European-level debt is going to be taken on, the impetus has to come from Germany. The problem with that formulation, though, is that Germany is a long way from doing that, even if it theoretically could. So ultimately, when we’re thinking about who the ‘we’ is in that Keynes phrase, even in a European context, are we actually back to talking about Germany?
SM: I think we probably are. But I’m astonished at the degree of importance that Germany is ascribed in so many European discussions at the moment. It’s something that the Germans are really uncomfortable with. It’s not that I think the past should always be a frontier of thinking in the present, but the idea that Germany is a geopolitical power, and others are ascribing that power to us is something which doesn’t resonate with a lot of people, especially at my age or older. They were raised on the assumption that we needed to stay away from that sort of thing.
RW: Now we’re running back into nightmares. The idea that geopolitics is something that Germany has to ‘do’ now is treated as anathema, but the idea that it ever wasn’t acting in a geopolitical world always been an illusion, based on fear. But there’s still so little appetite for this new role that Germany is expected to take up. The only person I could really name as a figure that seems comfortable with that new role and is ready to make the case for this change is Boris Pistorius.
SM: Well, there are others, but they’re not necessarily people that you and I would want to associate with. In and around the Bundeswehr there are certainly plenty of voices who would claim a bigger role for Germany. But they aren’t always liberal or democratic voices. But the Bundeswehr is in a process of finding new perspectives. There’s also a question of leadership, and this is why Pistorius has seemed like such a breath of fresh air. Bundeswehr doesn’t necessarily have a money problem; it also has an organizational problem. It is incapable of setting priorities and allocating resources (including money) according to those priorities. Part of the appeal of reaching for ‘emergency’ is the transformative effect it can have on an impasse. But even if you do declare an emergency, if your systems aren’t fit to take decisive action, it won’t help.
RW: This feels like the central problem with the Zeitenwende. We’ve had the emergency declared, but the action is still lacking. But is it a question of either insufficient resources or organizational ability to deliver that action, or insufficient will?
SM: I’d say that the lack of resources and ability flows from a lack of will, actually. But this is not just an emergency. This is about fundamental changes in the way the world works. And there is a lack of will in Germany to adjust to this fundamental change, not just on a political level, but at a societal level.
Maybe what would help is to think about problems on different temporal scales. What are the things we need to address most urgently in the short term, and what are things which we can do over a longer time scale, like climate change and the new emerging global order? That way we could actually establish what the emergencies are, and direct action towards those things first. This might also be where historians come in, because we may be able to offer a longer-term view on issues which, when we take stock, we can see we’ve faced them before. For instance, questions of global order, and the relationship with China.
RW: Yes, because it definitely feels like Germany’s suffering from something like an ‘omnicrisis’ at the moment, and it’s overwhelming any ability to respond. Establishing some scale of priority sounds basic, but it might be the best place to start. I’m relieved you mentioned China, because we’ve failed so far.
SM: I’m no expert, but I was listening at an event last week, where an expert on China from Harvard reiterated the importance of dialogue as a way, perhaps, of getting us out of our nightmarish visions and towards a more reasoned position. That doesn’t mean accepting or taking on or accepting our rivals’ opinions—I’m a historian of the Nazi period, so I know that dialogue with those who have an antiliberal or authoritarian view of global order is a complicated question. But having the opportunity to communicate, not only with rivals, but with other parts of the world which aren’t traditionally included in these conversations, could yield results. But do you really want to talk to Putin?
RW: The problem of course is what ‘angle’ do those rivals have when they come to the table. Do they view our willingness to speak as a sign of weakness? I think in the case of Putin, definitely. And it’s again concerning that we’ve had reports from Berlin that Scholz has been thinking long and hard about making that phone call to Moscow in recent weeks. Xi is less clear, I’d say, but it’s hard to get away from the feeling when you see German politicians in Beijing, that this is a form of appeasement.
Germany’s big problem is that since Xi announced the Made in China 2025 plan back in 2015, China has set itself on a course to become a giant version of Germany through industrial policy, and all the while German manufacturing became more and more enmeshed in Chinese markets. So it now faces a bind where one of its most important markets and overseas manufacturing bases is also it’s greatest strategic rival. And that’s what produces scenes like we saw in Brussels with Germany’s ‘no’ to tariffs on Chinese exports of EV’s to Europe, in fear of Chinese retaliation against the likes of BMW and VW. But to say that Germany is acting ‘against the logic’ of geopolitics misses the point. Germany’s close relationship with China over the last 20 or so years is a feature of geopolitics, it’s just that Germany never saw it in those terms.
SM: With regard to Germany, it’s really a problem of mentalities. We have to think of these ‘bilateral’ economic relations as part of a broader geopolitical strategy on both sides. And that was also clearly the issue with Germany’s dependence on Russian energy. It probably wasn’t in the minds of those in power at the time that this was not just about cheap energy, but about geopolitical decisions. A change in attitude might need more time and patience to develop.
I wanted to ask you something, actually. I find it interesting how Germany is increasingly being ‘provincialized’ in recent years and in so many contemporary debates. How do you read that? Is it a political strategy? It’s become so omnipresent recently.
Firstly, I think it’s particularly striking when you consider how much of a 180-degree turn there’s been in the last 5 years about Germany in this country, at least in certain circles. You used to see books with titles like “Why the Germans Do it Better” in Waterstones, and they’d do pretty well on the non-fiction lists and get approving reviews in the papers. I think that was the product of a particular period after Brexit and before Merkel left the scene, when Germany was still seen to represent a particular liberal version of Europe. But as far as I can tell, it was the war in Ukraine punctured that view. It started to be seen as this weird, out-of-step and fundamentally misguided country which was asleep at the wheel of the EU. And since then, it’s started to become the ‘sick man of Europe’ economically. I think this is actually born of frustration with the mismatch between Germany’s power and it’s unwillingness or inability to use it.
I think it’s interesting to see the ‘sick man’ title coming back, because that was used to describe Germany in the late 1990s too. Then we became the successful, dynamic economy, the place that had solved its problems. Now we’re not just the sick man, but the ‘odd’ man. There’s this sense that the outside world just doesn’t understand why Germany is acting the way it is. But it’s really interesting to see how the perception has changed and re-changed since the 1990s.
I wonder if you can chart that as a rise and fall of a particular model of globalization: a preference for an open, ‘de-geopoliticised’ neoliberal trade order that looks fundamentally naïve now.
But I find that strange, because other countries— Britain, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries—had their own experiments with neoliberalism, and they don’t get pathologized in the same way as Germany. So I do sometimes have the impression that Germany becomes quite a useful place for other country’s to project all sorts of criticism onto, perhaps cynically you’d say in order to obscure a more complicated picture.
I think there’s some truth to that, but the difference is the degree to which Germany remained a fundamentally industrial, export-oriented economy which became deeply integrated into— and therefore acutely exposed to— what now look like systemic rivals, whereas Britain’s path, for instance, was powered by financial services and the power of the City of London. That being said, we could very easily be having this discussion about how Britain has disappointed expectations or seems to be locked in this terrible state of limbo while it works out a new consensus for itself. I saw Maurice Glasman speak at the Sheldonian recently, and he spoke in similar terms to us now about this sense of being in stuck between eras. He mentioned Gramsci’s quote about the old being dead, and the new not yet being born. He argued that we’re entering (or at least should be entering) an ‘era of restoration’ after the pillaging of so much of a public sphere and traditional institutions in the last 30 or 40 years. And at times it felt like that was kind of the logic of the Starmer campaign—turn the page, rebuild the country’s sense of community and the public realm. But I’m afraid that feels like an overly optimistic view of the change of eras we’re living through and whether this can actually be done, at least under the current thinking.
Consensus doesn’t really fit anymore. We’re going to have to work on the basis of compromise rather than genuine consensus. And we need to think about the measures and mechanisms to do that, ‘emergency’ is one but maybe not the best.
More democracy is needed, but democracy feels so depressing at the moment. The appeal of emergency is that it cuts through that process of delivering transformation, but that’s actually a bit illusory, it’s a sugar-rush of apparent change that actually ends up being unsustainable. You need to create stable foundations which really include people in the process. There’s a lot of interest in the idea of Bürgerräte (citizens’ forums) and creating real-world interactions between citizens and institutions.
Are historians in the uniquely useful position they think they are to help address these issues? It feels like historians have two different types of public engagement available to them. There’s the genuinely ‘public’ public engagement, and then there’s ‘private’ public engagement: informal discussions with people in policy and government, and it’s the ‘private public’ stuff that’s most useful. The genuinely public engagement is too limited and forces us to give up our desire for nuance.
Yes. Conflicts arise out of contradictions, and it’s the historians job to identify and deal with the contradictions of the past and track their transmission down to the present. The idea of emergency was never a clear-cut instrument, but it emerged in response to particular crises and moments of change. It’s similar at the moment. We need to know about where the tipping points are, when emergency politics and rule becomes problematic, and this is what we can learn from history: how to deal with moments of complexity. It’s more difficult to do that in a newspaper article than these kinds of personal interactions, to make that point.
That’s my experience. Colleagues might think differently. They might engage more in columns, or media work or twitter, and feel it’s their responsibility to communicate nuance (as best they can) to a wider, ‘general’ audience.
The contemporary historical ‘academy’ in Germany – for obvious reasons – is strongly influenced by questions of memory and often preoccupied with ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, a coming to terms with the past. But there are definitely signs of change. One big indication of this might be the Historikertag, our national historians’ conference. For many years, its focus has been on topics rather postmodern, such as the fragility of facts or conflicts over narratives. The next one deals with ‘dynamics of power’. So, there’s definitely some changing priorities among German historians.