Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition by Edmund Fawcett

Author:Edmund Fawcett [Fawcett, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

iii. Remaking the German Middle Ground: Adenauer and Christian Democracy

In 1945, little a sincere German conservative believed in was untouched by the ruin that Germany had visited on itself. The familiar elements of a conservative outlook—social unity, the authority of custom, unreasoned loyalties—looked sullied. Loathing for Germany’s occupiers, Soviet and Western alike, was poor substitute for the sentiment, vital to conservatives, of national pride. Germany was defeated, shorn of territory and divided. Many cities were shattered. Millions of people were displaced or on the move. In the winter of 1946–47, disease and hunger spread. In the West, the economy’s capital stock had, remarkably, survived the war and Soviet pillage, but industry, supply chains, and commerce were all badly dislocated. The self-inflicted catastrophe of war and the enormity of the Holocaust had to be explained and accounted for. Many conservative Germans had seen the war as a campaign for the West against Bolshevism. Germans of all opinions bridled at foreign occupation.

For German politicians of the postwar right who took responsibility for repairing that collective wreckage, the strategic tasks loomed of economic reconstruction, restoration of political sovereignty and national unity, and recovery of Germany’s moral reputation in the world. Each was achieved, though not in sequence or at an equal pace. All were fought over within the right. First, a new political framework was required. It included a provisional constitution for Western Germany, known as the Basic Law (1949), and new conservative parties: the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian “sister” party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

A tempting but false view was that victorious Western allies airlifted liberal democracy into a broken, unwelcoming Germany. On that picture, the Basic Law was a foreign imposition, alien to German tradition, where the left was not liberal and the right not democratic. In truth, Christian Democrat and Social Democrat lawyers combined to draft, without foreign bullying, a model liberal-democratic charter. Its overriding aim was summed up by the Christian Democrat lawyer Adolf Süsterhenn as avoidance of the “concentration of power in any one place,” a liberal principle with which many conservatives were now happy to agree. Catholic political tradition echoed in the first article: “Human dignity shall be inviolable,” which all state authority was obliged to respect and protect. Further, citizens had a duty to resist tyrannous government. With an eye on Western communists but also on its own troublesome far right, conservatives accepted that the highest court could ban “anticonstitutional” parties.

Left-right disagreements as well as regional differences within the right were brokered away. Christian Democrats wanted less centralized taxation and revenue-sharing than did Social Democrats. Catholic Bavaria, which wanted greater regional autonomy, was joined by Baden and Württemberg, where liberal localism of small farming and craft industry was strong. When sent for ratification to the Länder, Bavaria voted against the new federal republic but agreed to join if two-thirds of the other Länder assented, which they did. Although Bavarians clung to old suspicions of a domineering, Protestant North, the weight of Catholicism had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.