"What we need is a surplus of hope"

It seemed certain that there would be no more war in Europe. It seemed certain that Germany would succeed economically as an industrialized nation. It seemed certain that America would be our reliable ally. It seemed certain that we would have good relations with China and be able to tap markets there. It seemed certain that we could exit from nuclear power and coal. It seemed certain that we could get cheap Russian natural gas. So a lot of certainties have vanished over the few years since the Covid pandemic. We now have to recognize, to our chagrin, that we no longer live in a safe Europe that can afford to abandon the internal borders within the European Union on the grounds that we have a functional, shared protection from outsiders. At the same time, we’re also realizing that we can’t wall ourselves off, and instead that dramatic refugee movements are causing many people to crowd into our country. As former German President Joachim Gauck said, our hearts are wide open, but our options are finite.

First of all, it’s not a bad thing that there are different poles in the world. That’s normal in the world, just as it is in a democracy. Democratic parties actually draw life to a certain degree from polarization, because it enables them to clearly highlight differences, and it’s also how they try to give voters a chance to choose one and not the other.
 
Polarization becomes a threat when it allies itself to resentment and begins to think in terms of “friend or foe.” Up to now, parties in Germany have been competitors, not enemies. It’s been different in the USA for years now – Republicans and Democrats there have become genuine enemies, fighting against the other side to protect the country from a presumed collapse if the other side gets into power. But anybody who’s convinced their competitor will ruin the country is also willing to resort to means that are actually forbidden in a democracy and in a state that obeys the rule of law. All at once, the ends come to justify the means. What was supposedly going to be protected gets destroyed. The USA is at risk of having that happen.
 
With the rise of the AfD party, and now also with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, friend-or-foe thinking and resentment have also returned to Germany. Along with an unbelievable heartlessness and coldness of the kind I’m seeing for the first time in Alice Weidel and Sahra Wagenknecht. I shudder to think that these political movements might achieve majorities in Germany. But we can do something about that. Up to now the democratic parties have left a no man’s land in areas like migration and internal security, and made promises that they ultimately couldn’t keep. That too leaves a gap for populists to fill. The two formerly big people’s parties especially, the SPD and CDU/CSU, have it in their power to correct these mistakes.

The social media are not the cause, but they do heighten the problem – especially among young people who run around on TikTok and other platforms. Social media are excellently suited to sharpen resentments, but they’re not so good at reproducing democratic discourse, because that’s more strenuous to consume since you have to deal with questions of fact and look for compromises. But compromise is the opposite of what earns lots of reach in social networks.

 
Here again, we mustn’t push the panic button. After all, current surveys show that between 70 and 80 percent of our electorate haven’t been taken in by the polarizers. On the other hand, we mustn’t misinterpret that as meaning that those 70 to 80 percent are satisfied with what the democratic parties are offering. Just the opposite. That’s why the most important task is first to keep this strong, democratic center stable. For that, politicians, parties, and occasionally also the media, have to deal more seriously with the topics that they’ve been sidestepping up to now because those things are unpleasant to deal with. What’s very certainly the wrong way is to retreat into cozy political-party dens where everybody promises each other what the party itself has been considering desirable for years. Get out into life, into Germany’s everyday lives and openness and curiosity about what people in our country are getting done, what they’re afraid about, and what they hope to get from government. Years ago, I told my party, you’ve got to go where things hurt, where things may smell and sometimes even stink. Because that’s the only place we’re needed. I got all sorts of applause for that – only nobody did it.
 
One thing we can just quit doing is constantly talking about an election campaign “against the right.” First of all, in Germany you’re allowed to be on the right, and also a nationalist conservative. What we need to defend against is right-wing radicals, right-wing extremists, and right-wing terrorists. To counteract those, we need to talk about the topics that push voters toward the extreme-right populists. The same goes for Sahra Wagenknecht’s national Bolshevik movement. The parties need to deal much more seriously with the underlying anxieties and the reasons for our people’s disorientation. That doesn’t mean doing a better job of explaining policies, which gets mentioned so often – our citizens understand the topics very well, they just want other positions and measures. An exemplary case there is migration, which these days is issue Number One, especially among right-wing populists. If the democratic parties aren’t able to agree on effective solutions to the migration question that can be put into action through the rule of law, that topic is still going to be a defining issue in the next Bundestag election too.

There’s no textbook solution. And there’s not going to be one general blueprint for the migration issue. But there are a whole group of measures, which have to start out with a communal signal to the outer world that Germany is no longer able or willing to de facto take on this task almost all by itself for all of Europe. Basically we’re experiencing a double failure in migration policy. First of all, we have no real control over the question of who can come here. And second, we’re failing at integrating those who are here, because we’re spending too little on it, we have too few people for it, and we don’t take enough trouble with it.

If the democratic parties aren’t able to ease the overflowing anxiety provoked by the unresolved migration issue, this is going to remain the defining issue and leave the gates wide open for all sorts of anger and resentment. But we don’t need an even bigger surplus of anxiety in Germany. Instead, to beat back polarization, what we need is a surplus of hope that’s also founded on the understanding that over the past few decades, maybe even over the past 200 years, this country has been able to do somewhat better than most other countries on earth. We’ve always been successful economically, and we’ve had the self-image of being a rich, innovative country that was the engine for European development and able to generate prosperity.

Workers know very well just how important their companies are for their own well-being. Nevertheless in the social debate there seems to be a disconnect between economic capability, economic success, and the social, cultural, and ecological living conditions that we’re able to enjoy here in our everyday lives more than almost any other country on earth. You can see that as a politician when you try to talk about economic policy. It very quickly takes on the odor of  disreputably lobbying “for those guys up top in business.” Our media certainly have played a role in that resentment. When I think of the nonsense that was circulating even in high-quality media in the debate about free-trade agreements with the USA and Canada, the stuff you got to read and hear there showed very little knowledge, but plenty of bias.
 
I’m certain it would also be a task for politicians to make it much clearer once again that attractive conditions for investment and innovation in Germany don’t mean pouring out floods of money to  economically powerful companies. Instead, it means we’re protecting Germany’s ability to innovate and compete, and thus ultimately everything we and our children and grandchildren want to enjoy in our country. Ultimately even the “Green Deal” for a climate-friendly Europe will only be possible if it’s preceded by economic capability. That would be the first step in generating a surplus of hope.

Henry Kissinger once said, “Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world.” It’s got to be clear to us that there’s still no way around the goal of European unification. Not so we can keep borders open and have the same currency everywhere, but because in this world of the 21st century, no single nation state in Europe will have any chance of getting its voice heard. That will be possible only for Europe as a whole.

That in spite of all the conflicts and frictions, Europe is an incredible signal of hope. Nowhere ever before in the world have people succeeded in transforming a bitter enmity, with war and genocide, into partnership and friendship in less than a single human lifetime. Europe is the only continent where it took not even one lifetime to transition from Auschwitz to Strasbourg.

Of course businesspeople have great opportunities. Because they talk with their employees about all the things that have succeeded in this country in the past, and what conditions we need so we can make sure things stay that way in the future. But the question is whether businesspeople and top executives dare to talk to their employees in an honest, open dialogue about our society’s future, and aren’t afraid of critical arguments arising.
 
Workforces are a mirror of society. Ultimately, management might be facing the same populist expressions of opinion and outbursts of rage that we experience in politics. The task is to resist shrinking away from them, and instead to take employees’ concerns and anxieties seriously, and try and find out how to ease the surplus of anxiety these people are feeling.

I think that no later than their election to parliament, many members of the legislature gradually begin to go through a development in which committee meetings and gatherings in party groups become more important than circulating among people at a firemen’s festival or parents’ meeting. That disconnect from the normal reality of many people’s lives has contributed to a growing distance from democratic politics. That’s why we need new procedures and platforms to bridge the gaps between institutionalized politics and those people who have become alienated from politics but still have a firm fundamental belief in democracy.

Steffen Mau, a macrosociologist at the Institute of Social Sciences of Humboldt University in Berlin, has done a lot of research on the situation in eastern Germany. He argues for the idea of planning cells or citizens’ councils. For instance, citizens of a town could be summoned by lot to develop an opinion and a draft decision within a given time on a given community problem, and they can consult any kind of expert on the subject. They might develop proposals, say, on how traffic routing in town might be changed. That has the crucial advantage that when we make plans we involve not just those who are directly affected, but truly the whole citizenry. Which creates a broad consensus about the common good that goes beyond individual interests. Because what often happens otherwise is that once the noise outside their front door has died away, people also lose interest, or else special interests get their way at the expense of the common good.

We no longer live in a time when thousands and thousands of American GIs spend years in Germany, find their spouse here, and then go back to the USA and shape the image of Germany there, and vice versa. Many Americans today no longer have European roots, they have Asian, Afro-American, Latin American ones instead. And Germany too is changing and has grown more diverse. So it’s no wonder the picture looks a bit more foreign on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
On top of that, of course, in the recent past there have been conflicts between the two countries that have also had effects. But ultimately, one thing is sure – even the greatest possible efforts to become more defensible and to work better together within Europe will take a long time to come even close to the capabilities that the United States of America has. So if only for reasons of security policy, we have to take an interest in still maintaining a solid partnership with the USA.

Exactly. Precisely because security and defense policy will take long periods of time, we need to concentrate on our strengths and start out where we can get better with relatively little effort and expense. And that means the European internal market, it means Europe’s and Germany’s ability to innovate. But for that, we need to significantly improve investment conditions in our country. That begins with corporate taxes, and it ends with the planning bureaucracy.
 
I think Germany’s geopolitical role is sometimes too heavily focused on military matters, though I realize defense capability is immensely important. But ultimately it’s our economic strength that will make the difference. The world appreciates us Germans not mainly for our values, but especially because of our economic abilities. And that’s why I would say “first things first,” or to echo Bill Clinton, “It's the economy, stupid.”