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| ISBN-13: | 9780822397823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 382 |
| File size: | 487 KB |
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Reluctant Realists
The Christian Democrats and West German Ostpolitik
By Clay Clemens
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1989 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9782-3
CHAPTER 1
Union Ostpolitik from Adenauer to the Grand Coalition
The postwar German politicians who chose to label themselves Christian Democrats emerged from diverse political, religious, and geographic backgrounds. But this ideological "patchwork" had several strong common threads—above all a desire to expunge the legacy of Nazism by creating new political and economic structures infused with traditional Christian values. Though most early movement leaders and supporters were drawn from the old pre-1933 Catholic Center party, they appealed successfully for Cooperation between Germany's two long-divided Christian communities.
Early on, however, tension developed between those who wanted to let the Christian Democratic Union's initial burst of idealism propel it to political success and those with a more pragmatic bent. Many of the former, led by Jakob Kaiser, Ernst Lemmer, and Karl Arnold—men from the Catholic trade union movement in the Rhineland and Berlin—advocated a Christian "third way" between capitalism and communism, making Germany, socially and politically, a "bridge" between East and West. The CDU's Aahlen program of 1947 partly reflected this stream of thought. But the "Christian socialists" were handicapped because much of their grass-roots strength was in the Soviet-occupied zone, which quickly underwent Stalinization.
Moreover, they were outmaneuvered by Catholic Cologne's former mayor, Konrad Adenauer, who—though a cofounder of the new Christian Democratic Union—was skeptical of the Christian third way and aimed to transform Germany into a bastion of anticommunism. A master of sharp polemics and the ironic witticism, a tireless campaigner and stubbornly patient bargainer, this aging Rhinelander allied with south German conservatives against the trade union and Berlin wings of his party, and quickly rose to the top of the CDU. He also became chairman of the Council established by the Western-occupying authorities to draw up a constitution for the new West German state. At the same time Adenauer brought into the CDU a man whose economic policies had already proven popular and successful—Ludwig Erhard, father of the so-called social market economy: free enterprise rather than central planning, yet with some constraints on monopolies and social welfare programs to protect against the excesses of capitalism. In 1949 Adenauer was named the party's candidate for chancellor in the first federal elections following the establishment of the new state.
After the CDU eked out a narrow victory over his archrival, Social Democratic chief Kurt Schumacher, Adenauer formed a center-right majority coalition (including the nationalistic, conservative-liberal Free Democrats) and set about building the Federal Republic. First and foremost the chancellor wanted to make his country a paragon of stability and respectability, thereby erasing the legacy of Adolf Hitler. At the same time he was determined to mold West Germany into a bulwark against Soviet communism. These goals impelled him to purge the country of those extremist viruses on the left and right that he considered potentially fatal. The chancellor also aimed at undercutting Social Democracy, which he suspected was inherently vulnerable to Subversion from the far left.
To achieve these goals, Adenauer took personal command of the new federal government, which he maintained against challengers from his party or coalition partners for at least the first ten of his nearly fifteen years as chancellor. Under his paternalistic guidance the FRG became a "chancellor democracy." With supreme self-confidence, this elderly pragmatist regarded the survival of political stability in West Germany as dependent upon his continuing ability to shape its domestic and foreign policies.
Adenauer transformed the CDU into his personal political vehicle. Its express purpose became to assure the chancellor's reelection and facilitate his governance of the country. Only the party's top elected officials in the FRG's ten separate states maintained some influence over Adenauer; thanks to the country's federalist System they retained independent power bases, and decision-making in the party to some extent remained decentralized. Yet in general the regional "barons" shared Adenauer's basic goals. Consequently, year by year the Union's original ideological momentum slowed as it took on the character of a broad electoral coalition reaching out to all classes, confessions, regions, and interest groups of the center-right. As the Union co-opted and absorbed the smaller political rivals that had represented those diverse groups, its early idealism waned and was replaced by pragmatic political objectives. Intraconfessionalism remained a major leitmotif of the CDU, but more because of its desire to attract Protestant votes in the 1950s than because of any lingering idealistic Christian impetus. In spirit the Union abandoned its search for a "Christian path" between capitalism and socialism; enough of the party's initial progressivism on social issues survived to sustain at best a modest trade union–supported Christian socialist wing.
Under Adenauer's tutelage—and thereafter—the Union was thus formally a broad church that included some social and liberal groups but was dominated by conservatives and pragmatists. This was largely due to Adenauer's success as chancellor and Erhard's as economics minister. As the Union received ever-greater credit for a flourishing social market economy, waxing world influence, and respectability, its willingness to tamper with the Status quo waned. The party's famous 1957 election slogan—"No experiments!"—expressed its growing identification with the emerging West German social and political establishment. Industrialists as well as small-scale, independent businessmen and farmers became ready adherents of the chancellor's party. Eventually the CDU established auxiliary organizations to institutionalize the representation of large corporations and smaller private firms within the party (Germany's well-organized farm lobby also maintained close ties to the CDU). With Erhard as their chief spokesman, leaders of business and industry became a dominant force in shaping CDU economic and social policy, generally—if not always—prevailing over the Christian trade unionists.
Reinforcing the CDU/CSU's conservatism was the impact of the expellees. During the early 1950s a small, independent political party represented those thirteen million ethnic Germans who had been forced to leave territories lost to Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in 1945. Adenauer gradually co-opted and absorbed this party's supporters. Silesians, Upper Silesians, Pomeranians, East Prussians, Sudetens and the nearly twenty other expellee groups continued to maintain their own individual leagues, as well as an umbrella Organization, but they increasingly made the Union, and to some extent the SPD, their political home. Although younger expellees over time identified less with their Heimat or "homeland," their political spokesmen, fearful of being written off politically and historically, remained active. These vociferously nationalist and anticommunist politicians received a hearing in the Union.
But no factor more clearly bolstered the Union's conservatism than its dual structure. From 1949 onward it was not one party but two—the Christian Democratic Union throughout all of West Germany except the state of Bavaria, and the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria alone. Like the CDU, the CSU traced its political lineage back to a pre-1933 Catholic party, one that had fervently espoused Bavarian Catholic interests and resisted Protestant-Prussian domination of Germany. After 1945 there was an identity crisis among founders of the CSU, ultimately resolved by a decision to break with its pre-1933 predecessor's particularism and form a close partnership on the federal level with the CDU. The two branches of the Union agreed not to compete in each others' territory, and created a Joint delegation in the lower house of the federal parliament, the Bundestag. The CSU constituted from one-fifth to one-fourth of the Union group and maximized its influence by caucusing separately before each vote and confronting its sister party with a united bloc.
This unique relationship gave the CSU an opportunity to push its sister party in a more conservative direction. For though the CSU claimed to be a genuine catch-all party, its constituency remained predominantly Catholic, middle dass, and conservative. More important, the CSU overcame all competitors to identify itself successfully during the 1950s and thereafter with the fierce sense of Bavarian regional pride, a pride arising from that kingdom's centuries of existence as a distinct, cohesive political unit. In the words of one CDU official, "[For the CSU] national policy is always a bit of provincial politics." This sense of tradition, continuity, order, and affinity for the Heimat (CSU politicians often closed Speeches proclaiming "God be with you, land of the Bavarians!"), as well as the region's agrarian and middle-class social composition, made the CSU—as Bavaria's leading party—fervently anticommunist and antisocialist.
Enhancing the CSU's growing influence over its northern sister party was the shrewdness of Franz Josef Strauss, a top boss from the mid-1950s onward. His caustic oratory and autocratic style made Strauss the natural, at times brilliant, champion of hard-line Bavarian conservatism. Yet his fierce desire for a personal role in major issues of the day also made him acutely sensitive to shifting political winds, giving the stocky Bavarian the skills of an adept trimmer. As one Strauss advisor remarked, "There is no label for him; there are [merely] attributes." Admirers insisted that he maintained a clear set of guiding principles, but critics generally regarded him as totally lacking in consistency, a talented populist, or—less flattering, but more widely believed—a shrewd, if at times demagogic opportunist. But friends and adversaries alike agreed that the CSU boss by his very nature polarized opinion, often by vitriolic conservative rhetoric, often by unexpected shows of pragmatism.
From the 1950s onward, Strauss capitalized on the CSU's role as a Bavarian "bastion in Bonn" and its decisive importance in providing the Union a parliamentary plurality to influence overall CDU/CSU policy in a conservative direction. Because there was considerable, if not total, congruence between the views of Adenauer, Erhard, and Strauss, relations between CDU and CSU remained stable during the 1950s, though the CSU leader's ambitions and style then and later created tensions.
Economic prosperity and political stability, so closely identified with the figure of Adenauer (and to a considerable extent with Erhard), made the Union a successful establishment party. Adenauer's impressive longevity deferred the question of succession until the early 1960s, when he finally, reluctantly shared his power and then stepped down. Despite over a decade of political power, Adenauer's legacy included his party's organizational weakness; it continued to prosper during the 1960s largely on the merits of past achievement, an entrenched position within the halls of governmental power, and the still-popular appeal of luminaries like Erhard, who initially succeeded Adenauer but lacked the latter's skill. A strong, coherent, centralized party structure and a clear, identifiable political program open to new ideas were missing. This contributed to a drop in support for the Union. From a high point of 50.7 percent of the vote in 1957, it slipped to 46.6 percent in 1965 and 46.1 percent by 1969, an erosion of support large enough eventually to cost the party its control of the government.
Elements of Adenauer's Foreign Policy
CDU/CSU Westpolitik and German Unity
From its first day in power to its last, from September 1949 to Septe mber 1969, the CDU/CSU viewed itself as guardian of a revolution in German foreign policy—a revolution launched by that most unlikely of radicals, Konrad Adenauer. As part of his effort to sweep away the legacy of Adolf Hitler—totalitarian fascism and aggressive, racist expansionism—and to establish an entirely new order in what remained of Germany, Bonn's first chancellor fundamentally changed the country's relationship with its neighbors. Though Adenauer's Westpolitik in part simply reflected his cool calculation that the Western allies were in a position to shape postwar Germany's fate, he had more far-reaching aims. Adenauer hoped to end centuries of suspicious uncertainty about Germany's geopolitical orientation—Was it part of Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or a balancer between the two?—by turning the Federal Republic unequivocally Westward. He and his political heirs in the CDU/CSU believed that only harmonious relations with the West and commitment to Western values would restore Germany to a constructive role in world politics. Making Germany feel part of the Western Community of nations would also reinforce the transformation Adenauer hoped to achieve at home, namely the conversion of West Germany into a stable, durable democracy, free from the temptation of fascism, communism, or socialism. Close cooperation with the West and above all Europe's "guarantor," the United States—made tangible by a controversial decision in 1950 to contribute forces to the Western Alliance—also assured West Germany security against a perpetual threat to its long, exposed eastern border. Finally, Westpolitik guaranteed against a "return to Potsdam," that is, a return to the days of complete national impotence, when the country's fate was settled entirely by external powers in the absence of German representatives. For Adenauer, the complete Integration of the Federal Republic into an evolving West European federation allied to the United States, which had to be kept in Europe to counter Soviet power, was the optimal goal of this Westpolitik.
For Adenauer and his successors, Westpolitik took precedence over another aim—national unity. Before 1949 Germany lay partitioned into four zones of occupation (with Poland and the Soviet Union in control of the Eastern provinces); after 1949 the occupation zones became two states that would gain full sovereignty in 1955. As the party saw it, any attempt to reunify the nation should not interfere with the effort to regain respectability, rebuild democracy, provide for its security, and assure sovereignty—interests best served by Westpolitik and (at least until the mid-1950s) specifically West European integration. Binding the country's Western half to the Western camp in the Cold War was, given Soviet control over East Germany, bound to delay or complicate national unity, but Adenauer was ready to pay the price. He did not want to press German reunification at the expense of relations with the West or at the cost of democracy, for he believed that the only form of unified Germany the Kremlin would permit was a Sovietized or at least strictly neutralized state, as a large Germany armed and aligned with the West would be Moscow's worst nightmare. As the chancellor observed, neutralization of Germany would heighten the risks for all of Europe, creating a vacuum in Central Europe, effectively inviting some form of Soviet hegemonial effort. For that reason he remained eternally vigilant, suspicious that every Soviet hint of flexibility on the unity question represented an effort to play upon national sentiment and detach Germany from its newfound Western partners.
This order of priorities raises the question of whether CDU/CSU leaders were in essence ready to write off those parts of the old empire under communist control. Some historians maintain that Adenauer not only accepted but welcomed the loss of largely Protestant Prussia, which had occupied and attempted to "Prussianize" his own overwhelmingly Catholic Rhineland during the nineteenth Century. Moreover, Adenauer and many of his supporters partly blamed Prussian militarism for Germany's catastrophic war efforts. Given these views, his Weimar-era proposals for an autonomous Rhineland and his enthusiasm for complete Integration of the FRG into a unified Western Europe, Adenauer was often considered a Rhineland Separatist or a Carolingian—that is, someone inclined to regard Germany's Western regions and France as what they were in Charlemagne's time, part of a Western world not yet divided by nationality, and held together by the Church.
On a less lofty plane, Germany's division was also said to serve the purely political interests of any party that—like the CDU/CSU—initially drew most of its support from Catholics. Those areas of Germany under Communist rule were predominantly Protestant, ensuring that the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in the Federal Republic was far more favorable to Adenauer's party than it would have been in Germany as a whole.
The Bavarian character of the CSU could be said to have given it an equally small stake in German unity. Many early CSU leaders even found the FRG's creation a threat to their region's autonomy. This residual particularism reflected how well the CSU embodied Bavaria's antipathy for anything north of the River Main. Rival CSU concepts of Bavaria as a Christian bulwark against or a Christian missionary to the rest of Germany were both fundamentally anti-Prussian and anti-north German visions. For the CSU, the nation's dividing lines ran both north-south and east-west.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reluctant Realists by Clay Clemens. Copyright © 1989 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Abbreviations,Foreword,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
I: The Origins of CDU/CSU Foreign Policy,
1 Union Ostpolitik from Adenauer to the Grand Coalition,
II: Debate over the Eastern Treaties,
2 The Initial Agreements, 1969–1971,
3 From the Ratification Debates to Karlsruhe, 1972–1973,
III: Beyond the Eastern Treaties,
4 Interpolation: Beyond the Eastern Treaties,
5 Finding the Limits of Ostpolitik, 1973–1976,
6 The Changing Ostpolitik Debate, 1977–1979,
7 Crisis and Consensus, 1980–1982,
IV: Conclusion,
8 The Union's Ambivalent Adaptation,
Postscript: The Union in Government, 1982–1988,
Appendix,
CDU/CSU Leadership Factions on Ostpolitik, 1969–1974,
CDU/CSU Leadership Factions on Ostpolitik, 1974–1982,
CDU/CSU Leadership Factions on Ostpolitik, 1982–,
Party and Government Positions (1969–1982),
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,