Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker, A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC SIGH:
Furthermore, it’s not as if German conservatives are a bunch of crazy far-right nihilists. This is not the Republicans we’re talking about. Both the CDU and the FDP recognize the urgency of global warming. Neither of them has a problem with gays. (The FDP’s leader, soon to be foreign minister, is the country’s other openly gay political bigwig.) Nor do they have a problem with allowing a woman to end a pregnancy if she feels she must, or with telling kids to use condoms if they can’t resist having sex, or with the theory of evolution, or with gun control—or, for that matter, with “socialism.”
People have “schema” which they use to organize their models of the world. In many ways conservative parties in Europe, in particular on the Continent, are oriented in what to an American would seem to be a socialist direction. Social insurance famously began under the Prussian junker Otto von Bismarck as a pragmatic measure. But life is more complicated than simply shifting the political spectrum to the Left. Note that the dominant conservative parties in Germany are called the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union. Their basis of support are among Catholics and conservative Protestants, and their connection to religious sentiment goes back to the old Catholic Centre Party. Therefore, it should not surprise that Hertzberg’s glib assessment is a bit misleading:
As a result, in 1976, West Germany legalized abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy for reasons of medical necessity, sexual crimes or serious social or emotional distress, if approved by two doctors, and subject to counseling and a three-day waiting period. In 1989, a Bavarian doctor was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and 137 of his patients were fined for failing to meet the certification requirements.
The two laws had to be reconciled after reunification. A new law was passed by the Bundestag in 1992, permitting first-trimester abortions on demand, subject to counselling and a three-day waiting period. The law was quickly challenged in court by a number of individuals – including Chancellor Helmut Kohl – and the State of Bavaria. The Federal Constitutional Court issued a decision a year later maintaining its earlier decision that the constitution protected the fetus from the moment of conception, but stated that it is within the discretion of parliament not to punish abortion in the first trimester, providing that the woman had submitted to state-regulated counselling designed to discourage termination and protect unborn life. Parliament passed such a law in 1995. Abortions are not covered by public health insurance except for women with low income.
First, note that there was resistance from German conservatives in the 1990s toward perceived liberalization of the abortion laws. Second, it is a fact that the people who reside in the former GDR have seen a rollback in terms of the right to an abortion in the united Germany. Third, German abortion laws are still more restrictive than in the United States.
American liberals often chide conservatives on their one nation parochialism. But the reality is that everyone is shaped by their own local lens, and the Left can’t help but project their own categories and dualities onto Europe.
H/T Matt Yglesias.
As I have commented on here before, I have some German friends (mostly lefty Social Democrats) and they are uniformly horrified by the American approach to abortion once they figure out what it is. One friend of mine who is a German medical student told me that unless a pregnant woman acts very early and very quickly to terminate the pregnancy, the unspoken policy is to “run the clock” to make sure that the necessary approvals weren’t given in time for the woman to have an abortion. Of course, there’s no social science validity to these observations — they are only offered as anedotal evidence that the abortion issue particularly is subject to very different sensibilities across the pond.
One thing about the Germans (and maybe the Europeans in general) is that the “right” there doesn’t really have a non-statist element to it. On things like abortion, there is no libertarian right to ally with lifestyle leftists to ensure a strong commitment to abortion rights. Of course, this means more nagging day to day big government, but it also means a public policy that is far more socially conservative than what is found in the coastal area of the U.S.
Pingback: The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Why Not Hendrik Uber Alles?
All sorts of interesting ideas here.
First, Hertzberg’s history of the SPD is a bit rosy. Yes, as he acknowledges, the party did support their country’s involvement in WW I (as did most other European socialist parties). And yes, the SPD was outlawed by the Nazi government, and many of its members were persecuted.
However, the record of the SPD with regard to communism/bolshevism is a bit spottier than Herzberg describes. It is true that many SPDer’s were ardent anti-communists. But the communist party in the DDR (East Germany) was known as the SED, (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), or Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Hmmm, I wonder where the unity came from? The SED was formed by a unification of the German Communist Party (KPD) and elements of the SPD. To some extent, this unification was forced by the Soviets. But it wasn’t entirely forced – there is no doubt that more than a few members of the SPD thought this was just peachy-keen. Some became disillusioned and were purged from the SED, but others enthusiastically supported the SED and its worst excesses. The SPD and its admirers don’t like to talk about this too much.
The German Left today is indeed very fragmented among the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke, and they mostly don’t like each other. The SPD is divided into two main factions – the pragmatic centerists (Gerhard Schroeder and the like) and the far lefty keynesian types, who always want to raise taxes and expand the welfare state. Their support is concentrated in the big northern cities (Berlin and Hamburg plus a few others) and in the industrialized Ruhr. Social issues (abortion, guns, school prayer) don’t play much of a role in Germman politics.
I have a friend, an American who has lived in Berlin for many years, who is an astute observer of German politics. He said that, regardless of who wins an election, nothing in Germany changes very much. The CDU and the SPD are very comfortable with each other. He also says the the SPDer’s can be divided into two groups – the far lefties, who think that if they keep tinkering with socialism, everything will finally fall into place and all will be wonderful, and the centerists, who know that socialism will never work but support it for selfish political purposes.
The actual German laws on abortion are far more restrictive than in the US and they have a much lower abortion rate. Their abortion rate is similar to the white abortion rate in the US. You have to have a reason for the abortion.
In the US the black abortion rate is very high, about 50% of all black pregnancies. Also, the black rate is very high for late term abortions. There are only 17 million black women in the US and blacks have had approximately 14 million abortions since 1973. There are about 100 million white women in the US and whites have had about 25 million abortions. About half of all abortions performed are not the first one the woman has had.
One woman blogged about her late term abortion and also noted many blacks at the clinic.
http://1outof3.blogspot.com/2009/01/day-1-waiting-room.html
“Day 1 The Waiting Room
When I arrive I cannot believe how crowded it is; young women mostly, many African American.”
An abortion provider blogged that being black was a risk factor for late term abortion.
http://abortioneers.blogspot.com/2009/10/second-trimester-abortion-provision.html
In the US, the known risk factors associated with presenting for second trimester abortion include: adolescence, drug and alcohol addiction, poverty, difficulty obtaining funding for the abortion, and African-American race.[1], [2] and [23]
With such different utilization rates, it is plausible that more restrictive abortion laws would disproportionately affect blacks and increase their birthrates accordingly.
Being from Germany myself I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the issue.
On the abortion issue: Germans are overall not a particularly religious people (in fact East Germany is probably one of the most atheist places in the world) and the churches have almost entirely failed to stop the advance of a mostly non-religious public mind. But religion has fared well where it appeals to Germans’ idealistic love of nature (Germans are environmentally obsessed and have a penchant for the esoteric as well) and Germans’ fear of any sort of life/death decision issue whether it’s on assisted suicide, the death penalty, shooting to kill in wars or abortion etc. (which obviously has to do with the nasty business of the Third Reich).
On the CDU, calling them a conservative party is rather misleading. Conservatives by American definition are virtually non-existent in Germany anyway as continental European conservatism never fully embraced free markets and doesn’t have its intellectual roots in the Founding Fathers’ 18th century enlightened liberalism but rather the monarchies of Europe which of course were “big government” in their own way.
But even by a European definition of conservatism the CDU isn’t really conservative, it understands itself as essentially the party carrying the state and thus is mostly a pragmatic coalition of the center. The Center Party out of which it was borne was never a party of the Right and always had a strong component of catholic social justice activism which in practice often made them a more likely friend of the SPD than conservative parties. It’d be wrong to say though that this “left wing” of the CDU dominates the party, the party is mostly a vehicle of power for its clients in the slightly more business-oriented part of Germany’s mainstream and as such has an aversion to pretty much any committed ideological agenda beyond basic benchmarks set by Germany’s constitution. Conservatives, Christians, free marketers, nationalists, centrist trade unionists all on occasion get a bone thrown their way but in the end the course of the party is decided in the corridors of power which are almost as oblique today as they were in the days of Bismarck and Count Metternich. It has to be said that Germany to this day is a rather paternalistic state and society. The CDU embodies the “father knows best” understanding of politics maybe more than any other party (a rather stark contrast to the basic American conservative distaste for government control and interference in life). The basic German political mentality can be summed up as “There’s a government program for that” and CDU and SPD are both firmly invested in delivering on that.
Even the pro-business FDP in spite of its rhetoric of tax breaks and public sector reforms essentially promises government activism and will angrily refute claims they don’t care about social justice. Social justice, a leftist mantra in the U.S. is an item of the general political consensus in Germany and the suggestion that people should ever be left to fend for themselves in life without the government being involved somehow to supposedly improve their lot is essentially considered barbaric by broad swaths of the public.
Yes, precisely, German “conservatives” are far more statist than American ones.
Pingback: Secular Right » Notes