A rchive Date
[ 13-08-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Germany ]
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The Last Welfare State
A meditation on the (compulsory) comforts of social democracy
By Peter Wilmarth
2000/08
Special Section
A nation, like a married couple, must decide what will be held in common and what will be owned separately. And such decisions say a good deal about what kind of countries and couples they are. How trusting they are, for example--of each other and of government, which in countries is generally the designated trustee of common goods.
Americans--and in this they lead the pack of developed nations--are choosing to hold less and less in common. They are industriously privatizing, deregulating and mass-customizing just about every once common good and service that they can lay their hands on. (On the marriage front, just to extend the analogy, there is the prenuptial agreement.) The implicit principle of these decisions is often the same one that is behind the well-known marketing slogan, lately elevated to a civil right: Where do you want to go today? In a word, the principle of choice.
Other countries, especially in the Old World, tend to view this notion of opting for choices--the more the merrier--as an invitation to national disintegration. They believe that what they hold in common--what in fact they've been given in common, older generation to younger, across classes, genders, and ages-- is what identifies them as compatriots. To make nationally shared goods a matter of choice (school curricula, health care), to hand them over to a private entity to administer them as it chooses (prisons, parks, "faith- based" charities), to fashion them for individual, family, or group tastes and needs (postal services, hundreds of cable television channels)--all this, it is felt, is to risk dismembering the country itself.
Germany is a well-known example of a country that clings to its common goods, to its givens. There are many other such countries, generally labeled social-democratic. But Germans are almost unique in beginning with a rather basic given good: Blut, or blood. They tend to believe, against all sorts of evidence, that there is such a thing as "German blood" and that it and it alone serves as the common basis for other common goods. Citizenship is the most important; it entitles all Germans not only to a voice in the governance of their city, state, and country, but also to the wondrously downy safety net that has been a feature of German life since Bismarck started it in the 1870s.
With respect to Blut, for example, every German woman has a right to fully subsidized monthly visits to an obstetrician during pregnancy; mothers and fathers have a right to ten weeks of paid leave from work at the birth of a newborn, and up to three years of unpaid leave (with guaranteed reemployment) after that. This program has not served to boost Blut production, unfortunately: Since 1970, the country's birth rate has languished below that needed to sustain the nation's current population level. As a public-policy expression of transgenerational solidarity, however, Germany's family benefits do very nicely indeed.
Such givens have one drawback, though, at least in American eyes: They tend to inhibit the flourishing of a culture, and an economy, of choices. Take education: Germans confront nothing like the choices faced by most middle-class American children and their parents when the time comes for schooling--corporation-sponsored schools, for- profit schools, traditional private schools and colleges, charitable rich folks' scholarship programs, charter schools, magnet schools, and, of course, the usual public schools. And in these schools, different, often "culturally diverse" curricula abound, some with--no, many with few or feeble courses in American history, culture, or government.
Germans, for obvious reasons, face none of the choices spawned by cultural diversity. Neither, of course, do they enjoy the formidable cultural strengths it lends. Germans essentially make one educational decision: They can study hard in grades K-10, thereby earning admission to college or university, or they can move along onto a vocational track that ends, thanks to German Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen (work-creation measures), in remunerative and benefit-loaded employment, often at a nearby factory or other business. Whichever choice they make, they will have no choice about studying German history, culture, and government-- they just do it. Likewise, in the decade following their schooling, the males among them have no choice but to serve their country for a year or so, either in the reserves of the Bundeswehr or in some form of civil service.
The common benefits enjoyed by German employees, at all levels, are well known in America. They are the envy of American workers, who may not realize (or care) how much they inhibit choice, and they are an object of scorn from American employers, who can't wait until they undermine German competition in global markets.
Both the envy and the schadenfreude may be premature. On the one hand, Germans will cling to their six-week holidays, their comprehensive health benefits, and the rest. They will cling to them because these are not merely a package of goodies euchred out of their bosses; they are symbol and substance of what it means to be German. On the other hand, almost without their realizing it, German workers are slowly surrendering their more costly benefits. The alternative is to watch their jobs get shipped out to the Ost.
Equally well known among bien pensant American arts lovers are the many ways in which Germans support their (high) culture. Subsidies abound--for the opera, for symphony orchestras, for museums, for the theater, even for tickets to same. These subsidies are supposed to underwrite a great common holding, and they surely do. But as with the various cultural import restrictions that Germany and other E.U. countries have adopted, the subsidies also aid the national patrimony in its competition with other culturally tempting choices--above all, of course, the vast array of pop-cultural enticements offered by the American entertainment industry.
Finally, as Germans slope toward mandatory retirement at age 65, they can look forward to a common reward for their labors on behalf of their country. German pensions amount to about 60 percent of their salaries--a generous sum by any standard. These are financed by employee and employer contributions as well as by government subsidies. Unlike American 401(k) contributors, however, Germans are not likely to be able any time soon to invest any portion of the funds in question in shrewd stock picks on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. That would be to turn over a traditional common legacy to unseemly speculation by competing individuals.
In one sense, this is an old story, this comparison between Old World and New. Where Germans see Americans atomizing themselves in an orgy of personal getting and spending, Americans see Germans courting national bankruptcy and, in response, another fit of lethal nationalism. Where Germans see Americans gating the commons and obsessing over equities, Americans see Germans backing the dead horse of "welfarism" and wallowing in gemuetlichkeit.
In another sense, though, it's a new story. Germany, like the rest of the world, is changing. More or less painfully, with more or less danger of reactionary spasms revolving around Blut und Boden, Germany is privatizing its common goods in the name of individual differences, individual desires. The transition will not be smooth or speedy, which is just as well; by the time it is complete, the Germans will have learned to live with dismemberment, if not to love it quite as much as Americans do. Meanwhile, sensible observers should take their stand somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, probably shading a little closer to the American coast.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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