Thesis Eleven

This article presents an overview of the institutional architecture and the organizing principles of the German welfare state, which is widely and rightly considered to be the model case of North West European Continental welfare states. The author's ambition is to be both systematic and historical in his presentation, emphasizing the process in which different layers of the historically evolved structure serve certain functions, such as poor relief, the protection of workers at work, the protection of workers outside of work, the determination of wages, and the level of employment. In the second part of the essay, the question under discussion is of what happens to this structure under the impact of German unification, European integration, economic `globalization', and lasting labor market disequilibrium. The third and final part outlines a policy proposal that aims at the strengthening of social citizenship rights which replace the `worker' as the reference unit of social protection with the `citizen'.

A comparison of the analyses of West German society in the 1960s in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and in the 1980s in Beck's Risk Society provides the historical frame for a reconsideration of the student movement of the late 1960s in terms not of its own self-understanding but of its place and role in the larger processes of social and cultural change in the Federal Republic. The idea of cultural revolution - one of the central, defining themes of the student movement - and its outcome are examined with reference to Schulze's cultural sociology of postwar German society.

In contrast to the home-made Nazi regime, the East German dictatorship was imposed by a foreign power and remained dependent on it. It did not cause a civilizational collapse comparable to Nazism, but it was more totalitarian in its efforts to subordinate all areas of social life to political control. This totalitarian logic resulted in a permanent dilemma: the party-state suppressed the innovative potential which at the same time it needed to achieve its modernizing aims. Various responses to this problem were tried in the course of the history of the GDR: phases of liberalization - loosening of control in various fields - were relatively brief and insignificant. Attempts to reform and rationalize the controlling centre were more characteristic of the East German regime; this strategy, combined with visions of a `scientific-technical revolution', may be seen as the GDR version of reform communism. When the leadership gave up such ambitions in the 1970s, the only alternative left was to pacify society by means of improving living standards and developing a more flexible policy towards the other German state. This minimalist strategy of survival left the regime defenceless when it faced a major crisis at the end of the 1980s.

Many voices now proclaim that we live in a global age. Doubts are cast on this view in this paper, particularly insofar as it suggests that the nation-state has lost its functional salience for modernity. A first argument suggests, by means of varied figures and analytic consideration, that the world economy is far from globalized. A second argument adds to this an insistence of national diversity within capitalism. None of this is to suggest that nothing has changed. To the contrary, the internationalization of the world economy is now embedded more firmly than it was in the past - as the result of a stable geopolitical settlement.