New Britain: new Germany. The two countries which often seem to represent opposite poles in European political and economic life are showing a remarkable level of interest in each other's fin-de-si?le realignments. This goes beyond the polite curiosity we might expect to show one another on the eve of the euro's arrival and the next step of European integration. It entails a kind of intimate narrative intrigue-a fascination in Germany with what will happen next to Tony, and characteristic British headshaking about whether Gerhard and Oskar can really get along together.
The German hunger for news of the latest Blairite bright idea is still a shock for those of us who remember insistent hopes that the Labour party of the late 1980s and early 1990s would remodel itself on the social democratic parties of continental Europe in general, and the German Social Democrats (SPD) in particular. When Neil Kinnock lost in 1992, I was working for The Times in Germany. London called to request an article on how Labour had to change to become more like the SPD. The day after the 1997 election, a German paper called to ask for an article on how the SPD could become more like New Labour.
In the manner of Cecily Cardew meeting Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, Gerhard Schröder decided, in the wake of Tony Blair's victory, that the two were going to be the dearest of friends long before they had even made each other's acquaintance. Blair became one of Schröder's most potent weapons in his campaign for the nomination to fight Helmut Kohl. Without the success in a related western democracy of a likeable moderniser who had triumphed over his own party's orthodoxies before he had won an election, Schröder would have struggled to cast off the reputation of an arrogant outsider. One of Kohl's senior strategists told me four months before the election that once the phrase "our Tony Blair" had been applied to Schröder and stuck in the public mind, his man was a lost cause. The one thing the great electoral Houdini could not be by definition, after 18 years in power, was a second Blair. Kohl belonged to another generation-Reagan, Bush, Thatcher and Mitterrand were his in-crowd.
Schröder exceeded his own expectations and those of his party by overturning Kohl's ten-seat majority by a solid enough margin to set up a coalition with the Greens. Having prepared itself psychologically for a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats, the SPD government finds itself in a position in which greater radicalism is expected of it than it had envisaged. This is one reason why Oskar Lafontaine suddenly appears such a commanding figure and why its first few weeks in power have seemed so rocky-in contrast with the near-perfectly orchestrated first 100 days of Blair in Downing Street.
A proportional representation system like Germany's entails several possible outcomes to an election, rather than the stark win or lose currently on offer in Britain. This makes it much harder for an incoming government to be as well prepared as New Labour was. It also means that the vagaries of coalition politics can produce outcomes for which there is barely a mandate. The SPD, for example, campaigned on a thoroughly anodyne platform-Schröder is not Kohl-stressing continuity and competence. And suddenly the political levers appear to be in the hands of two (by German standards) charismatic and unpredictable figures-Oskar Lafontaine and Joschka Fischer.
What about Gerhard Schröder himself? Bodo Hombach was his campaign manager and close adviser. He is often compared to Peter Mandelson, with whom he shares the task of joining up German thinking on the neue Mitte with Labour's quest for a Third Way. But Mandelson has sought a ministerial career and a political identity separate from his master. Apart from a stint as economics and transport minister in Schröder's fiefdom of Lower Saxony, Hombach is an outsider who spent most of his working life in business, ending up as chief executive of the trading and international sections of the Preussag group.
His new book, Aufbruch: die Politik der neuen Mitte (Departure: the Politics of the New Centre), is the first road-guide to the journey Schröder hopes his government will take. Aufbruch is a strong and romantic word in German-it suggests the kind of departure achieved by leaping on to a stallion and galloping towards a distant horizon, rather than on to the 5:33 to Orpington. And Hombach's enthusiasm for a new beginning is echoed by Schröder in an afterword which quotes Blair's demand that centre-left intellectuals "think the unthinkable."
Reading Hombach in conjunction with Philip Gould's recent book on New Labour, it is striking how shallow most of the comparisons between Labour and the SPD are, and how deep remains the gulf between the political cultures of the two countries.
Gould's book The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers saved the Labour Party, describes a kind of political coup that would have been impossible in the SPD. Gould worked with all the Labour leaders of the past 13 years and was Blair's private pollster in the 1997 campaign. But his main contribution to Labour's victory and, he believes, the key to its future dominance of British politics, lies in pre-empting the fears and hopes of the broad middle class. Gould is obsessed with middle England, scathing of the sentimentalism of cloth-cap Labour and the de haut en bas radicalism of the party's metropolitan elite. Such class consciousness finds no echo in Hombach.
Much has been made of the fact that both the new German and the British leader are hostile and mistrustful of their own parties, but only Blair brought his fight out into the open, when he rewrote Clause IV. Gould quotes Blair as saying at the time: "Past leaders lost because they compromised. I will never compromise. I would rather be beaten and leave politics than bend to the party," as if Labour's own ranks, rather than the Tories, were his most potent foe.
The SPD was (and is) more difficult to push in the direction of radical reform because it does not feel its 16 years in the wilderness anything like as keenly as Labour did. The federal structure of German politics saved the SPD from the ignominious confrontation with failure suffered by Labour between 1979 and 1997. The SPD had a majority in the Bundesrat, the second chamber, throughout much of its time in opposition, because it continued to run many of the L?der.
Not having had its nose rubbed in its inadequacies to the same extent as Labour, the SPD (and Hombach) remain discreet to the point of clueless about the causes of their routs. It took them four attempts to wrest the chancellorship from the CDU, under Johannes Rau, Hans-Jochen Vogel, Oskar Lafontaine and Rudolf Scharping. None of these failures underwent the humiliating post-mortems which Gould and Peter Mandelson conducted on the Labour party.
germany approaches the millennium as a unified country, albeit one still coming to terms with the aftermath of 1989 more slowly than its elite expected at the time. It remains much richer than Britain on most conventional calculations, even including east Germany. It has a leading, arguably dominant, role in a Europe whose great adventure, the single currency, reflects its long-held strategic aim of joining forces with France to determine the course of the continent. Outsiders in general still view Germany (or rather the former West Germany) as an impressively cohesive society. Francis Fukuyama, in his book Trust, names it as the European country with the highest "trust-rating"-between its citizens.
In these circumstances it is difficult to lead a crusade for radical modernisation, even if most of the electorate do seem permanently stuck in a gloom. But Hombach is not complacent. He rightly acknowledges that unification, European integration and global competition require a flexibility and lightness of touch which do not come easily in Germany. Thanks to its geo-strategic position during the cold war, these virtues were less highly prized than reliability and steadiness. They have to be re-invented in business, politics and diplomacy.
Hombach, like Gould, echoes the need to reconnect politics with the unpolitical masses. But his criticism takes the form, at least implicitly, of an attack on Germany's system of proportional representation which encourages a cosy political discourse dubbed by Hombach as the "between you and me" approach. Politicians speak openly to each other in private about serious problems such as the expected pensions shortfall in Germany, while conspiring to keep the gravity of the situation from the voters.
Germany is still far more elite-led-for good and ill-than more populist Britain. But the elite has not been quietly sorting out the country's problems. Hombach denounces the blockages which make it so hard to reform the welfare state or reduce unemployment. He also peers beneath the surface consensus and solidarity and sees fissures opening up in civil society, such as the increasing Streitlust (desire for conflict), reflected in increased recourse to legal processes. (The most popular new television programme tells you how to take your neighbour to court for petty infringements.)
In common with the handful of neo-liberal German intellectuals, Hombach saw the fall of the Wall as an opportunity to examine all the fixtures and fittings of national life. It would have been impossible to seek such a review of the cost-effectiveness of the welfare state, for example, when this was still a symbol of the Federal Republic's compassion, and thus a counter-weapon to East Germany in the cold war.
Today's Germany not only has a hugely expensive welfare system but also a growing exodus of talent to contend with. The number of young people leaving Germany to study or work abroad is startlingly high: 900,000 between 1989 and 1996, 300,000 in 1997 alone. "If the countries to which they emigrate were not so cautious about receiving them," adds Hombach, "an awful lot more would join them."
The sense among ambitious young people that their homeland has become, in the words of a Die Zeit headline, "M?es, Bl? Deutschland" (tired, stupid Germany) has not been addressed by mainstream politicians. Indeed, east Germany's former communist PDS produced the one outstandingly strong image of the election campaign on television-that of a young woman running against the direction of a mute and worn-out crowd.
The failure of Helmut Kohl's tax reforms-partly caused, though Hombach omits to say so, by the SPD-together with a stultifying parliamentary wrangle over spelling reform, contributed to a sense of national boredom and frustration in the last 18 months of the last regime. Hombach is honest enough to see that this "leaden heaviness" will not lift merely as a result of arrival in office of new faces under a red-green banner. The new coalition will be judged not only on its success in bringing down unemployment, but on whether its promised changes encourage people with ideas and verve to contribute to the export success-and the tax base-of their native land, rather than setting up restaurants in London or art galleries in New York.
Despite the vigorous language, both Gould and Hombach remain cautious when it comes to policy. Hombach compares the Dutch and US approaches to tax and welfare reform. He clearly prefers the US one, but concludes: "The Third Way between the traditional welfare state and market liberalism is still unevenly formed and must be tried out experimentally."
Both modernisers can be ahistorical in outlook too. The cover of Hombach's book shows Schröder and Lafontaine in victorious pose and the combination is heralded as a "dream team" on the opening page. But little mention is made of Lafontaine in the book, and no mention at all of the eco-socialism he discovered in the late 1980s. Gould, for his part, appears blind to the fact that there have been several old Labours and a few new ones already in this century.
But Blairite Labour differs substantially from foregoing attempts at modernisation-in its ruthlessness. As far as the shock troops of New Labour are concerned, the only good old Labour leader is a dead one. Attlee receives his usual obeisance from Gould, but Neil Kinnock, for whom he worked in the 1987 and 1992 campaigns, is described as drained, pale and tired, with a tiresome habit of losing both his temper and elections. (This last view has obviously rubbed off on Hombach, who is under the impression that the 1983 defeat was Kinnock's. As if the poor man didn't get enough flak for losing the ones he did...)
Gould is also the first to break ranks and not say a nice word about John Smith until he gets to his funeral. He portrays Smith as doubtful, in the end, about his own tax proposals in the 1992 election, but fearful of retreat. He recalls Smith's defensive words on the matter: "All we have in politics is our integrity. Neil has changed so much. I can't change at all."
Fretting over how much could be changed, by whom and in what circumstances, was a leitmotif of the early modernising of Kinnock and Smith and a reminder that the Labour party's roots lay in the essentially reactionary project of opposing social and economic changes and seeking to restrain the forces of modernity during the early years of the century. How arcane these debates now appear is testimony to how far the party has come. New Labour's relationship with change is its most fundamental reform. For the first time, a political project has been constructed around the principle that a party is not afraid to change its mind. Indeed, Blair's New York lecture went so far as to imply that the definition of the Third Way was the embracing of permanent flux.
even the language and imagery of Hombach's book seems to underline the large differences between the two cultures. So thoroughly has the cult of the personality been expunged from modern German life that in the whole of Hombach's elegant introduction to the modernisers' project, we never meet a single individual, but only groups: "the taxpayers," "the pensioners," "the young."
Where New Labour coins slogans like "the many, not the few" or "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime," Hombach's metaphors are more abstract such as "breaking through the blockage." Labour is fixated on the middle class (of people) while the SPD is obsessed by the middle ground (of politics).
Hombach/Schröder are trying to launch a debate about the social market economy and whether its present form is bad for employment. But the pressures on the government to funnel the jobless into work may mean that this is done in the old-fashioned way, by increasing government borrowing to finance work programmes, with resulting risks for the stability of the euro and little impact on the deeper causes of unemployment.
To this extent, the German project is more likely to collapse into what Blairites would regard as "old-fashioned" social democracy-high spending and more, not less, state intervention. New Labour, unlike the SPD, is built on an immoderate hatred of the left which "enslaved" (Gould's word) the party in the early 1980s. He uses the word "betrayed" as often as any Trotskyite. The SPD has not had an ideological split since the retreat from Marxism at the 1959 Bad Godesberg conference. This has been seen by the SPD mainstream as its great strength; it has also shielded the party for too long from self-scrutiny.
But the outstanding difference between the intellectual world of New Labour and the SPD is the strong awareness in Britain of Thatcherite neo-liberalism, a school which has never penetrated the robust defences of a German Christian/Social Democrat duopoly. Hombach returns insistently to the theme of "vulgar" market liberalism, which is automatically discredited without ever being defined or discussed. This is not limited to the centre left-Wolfgang Sch?ble, who has just replaced the defeated Helmut Kohl as leader of the CDU, once told me that his party would have "no dealings with the vulgar (that word again) excesses of Thatcherism."
Yet Gould's approach to Labour's recovery, post-1992, was to accept that Thatcherism had entered the body politic, and that Labour had first to understand and engage with these principles in order to build its own framework of ideas. Continental social democracy, by contrast, has such a strong identity that it has been insulated from acknowledging its failures, a fact which Schröder and Hombach have tacitly acknowledged by calling for a rethink of how the party can attract new members (the SPD lost over a tenth of its members between 1991-97 and the party is ageing fast). "The typical Social Democrat does not look exactly fresh," says Hombach, diplomatically.
Indeed, even the leaders have a good ten years on their British equivalents. Schröder, at 54, dyes his hair and is anxious to market himself as a member of the "younger" generation. His victory has brought to the fore a generation whose political sensibilities were formed by 1968 and who still know the words to Konstantin Wecker's Willy-the great anti-fascist folk hit of the early 1970s. The Blairite equivalents came to political awareness a decade later and tried hard to forget that they know the words to Billy Bragg, circa 1983. This age gap partly reflects Germany's greater conservatism when it comes to entrusting power to younger people.
One telling omission from the Hombach account is any adumbration of how the imminent move of the German government to Berlin will affect national sensibilities. Latent unease with the east and reluctance to discuss the place of patriotism and national identity, post-unification, remains a flaw in German social democracy. But there are signs that the first postwar generation in power does, indeed, feel less cramped by the past. Consider, in no particular order, the new Holocaust debate started by the leftish writer Martin Walser, Germany's assertiveness over EU payments, and Joschka Fischer's unexpected early radicalism over "no first use" by Nato.
Hombach's call for a new German politics of the centre, for all its boldness, is addressed to a society fearful of abandoning what it has and unable to see the real urgency of reform (see Lafontaine's own complacency about welfare in his latest book). New Labour's dilemma is different: how can a party which has made changeability a central part of its identity retain the virtues of consistency and reliability which inspire long-term trust? Gould reminds us that privatisation was Labour's main bogey in 1992. Now, of course, business is helping to run schools in poor areas. In a project as protean as New Labour, nothing is for never.
