Vol. 20 · No. 2 · Issue 63 · Summer 2002 · pp. 1-48 (48)

Political Culture and Political Change in Eastern Germany
Theoretical Alternatives

Laurence McFalls

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Abstract

In the past century, Germany, for better and for worse, offered itself as a natural laboratory for political science. Indeed, Germany's excesses of political violence and its dramatic regime changes largely motivated the development of postwar American political science, much of it the work of German émigrés and German-Jewish refugees, of course. The continuing vicissitudes of the German experience have, however, posed a particular challenge to the concept of political culture as elaborated in the 1950s and 1960s,1 at least in part to explain lingering authoritarianism in formally democratic West Germany. Generally associated with political continuity or only incremental change,2 the concept of political culture has been ill-equipped to deal with historical ruptures such as Germany's "break with civilization" of 1933-1945 and the East German popular revolution of 1989. As well, even less dramatic but still important and relatively rapid cultural changes such as the rise of a liberal democratic Verfassungspatriotismus sometime around the late 1970s in West Germany 3 and the emergence of a postmodern, consumer capitalist culture in eastern Germany since 1994 4 do not conform to mainstream political culture theory's expectations of gradual, only generational change. To be sure, continuity, if not inertia, characterizes much of politics, even in Germany. Still, to be of theoretical value, the concept of political culture must be able not only to admit but to account for change.