EASIER TO KILL THEM THAN BREED YOURSELVES:

World War II In The West's Political Imagination (Christopher Caldwell, 18 Sept. 2004, Financial Times)

For two weeks, German newspapers have been charting an approaching storm. Earlier this month, the ruling Social Democratic party saw its vote collapse to 31 per cent in regional elections in the Saarland, where scarcely a decade ago it was winning absolute majorities. More ominous still, the far-right German National party (NPD), which had won no measurable allegiance there since the late 1960s, narrowly missed winning seats in the state parliament, with 4 per cent of the vote. Clearly, many Saarlanders were outraged by the welfare reform package advanced by Gerhard Schroder, the chancellor. And some lurched to the xenophobic parties of the right.

In eastern Germany, where two more state elections take place on Sunday, the outrage is more severe and the lurch will be larger. According to Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, a German election-polling firm, the NPD is registering 9 per cent in pre-election polls in Saxony, while the equally hard-line German People's Union looks set to take 6 per cent in Brandenburg - both levels that would translate into ample parliamentary representation. This is leaving aside the Party of Democratic Socialism - the successor to the Communist party - which stands to win 27 per cent and overtake the SPD. Nothing is more novel about the upsurge of the right in Germany than the equanimity with which it is being received. In 1968, when the NPD took several dozen seats in a handful of regional parliaments, European observers anguished over the crisis. This year, the possible entrenchment of rightist parties in eastern Germany is taken seriously but not that seriously. In Germany, politicians themselves invoke the right's effect on employment as readily as they do the country's history. Mr Schroder was quoted in the Suddeutsche Zeitung as saying: "Anything linked to the brown (fascist) muck harms us, harms Germany and really harms us with foreign investors." Everywhere else, the German elections are fighting a losing battle for news space with the elections in the US.

If the world can take such an electoral realignment in its stride, part of the credit is due to the achievements of German democracy since the second world war. But there is a larger development at work: the war is losing its grip on the western moral imagination. Until very recently - and certainly as late as the Kosovo war - the second world war supplied European and American thinkers with their benchmark for the progress of civilisation, their criteria for acceptable and unacceptable statecraft and their rationales for military intervention.

It seems worth considering exactly the opposite possibility, that Germans are untroubled by the rise of extremist parties because they'd welcome a return of exterminationism, this time directed at Turks and other Muslims.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 25, 2004 5:21 PM