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' THE CDU AND GERMAN POLITICAL CULTURE: A CONFESSIONAL PARTY RESPONSE TO A CHANGING NATION by Christopher Raymond Byrne submitted to the Faculty of the School of International Service of The American University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in International Affairs Signatures of Committee: Chair: kjrusa CjO G-ry Dean T^<-, I ^ / Datef i / / 1991 The American University Washington, D.C. 20016 7227 THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY © COPYRIGHT by CHRISTOPHER RAYMOND BYRNE 1991 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE CDU AND GERMAN POLITICAL CULTURE: A CONFESSIONAL PARTY RESPONSE TO A CHANGING NATION BY Christopher Raymond Byrne ABSTRACT The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of the Federal Republic of Germany is an interconfessional Sammelpartei (catch-all party) based on the Catholic social principles of personalism, solidarism, and subsidiarity. This paper examines the development of the CDU since 1950, the way it shaped the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany, how well it has held to its principles, and its ability to maintain itself as the leading party in the united Germany based on CDU election campaigns, CDU history and the philosophical and ideological writings of leading CDU intellectuals. The CDU can take credit for helping to lead Germany to democracy and a functioning civil society; however, its abandonment of many of its Catholic philosophical roots in favor of protecting the economy may hurt its chances for leadership as it tries to transform Eastern Germany and serve as a role model for Christian Democrats in Eastern Europe. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Dr. Albert Mott, School of International Service, and Dr. Saul Newman, School of Public Affairs, for their guidance, suggestions, and support during the preparation of this thesis. I also wish to thank Mr. William Baker, School of International Service Graduate Office, and Mr. David Klein, Georgetown University, for their editorial assistance and encouragement throughout. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................... iii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ................................... 1 The CDU as the Focus of Study 2. POLITICAL CULTURE IN GERMANY ................... 9 Political Catholicism The Party System 3. CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND ITS INCARNATION IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF G E R M A N Y ............ 34 Personalism, Solidarity, and Subsidiarity The CDU Party Program as it Evolved in the Late 1940s 4. CDU PARTY HISTORY FROM 1950 57 The Role of Konrad Adenauer The Post-Adenauer Years The CDU in the 1980s Conclusion iv 5. THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC UNION AND ITS NATIONAL ELECTION CAMPAIGNS ............................. 88 The 1950s The 1960s The 1970s The 1980s 6. CONCLUSION ...................................... 122 The New Political Culture in Germany APPENDIX A. TOP FIVE LEADING ISSUES BY PARTY FOR 1949-1980 . 133 B. THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS IN RELATION TO THE STATE PIUS XII'S 1942 CHRISTMAS MESSAGE ............. 134 REFERENCES ............................................ 135 V CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Thomas Mann in 1918 described politics as "uncouth, vulgar and stupid." That politics taught "envy, insolence, and covetousness...causing the defilement of the national life....I do not want politics. I want practicality, order, decency" (Reichel, 1980, p. 384). This study deals with political culture and the role of a party in German political culture. Both terms, political culture and party, are the source of seemingly endless debate, both in English and in German. How the CDU sees itself in this debate will be examined. Geoffrey Pridham (1977), in his study of Christian Democracy in West Germany, addresses the problem of studying an individual political party. He sees three possible approaches: focus on party organization; its policies and goal orientation; and how it governs the country and its response to political developments. This study is a combination of the second and third approaches, with the main emphasis on CDU policies and goals in response to political developments. Pridham's work focuses on party organization for the most part; however, he encourages further study of the CDU in all three areas "because of the absence of a comprehensive and up-to-date academic study on the subject in either English or German" (Pridham, 1977, p. 15). In reaction to Germany's authoritarian past, the Allies and their German assistants created a Parteienstaat, a political system based on political parties, in the West in 1949. This is in contrast to the totalitarian Party State of the Nazi period, in which the National Socialist Workers Party controlled all aspects of government. In the Parteienstaat, the political parties are responsible for all political decisions. Article 21 of the Basic Law mandates formation of the "political will of the people" to the parties. As such, the effects of party doctrines and ideas, as well as voter responses to them, are reflected in the political culture of the nation. By contrast, the numerous and fractious parties of the Weimar Republic were unable to establish themselves as legitimate representatives of the people's will, especially in the face of possible presidential rule by decree. President Paul von Hindenburg did so from 1925 until Hitler's appointment as Chancellor and the passage of the Enabling Act in 1933. In Hitler's fever to rule by decree, the Reichstag ceased to exist as an operational entity in any democratic sense. The party landscape of the immediate post-war period contained many parties, ranging from the Communists on the left to the Socialist Reichs Party on the right. The two major parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), represented an "antebellum mass integration party" or Weltanschauungspartei (SPD) and a "postwar catch-all party" or Sammelpartei/Volkspartei. The SPD had acted before the war as a party of the working class. It saw that the bourgeois parties, for the most part, were unwilling to change from "clubs for parliamentary representation into agencies for mass politics" (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 183). The SPD, as a working-class party, had a socialist Weltanschauung and worked for the democratic participation and social integration of all class groups in an industrialized socialist state. The Federal Republic of Germany celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1989. Over those forty years, the CDU, in partnership with its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU), was a member of the coalition government for twenty-seven years (1949-1969, 1982-1989). From 1957 to 1961, the CDU/CSU had an absolute majority in the Bundestag. The legacy of the CDU is noticeable in the basic structures of the Federal Republic— in its Basic Law, in its economic system, and in its values. One sometimes speaks of the "CDU-State" when describing the German state and its functions (Heussen, 1982). The CDU, unlike the Social Democratic Party (SPD), began as a new party, geared toward the Federal Republic's Parteienstaat system. The CDU's precursor was the Catholic Zentrum of the Weimar era, a quasi-Weltanschauungspartei which worked for the social integration and political participation of all Catholics. Because of its denominational focus, the Zentrum could never become a mass party, since it excluded non-Catholics (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 183). The CDU attempted to be many things to many people— interconfessional, classless, and non-ideological— in other words, a "catch-all party." Irving (1979, p. 113) calls the CDU "dull, bourgeois, pragmatic, almost hysterically anti-Communist and excessively critical of political 'extremism', but at the same time staunchly committed to parliamentary