VoxEU.org: German division and reunification and the ‘effects’ of communism

The location of the border between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is not the random outcome of where American, British, and Soviet tanks stopped at the end of WWII in 1945. Instead, in anticipation of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the three allied forces had agreed in 1944 on a division of post-WWII Germany into Soviet and Western occupation zones that followed the pre-WWII borders of the German Empire states and the provinces of the largest state, Prussia (with a few very minor exceptions for geographic connectedness). As a result, the East–West border separated the populations of pre-existing regions with distinct histories and cultures.

Since the border follows pre-existing regions, we can explore pre-WWII county-level data to investigate whether West and East differed in relevant dimensions. A first dimension is the size of the working class, strongly emphasised by communist countries. Inspecting pre-WWII data, we see that the East Germany already had a substantially higher working-class share in 1925 (Figure 1), well before the area became communist. The difference between East and West in working-class share amounts to 12 percentage points. In fact, the working-class share jumps quite abruptly in several regions around the later inner-German border: it is significantly detectable when focusing on counties within 100 kilometres of the later border or on the counties that have a direct contact with the later border. [...]

East and West were differentially affected by WWII and the occupying forces. Using data from the German Census jointly administered in all four occupation zones in October 1946, we show that the ratio of men to women was substantially lower in the Soviet zone. No such differences had existed in the last pre-WWII census, in 1939. [...]

What is sometimes overlooked is that also about half a million people migrated from the West to the East before 1961. GDR propaganda describes them as “not in agreement with the capitalist system”. We show that six of the 19 Politburo members in the early GDR (1949–1961) had been born in what became West Germany, including long-time GDR leader Erich Honecker. Taken together, the evidence suggests that there was selective migration and sorting by political preferences.

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Aeon: How the philosophical paradox of aspiration is resolved by a new theory of self-creation

Let’s say you’ve decided to enrich yourself by learning to appreciate classical music, even though you didn’t have much previous interest in it. Such a resolution is hardly uncommon, but acting on the aspiration requires you to value an activity that you don’t yet know how to. In this video, Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, borrows from her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) to put forth a solution to this paradox centred on understanding our current and future selves as inexorably bound through the act of aspiration. Further, she argues, in resolving this paradox, we can understand ourselves as responsible for the act of self-creation – and, by extension, for our own morals and values. This video is part of the series Into the Coast, which sets out to capture philosophy as a ‘living discipline’ through interviews with leading academic philosophers.

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UnHerd: Can Keir Starmer rescue Labour?

Keir Starmer was victorious because he was the best candidate to take Labour to at least some sort of electoral respectability. His campaign was planned, professional and aimed at Labour members exhausted by repeated defeats. That, for now, is enough to give him a mandate that will last beyond the exceptional politics of the coronavirus crisis. His actions in the first few days of his leadership are already indicating that this professionalism maybe the hallmark of a new era. In this he has been helped by the weakness and division of his opponents within the party. [...]

This failure was compounded in the election for deputy leader. Since 2015 the left has unified around single candidates and slates to win elections. Not his time. It was split between support for Angela Rayner, nominated by Momentum, and Richard Burgon, supported by McDonnell. Rayner won her victory; Burgon was beaten into third place. [...]

What will Keir Starmer do and how quickly? Historically, Labour leaders focus on two aspects of leadership: management and policy. Neil Kinnock was the example of a leader who used the party machine to attack Labour’s internal dissenters and show the electorate it was serious. It was his courage in the Eighties that paved the way for New Labour in the Nineties. He brought in new, younger management of the party, most notably in the form of Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications in 1985, but also promoted young new MPs such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most of the future New Labour government. [...]

The first item will be cleaning up anti-Semitism. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been summoning evidence from a wide range of Labour members to get into the history of this mess, going back to when Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. There are pending legal as well as political consequences. Labour has to show not just contrition for the past; it has to reveal its managerial and political failures and then prove that it has a defined route to ensure they are never repeated. Action has to happen immediately and be visible.

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UnHerd: The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

War For Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (published on 21 April) reads a bit like Dan Brown’s pol sci doctoral thesis — standby flights to Washington, 3am Skype calls with Kremlin advisors, mittel European intrigue in Budapest, racists in ashrams, a Black Hand of high-end political operators, all united by their faith in a shadowy paleo-religion.[...]

The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies. [...]

Most influential of all is Aleksandr Dugin, a long-time foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin. Though his relationship to the Kremlin has often been informal, it was Dugin’s ‘tanks to Tblisi’ sloganeering that persuaded Putin to seize South Ossetia in 2008, and his dreams of a greater Russia that undergirded both the taking of Crimea in 2014 and the continuing attempts to hack bits off eastern Ukraine. Dugin even wrote a book on Traditionalism: The Fourth Political Theory. [...]

The question of whether Traditionalism is a religious ideal with political dimensions or a political one with religious ones is never quite resolved. At its heart, it takes a sort of gnostic, Unitarian ideal of faith. It hardly matters which faith — but older, more ancestral creeds are prefered, which is why so many Scandinavian neo-Nazis embrace Wodin and Thor, and why Hinduism is considered an acceptable choice for the modish skinhead intellectual. It’s ancient, it’s pantheistic, it’s bafflingly non-linear. Which is why in 2009, two of America’s alt right founding fathers, John B Morgan and Daniel Friberg, ended up living at a Hare Krishna temple near Chennai. [...]

But Bannon is also far more pragmatic than either Dugin or de Carvalho. He seems to draw upon his intellectual tools like a bag of golfing irons. He tells Teitelbaum that “Traditionalism is a total rejection of racism in that it is a brotherhood of the spirit”. What he seems to be, at base, is anti-liberal. Be it in trade, migration, or even education.

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Social Europe: Only a ‘New Deal’ can rescue the European project (7th April 2020)

The combined sanitary and economic crisis that the new coronavirus brings upon us may in the short term seem one that affects some European Union member states more than others. But it will soon become a systemic crisis for the EU as a whole and not just for the eurozone. [...]

This is not the time to reopen a discussion on the responsibilities of the member states, or for a beauty contest among the more or less virtuous. Comparisons with the 2008 financial crisis are inherently misleading. This is an exogenous shock, and it hits all member states. Some of them might be able to put on their own recovery plan, with national budgets. But this will not save them. If some countries face, in the coming months, a structural crisis of their public health services and a deep and long-lasting recession, all member states will, at some point, be affected. [...]

The European Union must seize this opportunity to overcome its divisions and mobilise the necessary resources both to help the Member States and to develop its own European action. Issuing a specific kind of European bonds to complement the gigantic effort already made by member states to strengthen their health systems and their economies is the smartest and cheapest way to prevent a violent destruction of human lives and of millions of jobs.

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