The Legacy of Two Dictatorships for the Political Culture of a United Germany

Abstract

The political culture of a democracy stands in sharp contrast to the political culture of a dictatorship. German history is complicated, and its continuity has been broken many times. Germans are the only people in Europe who actively participated in the two great movements of the twentieth century, namely the fascist and the Communist movement, which went against parliamentary democracy and against the project of civil society. The transformation from an authoritarian to a democratic political culture is particularly difficult because value relationships of a political culture are relatively abstract, and their institutionalization in plural organizations is highly complex. Democracy is based on a self-legitimation of its structuring principles for those who are subject to these principles. Such a process of continuously renewed self-legitimation is always precarious and can only be achieved if system trust and—beyond that—system loyalty exist. System trust is not the same as system loyalty. The latter is based on compliance with the value relationships of the institutional order. These values are related to individual civil rights and to their realization in the framework of solidarity in the sharing of burdens and binding general legal norms.

Translated from German with permission from Springer. Original publication: Lepsius MR (2013) Das Legat zweier Diktaturen für die demokratische Kultur im vereinigten Deutschland. In: Lepsius MR, Institutionalisierung politischen Handelns. Wiesbaden, Springer VS, pp. 168–181. Translated and edited by Claus Wendt, University of Siegen/Germany, wendt@soziologie.uni-siegen.de.