Willy Brandt: the Life of a Statesman, Part 8 of 12
Small is beautiful, and big is also beautiful
The post war boom was the greatest economic boom in history. It lasted from 1945 to 1973, but it was already starting to stumble by the end of the 1960s. Its end would bring on the curse of neoliberalism, austerity, floating currencies that lead to frequent balance-of-payment panics, falling productivity, weakening growth, and the decentralization of the world economy, as power leaked away from the USA and Europe.
Eventually it would pull all Western nations to the right, but the immediate effect was to loosen the status quo that had been keeping moderate conservatives in power. The result was 16 years when Left coalitions had the upper hand, in Germany and then in France.
For Germany, it was the moment to integrate the shattered pieces left scattered after the war.
In Europe, as in the USA, it is noteworthy that the younger generation felt that it was establishing a beautiful future in which people would be freer than ever before. This turned out to be true only regarding sexuality, which was increasingly spoken of as a kind of commodity, over which people should be granted the same freedoms that consumers were granted in other areas, regarding other commodities. For both straights, and especially for LGBQT individuals, society became less repressive regarding sex. But in terms of the class war, it reasserted itself, with the wealthy and the corporations gaining the upper hand and rolling back some of the reforms of the mid 20th Century.
As to freedoms won by LGBQT individuals, and also women in general, since 2016 we’ve seen significant pushback.
I wish this era had seen more experimentation with the large-scale architecture of government, and therefore of democracy, but the opposite happened. A long era was beginning during which it would be common to complain about bureaucracy, in both business and government, and, especially after 1980, the problems of bureaucracy were treated as unsolvable, or rather, the only solution anyone could think of was to get rid of bureaucracy, through some combination of decentralization, outsourcing, privatization and individualism. Of course, none of these things solved the problem. Though people might dream of either a libertarian paradise, or an anarchist paradise; a world where everything is simple and small, the reality is that we have 8 billion people living in the world, and the only way to provide them with both justice and a good standard of living is to solve all of the problems that exist with bureaucracy.
E. F. Schumacher would eventually write “Small is beautiful.” He also wrote for Resurgence magazine, which had the tagline, “Against Washington and Moscow, not because they are wrong, but because they are too big.” Consider this bit from his book:
“Socialists should insist on using the nationalised industries not simply to out-capitalise the capitalists – an attempt in which they may or may not succeed – but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort.”
This sounds like excellent advice to me, but it cannot be done without first solving the problems of bureaucracy, and once those problems are solved, it will be reasonable to write “Small is beautiful, and big is also beautiful.”
Willy Brandt
Life of a Statesman
By Hélène Miard-Delacroix, 2016
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Page 97-99
The Economy in Trouble, and the Grand Coalition
Over the course of a few months in 1966, West Germany was plunged into a state of uneasiness. Opinion polls revealed a sudden crisis of confidence. After more than a decade of impressive economic results, Federal Germany was experiencing its first recession. For the first time since the inflationary episodes of the early postwar years, prices rose, growth stalled and unemployment went above 2.5 percent. This was an unheard-of-figure after years of full employment, when German industry had had to employ immigrant workers in massive numbers just to be able to meet demand. Miners’ strikes in the Ruhr were the final confirmation of the failure of the Erhard government’s economic policy, despite Erhard being known as ‘the father of the economic miracle’. The ghosts of the Weimar and the 1930s reared their heads again, after a period in which growth had been the new norm. The extreme right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD) won enough votes to cross the 5 percent threshold and gain representation in several state parliaments.
In the autumn of 1966, the Erhard coalition government was in crisis; on 27 October, the little liberal FDP party left the government, and new negotiations between the three main parties had to be held in order to form another coalition. For some at the SPD, the best solution was to form a grand coalition uniting the two major parliamentary wings, right and left. After the Spiegel affair of 1962, Herbert Wehner had already started working towards such a possibility. Brandt preferred the idea of forming a coalition with the liberals, with whom he was now cooperating in Berlin, but he allowed himself to be convinced in the end, and indeed a coalition with the CDU was not a completely unknown entity to him, as the SPD and CDU had already formed a coalition in the Berlin state parliament in 1963, before the CDU had objected to his border-crossing agreement. An undeniable advantage of such an alliance between the two big parties would be that it would enable the passing of social reforms that required a two-thirds majority, because they affected the Constitution. On 25 November, the SPD agreed to a partnership with the CDU/CSU, and the new coalition government was created on 1 December 1966.
...Slightly against his own better instincts, Brandt accepted Wehner’s offer. He left the city hall in Berlin behind and took charge of the FRG’s foreign affairs, becoming the second most powerful man in the government, with the title of deputy chancellor. He took Klaus Schütz, one of his closest allies in Berlin, with him. Schütz had been in charge of the technical aspects of Berlin’s relationship to the FRG. Brandt’s appointment as head of West German diplomacy was welcomed by the Allies and in particular by Paris. Brandt had acted as the FRG’s spokesman abroad for some time, so in a certain sense his appointment just made what was already the de facto situation official.