Political Culture in France and Germany (RLE: German Politics)

A Contemporary Perspective

John Gaffney, Eva Kolinsky

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317560777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, originally published in 1991, assesses how attitudes, political orientations and social values changed during the five decades after the Second World War. The case studies in the book focus on key 'sites' in political culture: in France, on the extreme right, the cinema, the impact of media personalities and changes of political discourse; in Germany, on the decline of regional identities, the emergence of specific issues and the concern of political parties with the effectiveness of language. This interdisciplinary study provides new insights into the way French and German people see themselves.

1
French Political Culture and Republicanism¹

John Gaffney

As the Fifth Republic, created in 1958 in order to resolve the grave but relatively short-lived political crisis caused by the Algerian issue (1954-62), enters upon its fourth decade, it is appropriate to review this, by traditional republican standards, strange republic. Deep social and political divisions have characterised all French regimes since the Revolution of 1789. The Fifth Republic, with its ambiguous constitution, has, for two decades since the death of its founder, Charles de Gaulle, seen a developing consensus of opinion to the point where opponents of the regime, with the ambiguous exception of 'the events' of 1968, have been politically powerless. Since 1958, elections, referenda and national opinion polls have indicated repeatedly that a large majority of the French (doubtless for varying reasons and with differing degrees of allegiance) support the regime. The same elections, referenda and opinion polls, over the last 30 years, moreover, seem to indicate a significant and developing consensus of support for the main institutions and orientations of the Republic: the Presidency, the National Assembly, the Senate, French foreign policy, and the role of France within Europe; and an equal consensus upon a more diffuse set of issues concerning the economy, the procedures (conflictual and consensual) for resolving disputes between economic actors, law and order, the role of the state, national defence, women's rights, personal aspirations, life-styles, education, and civil rights. Moreover, the Fifth Republic is the first to have won acceptance by the Catholic population, historically hostile to republicanism.² Consensual attitudes on many issues have not only indicated support for the regime from within civil society, but have also been a significant causal element in major revisions in political ideologies as political parties and movements have responded to the evolving political culture.³ As the economic crisis which began in the 1970s continues, the developing politico-cultural consensus has not embraced all issues. The combination of developing consensus and continuing economic crisis has indeed strengthened certain aspects of non-consensual political life, the rise in the 1980s of the Front National being the most spectacular demonstration of this.

Varying degrees of dissensus persist on issues such as immigration, the redistribution of wealth, employment, the relation between state and private education, the roles of and relationships between the several political 'actors' (the President and the government, the media, trade unions, and state-owned companies), the rights and responsibilities of employers, the state and the workforce, state centralisation, and state dirigisme in economic affairs. This dissensus sometimes involves only the political elites as they labour to distinguish themselves from their electoral opponents. The left marked itself off from the right in this way in the late 1970s; the traditional right did the same in the first half of the 1980s for identical reasons when the left was in power between 1981 and 1986.

This limited dissensus and political uncertainty throws into high relief the importance and meaning of 'consensus' and 'support for the regime', as well as the question of the strength of the regime's institutions. To what extent is regime support an active phenomenon? If, from opinion polls and surveys, it can be concluded that more than three-quarters of the population are generally in favour of the Fifth Republic, what are the springs and the limits of this sympathy? How are degrees of allegiance to be assessed? Is 'consensus' the reflected view of a population which passively or indifferently tolerates the regime, but which would not defend the Republic if a major crisis in the economy were to provoke a social and political crisis? How embedded in the political culture and 'hearts and minds' of the French is the Fifth Republic? Does 'the Republic' mean anything to a generation brought up on television, consumerism, the technological revolution, and the threat of unemployment?

As I have already suggested, all previous regimes since the Revolution of 1789 have been unstable. Whether one measures such instability in terms of their duree or of how suddenly they collapse, it is clear that France's regime instability is, by European standards, endemic. Since 1789, there have been ten major regime changes, half of which were the result of internal political or social crises (rather than military invasion). Even in the post-war period, there have been two new regimes, and observers have referred recently to the need for another major constitutional revision concerning the role and function of the Presidency, the hallmark of the Fifth Republic. Such observations raise the fundamental question of the inter-relation between French society and the traditionally fragile political structures which govern it.

A striking feature of France s post-Revolution regimes is that each has sought a legitimation and consequential stability after its establishment which would transcend the exceptional circumstances of its creation. All have wished to s' enraciner in the society and political culture of their time, whether or not they were established democratically (and 'democratic' acceptance at a time of acute national crisis is perhaps only a measure of acceptance at the time of the crisis itself). If, however, we acknowledge, along with those who have tried to assure themselves of it, that allegiance to a regime is a crucial, it is also the case that such allegiance is a very difficult phenomenon to identify and assess, let alone nurture. Let us, then, look briefly at the theoretical frameworks which have informed the assessment of political attitudes and allegiance in the modem period.

Perhaps the greatest influence upon the way European political behaviour has been perceived in the twentieth century has been the theories and writings related to the notion of 'Mass Society'.⁴ The increasing urbanisation and industrialisation of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe coincided with the accession to democracy (the suffrage) by the quasi-totality of the adult male (and, later, female) population. What, in the nineteenth century, was seen as the possible replacement of 'popular culture' by 'mass culture' has been assumed in the twentieth century to be a fact. And of the three major theoretical perspectives in social analyses: the liberal, the Marxian and the mass society perspective, it is perhaps the last which has dominated thinking in twentieth century France. In practice, the mass society perspective has probably informed the other two interpretations to such an extent that they can often be viewed as sub-theories of the first. In the post-war period, with the advent of further modernisation, television, the extensive ownership of motor cars, access to holidays, travel, and consumerism generally, assumptions concerning the cultural 'homogenisation' of French citizens have attained the status of near self-evident truths.

Two main consequences have flowed from this. The first is that, in spite of the generalised exercise of the suffrage in France, the 'mass society' perspective has been underpinned by the view that political power or potential power has been withdrawn from the voting public and transferred elsewhere, even that the suffrage itself is one of the essential mechanisms of the withholding of power, because it maintains the electorate in blissful ignorance of its actual powerlessness (Alliot-Marie, 1983; Gaxie, 1978; Lefort, 1981). Moreover, the mass society perspective has never resolved the question of whether the generalised exercise of the suffrage is evidence of the limits of active political participation or is an indication of a deeper desire for more participation. The second consequence of an assumed cultural homogenisation is the assumption that the population has become depoliticised (Vedel, 1962; Duhamel, 1985): as new patterns of life-style and more consumerist expectations have emerged, traditional, professional, family and regional influences and class-orientated allegiances have been replaced — as in Europe generally — by an 'end of ideology' France as it falls under the increasing cultural influence of the US.

Although mass society theories were of European origin, the subsequent influence upon social science thinking of American mass society theories in the post-war period cannot be underestimated, and has contributed significantly to the way French political behaviour and attitudes have been perceived. Two essential, though differing, emphases have informed these approaches, the first heavily influenced by Marxism, the second by liberalism. The Frankfurt School's influence upon the notion of a 'culture industry' in modern 'mass' urban industrial societies which has robbed other internal 'popular' cultures and class perspectives of their political potential has had considerable influence upon the way in which European political behaviour has been perceived (Adorno et al., 1950; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1973; Habermas, 1976; Kirchheimer, 1966; Marcuse, 1974; Jay, 1976). The liberal influence has encouraged the view that, with the developments of a cultural convergence, a new kind of European society, far closer to the American model, has emerged and with it a new kind of European who is less political, more materialist, modern and so on (Almond and Verba, 1963; Riesman, 1978). This view has in fact largely shaped the methodological approaches (opinion polls, surveys, questionnaires) — and perhaps findings — of much of the politico-sociological research in post-war France.

One cannot deny the validity of much that is contained in these approaches and interpretations. It is even self-evident that there has been in France a Paris-led cultural 'nationalisation' in the last 40 years, and a move away from traditional and local political, social, professional and class allegiances and the development of new outlooks, aspirations and life-styles. Nor is the very real influence of the US to be denied. However, the weakness of these theoretical and methodological approaches, irrespective of the shortcomings of the inevitably superficial opinion poll, questionnaire and quantitative analyses themselves, is that they tend to screen out from analysis the effect of history as a cultural influence upon political perceptions and behaviour (while, conversely, making a series of assumptions about what constituted political and class allegiance, social aspirations and so on in preceding periods). It is not proven that the wide-ranging socio-economic and technological changes which France has undergone in the post-war period have eradicated the influence of French history upon contemporary political perceptions. One of the consequences of the predominance of synchronic analytical approaches is that research has often measured contemporary French attitudes to democracy but rarely the historically informed notion of republicanism. It is an appraisal of the latter, in conjunction with a consideration of the great socio-economic and cultural transformations in post-war France, which is crucial to an understanding of the Fifth Republic and its relation to French society.

It is interesting to note that many analyses have indicated the significant changes in class position, class identification, social expectations, and so on, which have taken place in France since the Second World War, and how these have effected a reorientation in political beliefs and attitudes. Given established assumptions concerning the relation between social class and political behaviour, these analyses are essentially measurements of distance from a previous socio-political relation, and are sometimes simply the restatements of a truism (that, for example, a civil servant in Paris will have a different attitude to political and social life from that of his or her blue-collar father or church-going mother). What concerns us here, however, is the nature of the relationship between social being and political attitudes in the Fifth Republic in the context not only of widespread socio-economic change, but also of the Fifth Republic's relation to French republicanism within French culture. The following discussion proposes some of the elements essential to the establishing of a framework for the analysis of contemporary republican allegiance.

Braud has pointed out that the socio-professional category in France does not play the decisive role it 'should' in electoral sociology: that in France there has never been an inclusive workers' party, no exclusively rich persons' party, no intellectuals' party, for example (Braud, 1980; Michelat and Simon, 1977). There are traditional bastions (right-wing parties for the rich, left-wing for workers and intellectuals), but the deviations from these norms are enormous, and it is the relation of these normative variations to the millions of voters who, say, are not rich but who vote for the right, who are not workers but who vote for a party with a workerist political ideology that reveals the complexity (and mutability) of political allegiance. In terms of what we said above concerning the historical dimension of political orientation, Braud argues that religion in France seems to play a part, in fact could be argued as being the strongest factor, in voting behaviour. France, however, can no longer be called a Catholic country in the traditional sense of the word. Besides, as Braud notes, there is something very strange in the idea of the least secular of allegiances (religion), being, in the valley of tears, one of the most influential allegiances in that quintessentially secular area of activity (politics). Braud's research demonstrates, therefore, that political choice is no longer related in any strict sense (if ever it was) to class position, material interests, or the political attitudes that are assumed to derive from them.

In one of the major studies of voting behaviour in the late 1970s, Capedevielle makes a similar point to Braud: that there exists a non-correspondence between the 'social' and its expected effect upon political choice, especially when one examines voting behaviour (Capedevielle et al., 1981). Nuancing earlier assumptions concerning 'depoliticisation', Caped...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• 1 French Political Culture and Republicanism
• 2 Socio-Economic Change and Political Culture in West Germany
• 3 The Politics of Disaffection: France in the 1980s
• 4 Language and Politics: The Case of Neo-Gaullism
• 5 Celebrities in Politics: Simone Signoret and Yves Montand
• 6 Contemporary French Cinema and French Political Culture: The 'New' Hegemony
• 7 Political Allegiance and Social Change: The Case of Workers in the Ruhr
• 8 Political Culture Change and Party Organisation: The SPD and the Second 'Fräuleinwunder'
• 9 The Battle of Semantics: The West German Christian Democrats' Linguistic Strategies Post-1973
• Index