Jürgen Habermas

National Unification and

Popular Sovereignty

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, new states have been emerging in
fast-moving sequence—whether through the secession of formerly ‘autonom-
ous’ territories, or through the reunification of national states that had fallen
into dependence and partition.* These would appear to be only the clearest
symptoms that a phenomenon more or less forgotten, or anyway neglected,
in postwar Europe has plenty of life left in it. A colleague of mine describes
the situation as follows: ‘With the break-up of the imperial realms, the world
of states is re-forming at borders marked by the origins of those states, whose
contours are to be explained in national-historical terms.’1 Today, the political
future again seems to belong to the ‘ancestral powers’—primarily, religion
and the nation. In the social sciences, the talk is of ‘ethno-nationalism’ which
is a way of stressing a common heritage, whether in the physical sense of
common descent or in the broader sense of a common cultural tradition.
*
This is the text of the Tseo-nam lecture delivered at Seoul National University, May 1996.
1
H. Lübbe, Abschied vom Superstaat, Berlin 1994, pp. 33f.
3
An exception to this trend is the continuing division of the Korean
nation.

This, no doubt, is the background to the request made by my hosts, to

discuss the meaning of national sovereignty through the example of the
German unification process, and to explain the problems that arose dur-
ing the restoration of national unity. I must say in advance that I am no
expert in contemporary history or political science, and that my compe-
tence is at most that of an attentive newspaper reader and of someone
interested in the times in which he lives. But I can well see that the par-
allels between the postwar histories of our two countries, as well as cer-
tain analogies in the relationship between South and North Korea and
between West and East Germany, make it seem desirable to examine
whether Korea can learn something—and if so, what—from the example
of Germany.

The most important aspects are already known to you. The division of
the German and Korean nations was a consequence of that antagonism
between the two world powers, the usa and the ussr, which came to the
fore soon after the end of the Second World War. In Europe, after the
defeat of the German Reich, partition naturally enough affected the
party with the main guilt for the war, whereas in Asia, after the defeat of
Japan, one of the victims freed from Japanese colonial rule was unjustly
forced to suffer again alongside it. The Republic of Korea in the South
and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North were pro-
claimed within a month of each other in 1948, and this was followed a
year later, in the same order, by the foundation of the Federal Republic of
Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East.
Strategically speaking, South Korea and West Germany were advance
posts of the American protector. In a similar way in both countries, the
ideological and military confrontation between the blocs overshadowed
internal political contradictions stemming from the past—colonial rule
or the Nazi period. This explains the continuity of leading personnel
before and after 1945. Just as a large part of the old Nazis were taken into
the new regime under Adenauer, so in Korea collaborators with the
Japanese occupation authority were largely able to keep their positions
under Syngman Rhee. Here, however, what fortunately remained a cold
war in Germany escalated into open military conflict. The Korean War
left behind a trauma which strained relations with the Communists in
the North considerably more than anti-communism strained relations,
in our case, with the rulers of the gdr. Nevertheless, the détente of the
early seventies under Nixon had similar effects on both fronts. The joint
communiqué on the reunification of Korea was signed by the two gov-
ernments at the same time that the Basic Treaty between the two Ger-
man governments was negotiated under Willy Brandt. The two Korean
states, which intensified contacts with each other after 1989, were finally
admitted to the United Nations only in 1991—as the two German states
had already been before. Of course, the recent growth of tensions shows
that national unification—which, as it were, fell into the lap of the citi-
zens of the old Federal Republic at a lucky moment of world history—
confronts the citizens of the Republic of Korea with a rather complicated
task. Clearly North Korea, with its pressure for a peace treaty with the
United States, is for the moment seeking to keep the partition in place.
4
After the end of the confrontation between the world powers, national
unification seemed in Korea, too, to be politically within reach. At first
sight, the state of things here between the North and the South seemed
to be like that which existed between the West and the East in Germany.
In 1989, a constitutional state stood facing an authoritarian state based
upon surveillance of the population; on the one side, a dynamic, growing
(despite conjunctural downturns), export-oriented economy, and on the
other side, a centrally administered, unproductive system incapable of
learning from experience. In Korea, a similar contrast still exists between
a political system which since the late eighties has at least opened itself
to democratization, and a regime which, even after the death of Kim Il
Sung, does not seem to have lost much of its authoritarian character and
which, even without China’s support, behaves in an aggressive manner.
In a certain sense, the economic opposition is also repeated here—
between a fast-moving export-oriented economy with high rates of
growth, and an inefficient planned economy struggling with major sup-
ply problems and stagnating under the weight of its military expendi-
ture. In short, this constellation gave rise in 1989 to the hope of a
knock-on effect. Questions were then posed about the most suitable
moment, the right political framework and procedure for such a unifica-
tion: whether sooner or later, whether to make a merger of states or a con-
federation, whether there should be rapid absorption of the other part or
a slow growing together. There were naturally also concrete questions
about the policies that should be pursued to achieve this or that goal.

You will, of course, not expect me to answer these directly political ques-
tions, simply because I lack the necessary knowledge to give advice on
policy. But there are also other reasons why caution is in order. The
analogies that occur to us when we consider the postwar destinies of our
two countries, both marked by a bipolar world order, tend to obscure
from us a number of deeper structural differences. This is why we should
be wary of rash extrapolations from the experiences of Germany. I shall
now take things in three steps. First, I would like to recall the different
starting-points that existed or still exist for national unification in Ger-
many and in Korea. Then we shall move on to a problem which is very
significant in Europe but perhaps in a different way in Asia: that is, the
relationship between the national state and democracy. In the light of these
considerations, it may be possible to learn something for a future reuni-
fication of Korea from Germany’s experience of a rapid, if not over-hasty,
process of unification.

1. The Different Starting-Points

Let us first compare the People’s Republic of Korea and what used to
be the German Democratic Republic. One of the distinguishing features
of the former is its relatively greater share of the total population; less
than a fifth of the German total lives in the Eastern Länder. North Korea
has also preserved a relatively greater political independence, and the
‘juche’ principle affirms a certain ideological and political autonomy
vis-à-vis both Russia and China. For example, the People’s Republic
kept its distance from Russian policy in Vietnam and Afghanistan as
well as from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, whereas the gdr, if only
for geopolitical reasons, always played the role of a Soviet satellite. As
5
to economics, the gdr was also firmly linked into the Eastern Bloc
division of labour. Its leading cadre staunchly followed Moscow’s general
line, and only in the mid-eighties—from fear of the destabilizing effects
of Gorbachev’s glasnost—did they more clearly display a wish for
national autonomy.

For our purposes, another aspect is obviously more important. What

collapsed with the Soviet empire was the alternative model of society
that had been the only possible raison d’être for a second German state.
The gdr lost the justification for its existence when bureaucratic social-
ism fell apart. North Korea, on the other hand, even after 1989-90, has
maintained together with China—that is, with China’s course towards
a ‘socialist market economy’—an alternative to the Western growth
model which for the time being offers it an orientation. Despite acute
bottlenecks, it is thus able to distinguish itself to some extent from the
Japanese path of development. I do not at all mean that the North
Korean regime is particularly stable; the recent provocations rather
suggest the opposite. But an inevitable implosion for endogenous reasons
appears less likely than in the case of the gdr. If this is correct, then one
thing clearly follows: the prospect of a non-violent self-transformation or
dissolution of the People’s Republic will largely depend on how much
citizens in the North—when the time comes—are attracted not only by
the economic successes of the South, but also by its social relations and
political freedoms.

Today’s South Korea can be compared to the earlier Federal Republic no

more than North Korea to the gdr. I am not thinking now of such
things as the level of social development or the economic balance-sheet.
In view of the considerable transfer-payments that flow from the West
to the new German Länder, many may wonder whether the power of
South Korea is sufficient to cope with the adjustment of North Korea to
the conditions of a capitalist economic system. But this is not, in my
view, the decisive question. Indeed, the South’s dramatic leap since the
early sixties, from an agrarian society to an industrially developed one,
has no parallel in any country larger than a city-state and compels our
admiration.2 On a comparison of the most important indicators—such
as the rate of urbanization, or the changing share of employment in the
main sectors of the economy (the development of the service society),
or the shifts in the social structure with the emergence of a widespread
new middle layer—it can be seen that South Korea really has followed
the well-known pattern of social modernization. But whereas this trans-
formation took Germany well over a century, South Korea has managed
it within the space of one generation. Such a compressed structural
change must be experienced by those involved in it as a sudden and
radical shake-up. The unprecedented mobilization of social energies and
reserves—of intelligence and labour-power, capital and goods, flows of
population, communications and commodities—is naturally the result
of a collective effort of the whole population. But, particularly under

2 See Han Sang-Jin, ‘Economic Development and Democracy: Korea as a New Model?’,

Korea Journal, no. 35, Summer 1995, pp. 5-17; and ‘The Rush to Industrialization and its
Pathological Consequences’, paper for the Sixth International Conference of Asian
Sociology, Beijing, November 1995.
6
President Park, this effort was politically directed and stimulated by
an authoritarian state bureaucracy, ambitious, geared to growth, insen-
sitive to the social costs of exploitation, heedless of civil rights, and not
immune to corruption. It was a different situation from the one that
developed in the Federal Republic.

In West Germany, the capacity destroyed during the war had only to be
rebuilt for the dynamic of economic growth to be set in motion. More-
over, the ‘economic miracle’ could take place within the framework of a
democratic, law-based state desired by the Allies. Under these favourable
conditions, people grew used to liberal institutions within the course of
a single generation; the pre-political trust that a functioning system
arouses was converted into political identification with the order and
normative content of the Bonn constitution. At any event, by 1989 a
political culture had developed which was decidedly more liberal than in
Adenauer’s time. Since the fifties it had been possible to create rights to
public provision, to build up and consolidate social-security systems. In
a climate loosened by the student revolt, even the reform initiatives of
the spd-liberal coalition gained widespread acceptance. This gave people
the feeling that political participation pays off in the use-values of demo-
cratically achieved social and cultural rights, that citizenship can mean
more than mere nationality. Citizenship, actively employed, is then ex-
perienced not as membership of an organization but as membership in a
polity that lets no one slip through the net and excludes no one from the
enjoyment of equal rights or from their share in socially produced well-
being. In other words, only the welfare state guarantees the real value of
equal subjective rights. The citizens of our prosperous oecd societies
realize this all the more today, when the welfare state is threatened by the
pressure of a global economy. But only with the help of such a well-
meshed social net can the democratic state keep its promise to establish
ties of solidarity, through abstract legal relations, among citizens who are
strangers to one another.

Modernization and Civil Society

I stress this socially integrative function of citizenship because it seems to

me important for a country such as South Korea, which has to cope with
the legacy of a growth-orientated dictatorship. Two trends collide here,
and they reinforce each other in a vicious circle unless they are checked
and reversed through a democratically active civil society. On the one
hand, accelerated industrialization has forcibly compressed the processes
of social modernization so that many continuities have been broken and
broad layers have experienced the wrenching of traditions as a loss of
roots. In this way, rapid strides in development take their toll in the form
of social pathologies which emerge when old forms of social integration
break down and new social ties do not appear in their place. On the other
hand, however, these anomic tendencies strike hardest where social
uprooting is the reverse side of a successful policy of development driven
by authoritarian means. For it is then that the effective use of civil rights
is most sorely lacking—rights which might replace the worn safety-nets
of the traditional forms of life. An authoritarian regime blocks up the
sources of a democratically mobilized civil society from which the more
abstract forms of legally mediated solidarity among citizens spring. The
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only way out of this dilemma is a continuation of the democratization
process initiated from above after the end of the military dictatorship
and since then energetically driven also from below.

With regard to the goal of national unity, progressive democratization

has a twofold advantage: it makes living conditions more attractive for
fellow-countrymen in the North, while in the South it initially strength-
ens cohesion so much that the liberal model of society is able to bear
the mental and economic strains of a unification process. In this country,
fortunately, the democratic forces—starting with the university—which
are breathing life into civil society are also the national forces which are
promoting reunification. My argument is essentially that progressives
must firmly associate the political goal of national unity with the idea of
making civil liberties a reality. Only such a package will counteract the
danger of a nationalism which is prepared, if need be, to sacrifice politi-
cal freedoms to national unity.

The mentality of what are called ‘progressives’ brings us on to a further

difference between our two countries. In Korea, where there is the mem-
ory of Japanese imperialism, political and social criticism can also turn
outward and combine with a strong national consciousness. In the
Federal Republic, by contrast, there are good grounds for remembering
the crimes of full-blooded nationalism in one’s own country. A German
has good historical reasons to be cautious in handling national themes; it
is no accident that the slogan of a ‘self-conscious nation’ has been com-
mandeered by the New Right since 1989.

Another reason why a politics geared to Korean reunification arouses so

little disquiet in this part of the world is that the external political con-
ditions for such an objective are rather favourable. The unification of
Germany could sometimes be perceived by its neighbours as a danger to
the precarious balance within the European Union—and not at all only
because of the demographic weight of a population of some eighty mil-
lion. But since 1990, when it regained full sovereignty from the Second
World War victors, the enlarged Federal Republic has resisted the temp-
tation to strive once more for the geopolitically natural role of a central
power holding supremacy within Europe. Otherwise, the already endan-
gered project of European unity would have run aground on the reefs of
national self-interest. Such a danger could not arise from the state unity
of the Korean nation. To be sure, as foreign policy becomes more directly
based upon economics, the Asian countries, too, are strengthening their
cooperation within the Pacific area. As we saw most recently in Bang-
kok, they already face Europeans to some extent as an alliance. But, un-
like in the German case, a unification of Korea would not necessarily be
felt by its neighbours as a disturbing factor, even if decisions made by the
Republic of Korea within the field of tension between Japan and China
are already playing an important role.

As the starting-points in Korea and Germany differ in so many respects,

we should not pitch the comparisons at too concrete a level if they are to
have instructive value. Allow me, therefore, to move to a somewhat more
abstract level and to examine from a certain historical distance the ques-
tion of how national state and democracy are related to each other.
8
2. The National State and Democracy

The efforts to strengthen the European Union, as well as the tendencies

observable elsewhere towards supranational combinations, make us
aware that state sovereignty and unity of the national state no longer
mean the same as they have done over the past two centuries. The global
integration of the economy, communications and transport creates prob-
lems of such a magnitude, and produces risks of such a scope, that they
go far beyond the range of action by national governments. The new
challenges can no longer be tackled through the classical forms of coop-
eration and treaties among the sovereign subjects of international law.
Rather, they call for actors with political power at the level of regional
regimes, which can thus also provide effective support for the United
Nations. At the same time, however, we see in Europe that national
states display a great force of inertia in the face of these imperatives. This
may be understandable in view of the historical success of this form of
state organization which has by now spread throughout the world. But
the resistance to new post-national forms of sociation also feeds off dubi-
ous themes that are bound up with the formative history of the national
state in Europe. The conception that modern nations have of themselves
has always been ambivalent—and it still is today. On the one hand,
Europeans hesitate on the threshold of political union, because they fear
that each nation might lose its distinguishing features and cultural life.
On the other hand, they experience again—in the mirror of ethnic wars
and cleansing in the former Yugoslavia—the tragedies which they know
from their own history. The catastrophic consequences of a politics
inflamed by fundamentalist nationalism did eventually, after the Second
World War, give an impetus to the unification of Europe. Allow me,
then, to recall from a European viewpoint a conclusion gained at great cost
and with great difficulty—namely, that where there is a conflict between
the two, the ‘demos’ of citizens should take precedence over the ‘ethnos’
of fellow countrymen.

Of course, modern societies continue to distinguish themselves from

one another as ‘nations’, but this does not yet tell us anything about the
character of their national consciousness. There remains the empirical
question of whether, and to what extent, modern peoples conceive of
themselves more as a nation of citizens or of fellow countrymen. This Janus-
face of national consciousness in Europe is to be explained by historical
reasons. One of the characteristics of national identity, as a formation
of modern consciousness, is its tendency to overcome older particular-
ist ties associated with regions. In nineteenth-century Europe, the new
form of the nation established a different bond of solidarity between in-
dividuals who had hitherto been strangers to one another. The ‘nation’ in
the modern sense remodelled traditional loyalties—towards village and
family, region and dynastic ruler, towards ties ascribing origins in gen-
eral—in a universalist direction. This was a long-term process which,
even in the classical nation-states of the West, probably did not en-
compass and penetrate the whole population until the early part of the
twentieth century.

The fact remains, however, that this more abstract form of integration
referred to a particular community—to the nation. This quantity had a
9
thoroughly artificial character: that is, it had been simply imagined as a
natural community of language and descent, and at the same time narra-
tively constructed as a common historical destiny. Membership of such a
nation was supposed to manifest itself above all in the readiness for com-
bat and self-sacrifice of national servicemen who could be mobilized
against the ‘enemy of the fatherland’. In situations of emergency, citi-
zens’ solidarity would prove itself in the solidarity of those who risked
their life for people and country. In this way, national consciousness
shifted between expanded inclusion and renewed exclusion. The ‘nation’,
opening itself internally and closing itself to the outside, was at the same
time the bearer of a future-oriented design for the realization of republi-
can rights and freedoms. The national independence of the collective,
which is asserted externally, here appears as a protective casing for in-
dividual civic freedoms to be realized internally. This historically
grounded symbiosis explains the Janus-face of the nation—which still
today, as soon as national questions are at issue, brings competing inter-
pretations and opposing political diagnoses into the arena.

I would not like to be misunderstood. If states with a long history to look

back upon are split in two as a result of imperial rivalry between the
powers, and if they are then annexed to different spheres of interest, the
recovery of national unity is unquestionably a legitimate objective. But
this objective is not neutral in relation to the political form in which the
divided nation is to come together. A republican or democratic concep-
tion of the nation suggests a different answer from the one through
which an ethnic conception may lead unification policy astray. For the
idea of a Volksnation assumes that the demos of citizens, in order to
stabilize itself, must be rooted in the ethnos of fellow countrymen; the
bonding power of a republican community of free and equal members
is supposedly insufficient to assure the political stability of a state.
I consider this assumption—that a democracy needs to be backed up
by the bonding energy of a homogenous nation—to be both empirically
false and politically dangerous. The political argument is straight-
forward enough. A government which based its action on the premise
that its citizens’ loyalty must be rooted in the consciousness of a common
nature and destiny, shared by a more or less homogenous nation, would
find itself having to enforce a certain uniformity against the actual com-
plexity and the growing diversity of modern life. In the case of Europe,
however, the premise in question also does not stand up to historical
scrutiny.

If one looks closely at the history of the national state in nineteenth-

century Europe, the symbiosis of nationalism and republicanism appears
as a temporary constellation. National consciousness—which crystallized
around the fiction of common descent, the construction of a shared his-
tory and the grammatical unification of a written language—had been
propagated here at first by intellectuals and scholars. The idea of the
nation also fitted in well with the administrative requirement of the
modern state apparatus for uniform living conditions. Starting with the
urban bourgeoisie, it gradually spread through modern mass communi-
cations to the rest of the population. Nationalism did, it is true, play a
catalyzing role in the emergence of democracy. It made subjects for the
first time into politically conscious citizens, who identified with the
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constitution of their republic and with its enlightened goals. In the
long run, however, the democratic process was perfectly capable of
supporting itself. It does not have to rely upon the bonding power of
nationalism for its continued existence, because the progressive inclu-
sion of the population in the status of citizen produces the new level of
abstract, legally mediated solidarity. As it is converted into a welfare
state, the democratic process undertakes to guarantee the social integra-
tion of the population.

In more and more sophisticated pluralist societies, a diversity of cultural

life-forms and world-views has anyway sprung up. Here politics could
rid itself of the burden of social integration only at the price of repressing
minorities. In such societies, only force could displace social integration
from the public communication of civil society to the seemingly natural
substratum of an ostensibly homogenous nation, and thus from the level
of political debate to the level of a merely implicit, pre-political back-
ground consensus.

This conception of the relationship between national state and democ-

racy allows us to identify certain deficits as we look back at the process of
German unification. At a distance of some six years, we can see that the
government which initiated and steered the process assumed too much
in the way of a pre-political background consensus.

3. The Lessons of German ‘Reunification’

At the time, something of the ethno-national world of the nineteenth-

century imagination must still have been alive in the minds of our
politicians. Anyway, the forces which took charge of directing the unifi-
cation script in 1990 trusted too much in a common pre-political stock,
hence in something like natural harmony among the members of a
nation, and paid too little attention to the need for political clarification
on the part of citizens of different backgrounds. The citizens of the two
states, despite a common national history since 1871, had drifted so far
apart since 1945 that—as we can see today—it would have been better if
a conscious political will could have taken shape in both parts concern-
ing the road to national unity and the political form in which they
would join together. The government relieved the people of meaningful
participation in the decision to go for rapid unification within the exist-
ing forms of the Federal Republic.

The constitutional provision for the event of reunification had been that
a new constitution, supported by the whole nation, should take the place
of the previous one, which would then count as having been merely pro-
visional. This option would, of course, have necessitated a longer process
of drawing closer together, and perhaps—as initially envisaged—a
detour through a confederation of the two states. There were a number of
internal and external political reasons, however, which spoke in favour of
a faster track. For this option our constitution offered the hidden alter-
native of the ‘accession’ of individual states—like that of Saarland in its
time—to the existing order. It was this route that the federal govern-
ment took in bringing about unification. Early on, it set the course for
rapid administrative and legal integration of the territory of the gdr into
11
the Federal Republic. In this way, a preliminary decision was also taken
to move, without a transition, the state-socialist economy to the func-
tional conditions of the market, as well as to assimilate all other areas of
gdr life into the structures prevailing in the West.

The governing parties in Bonn advocated this road, and the population
in the gdr quickly accepted it. Their approval was in effect expressed in
the Volkskammer elections held on 18 March 1990 which, though for-
mally still within the legal framework of the gdr, were already in the
complete charge of the Western parties. Following the currency conver-
sion in June, the newly reconstituted states of the gdr were annexed to
the Federal Republic on 3 October 1990. A few weeks later, the federal
government was voted back into office. These common federal elections
gave the West German population its first opportunity to ratify retro-
spectively the fait accompli, and the relatively low turnout is therefore
quite surprising. Subjectively, many people at that time were caught
unawares by the fast and furious pace of events. But the reasons were
different in the two parts of Germany: for people in the East, who had
at least been able to react with their ballot paper to what the Western
parties were offering; and for the citizens of the old Federal Republic,
who had had to make do with the role of observing a clever and swift
operation, stage-managed from the top down.

Now, it would be unfair to set the costs of this road to state unity against
the hypothetical results of a normatively prescribed, but not actualized
alternative. As this alternative exists only in the imagination, we know
only the negative consequences of what happened in reality. Counter-
factual considerations are especially tricky in the case of historical
processes. So I have no wish to argue that, in the other event, the balance-
sheet would, all in all, have been more positive. What I have in mind
is something rather different. A way of proceeding which permitted
broader discussion and opinion formation, as well as more extensive—
and, above all, better prepared—participation of the public, would have
included citizens in both East and West in the eventual responsibility for
the process. The allocation of responsibilities for unwanted side-effects
would have been steered from the beginning in a different direction. It
would have been the people’s own mistakes that they would have had
to cope with.

Because there was no public discussion of what citizens of the two states
should expect of each other, a certain discontent is now building up in
the West, while feelings of resentment are spreading in the East. In this
connection, I would just like to mention three points.

a) When the time came, the Kohl government dodged the issue of how
to fairly balance and share the burdens between West and East. The
transfer payments, now they come to 130-150 billion marks a year, are
felt as somewhat depressing by parts of the Western population. This
reaction is not all that hard to understand, given the rapidly worsening
situation of the economy.

b) The controversial privatization strategy of the Treuhandanstalt, which

was optimistically expected to realize 600 billion marks from the sale
12
of gdr state enterprises, has instead left behind a mountain of debt; it
was not even able to halt the dangerous tendency to deindustrialization
of once highly developed regions in the East. In the gdr, catastrophic
mass unemployment has set in, especially affecting women and young
people. This structural crash cuts deep into people’s lives; but the hurt
done to self-esteem obviously goes far beyond the circle of those who
have directly lost out as a result of modernization.

c) The structures of the old Federal Republic have been transferred,

under the direction of West German experts, to nearly every area of life
and organization of the gdr: from the economy, judicial system and state
administration, through the regulation of traffic and health, to higher
education, the media, the armed forces, and so on. This experience of
structural violence has exacerbated the differences in views and outlooks
between East and West—one symptom of this being the success of the
pds, the successor of the former Communist state-party, which wins
around a fifth of the vote in the new Länder. But the other parties, too,
are trying to use the same atmosphere to their advantage.

You will have noticed that I am not looking so much at the problems
raised in the process of unification itself. I have been speaking more of
the mental processing of disappointments to which the fast-track strat-
egy led. Other strategies would also have had disappointing side-effects.
But this very fact highlights the particular drawback of the road that was
actually taken. For it cuts off the population in the East from the possi-
bility of making their own mistakes, and learning from them at an excep-
tionally difficult period of transition. The question is not just about who
bears responsibility for the consequences of political decisions. It also
concerns the means and scope for the articulation of people’s own experi-
ences and interests, in a public sphere not yet under the tutelage of
Western ‘know-alls’. The fact that citizens of the ex-gdr could not, as
it were, engage in public discourse in their own home, proved to be a
special disadvantage when attempts were made to straighten out the
morally burdening legacy of their own regime—for example, over the
disclosures concerning the all-pervasive state security service.

In general, we learn only from negative experiences. This is especially

true of attempts to learn from history. No one can foresee the circum-
stances under which the two Korean states will one day, with luck, be
united. Should there then be any choice between a fast and a slow track,
it would be advisable to look back at the long shadows of the short-cut
hastily pursued in Germany.

Translated by Patrick Camiller

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