A Growing Concern: Germany’s Eastern Borders Under Scrutiny

Susan Ingram

“Germany’s Eastern Borders: Internal and External Fault Lines” was the theme of this year’s annual Faculty development seminar hosted by York University’s Canadian Centre for German and European Studies on January 17 & 18, 2003. Each year the Centre invites faculty from across Canada to gather and become informed about the latest developments in Germany. This year, 16 faculty from Victoria, BC to St. John’s, Newfoundland were treated to a dinner and reception hosted by the Consul General of Germany in Toronto, Dr. Klaus Rupprecht, and then spent an intensive but rewarding day examining and debating the prospects and pitfalls of upcoming EU enlargement from Germany’s perspective, as might be surmised from the otherwise rather odd plural in the title. However many eastern borders Germany may now have is not as anxiety-provoking as the number of eastern boarders that are expected upon enlargement. Where the “East” is and why it is represented as posing a problem formed the crux of the day’s discussion.

The seminar was divided into two halves. The morning’s discussion was provoked by Dr. Kurt Hübner, a DAAD Visiting Professor at the CCGES from Berlin FU’s School of Economics, while Dr. Oliver Schmidke, a DAAD German Studies Lecturer in the University of Victoria’s Department of Political Science, energized the afternoon. This dual thrust on economics and politics was reflected in the readings participants were requested to prepare as a basis for the discussions:

These readings were selected to provide participants with a cross-section of current research and a solid economic and political footing from which to understand how Germany’s experiences with unification since 1989 relate to the upcoming EU enlargement. Given that almost half of the participants were from language, literature and linguistics departments, having specific data proved helpful and at least initially facilitated the group’s discussion.

What emerged over the course of the day was an appreciation of the extensive difficulties Germany had to contend with in absorbing the former East German states, of the less successful aspects of the course that Germany chose to steer, and also of the inapplicability of comparisons between German enlargement and the upcoming EU process. Respect for the extent to which the former East Germany was provided with a modern infrastructure was tempered by considerations of the adverse effects and poor economic outcomes of overinvestment in construction. The political exigencies behind the initial currency exchange rate for East and West German marks being set at par and behind the realities of regional trade imbalances were also explored before the contentious issue of how to conceptualize the process of German unification was raised. Discourses of blame and colonization were mobilized and critiqued from a number of knowledgeable perspectives. How to position the former East Germans, the Ossies, was particularly problematic. How helpful is it to blame “them” for being greedy or short-sighted, uninformed or misinformed? How helpful is it to depict the wholesale takeover of East German institutions by the West and the nefarious activities of the Treuhand in terms of colonization? Habermas would have been satisfied by these debates, as they certainly confirm the value of informed exchange in bringing about a consensus on what the stakes of key issues and freighted terms are, if not a consensus on the issues and terms themselves. It was generally agreed that German unification had not provided Ossies with the institutions they needed, that the creation or re-formation of legal and media institutions in particular has important consequences for citizens’ well-being, and also that the German situation in this regard is unique and not comparable to the larger EU scenario.

Moving from internal to external fault lines refocused discussion on the problems of expectations and perceptions: both the perceptions and expectations of Germany in the post-Cold War EU and Germany’s perceptions and expectations of (or better, fears and anxieties about) EU enlargement. The symbolic nature of borders was stressed and how shifting from a national to a transnational or supranational perspective changes the criteria for identity-formation and enacts new forms of exclusion. Cultural, political and economic factors influencing EU enlargement were brought up – from the rhetorical trap the EU found itself in after the fall of the wall in declaring that “we’re all Europeans now” to the U.S.’s desire for Turkey to be included to the implicit Christianity of the union’s identity to the conflicting interests of French and Polish farmers. The variety of incongruent motors driving the integration process made some participants wary of other participants’ faith in modernization; culture understood as a way of life seemed to be at odds with, and to lose out in the struggle with, economic progress.

Given, as Balibar has noted, that racism now tends to wear a cultural face, interdisciplinary dialogue of the kind that this seminar was designed to encourage is paramount. Yet the seminar also made manifest how great the obstacles to sustaining such dialogue can be and how difficult it can be to translate across divergent approaches to identity. The breakdown of participants’ disciplinary backgrounds is indicative of the Canadian academic context in which knowledge of German-related topics is produced. Of the 16 participants, there were eight with a background in language, literature or linguistics, all female, and six political theorists or economists, all male. As the day wore on, what one participant termed “holes of hopelessness” made themselves felt, descending on some of the women whose expertise was not in the political and economic processes under discussion but rather in the expressions of suffering that so often result. In other words, it was precisely those scholars who had personally experienced the dislocating pressures of the financial cutbacks that have decimated the Germanic (and Slavic) language and literature departments across the country, who ended up feeling alienated by and frustrated with the priorities of hegemonic economic and political discourses. While it is no doubt important to be aware of the calamities that EU enlargement will likely entail, for Germany if enlargement fails but for “the East” even if it succeeds, that the seminar was unable to end on a hopeful note does not bode well.

Why exactly there seemed no place for resistance in the discussion is something I can only speculate on. I wonder whether reversing the two halves of the day and ending with consideration of the Ossie experience would have led to a greater sense of possibility for the process and for the plight of backwards “Eastern” farmers and light industrialists in the face of the paternalistic steamroller of “Western” capital. I wonder whether it might have been better not to bracket the question of values at the outset of the discussion but rather to decouple it from stereotypical place-bound associations and mobilize it to deconstruct the contradictions inherent in expansionist policies. I wonder whether other participants have further suggestions or reactions, and I would be delighted to hear from them.