2020 and 1933: An Analysis
2019 was eighteen years after 2001, as 1932 was 18 years after 1914. Two years of social crisis, each after a successful terrorist strike that started a war and made clear that the world was going to change, and exactly divided from it by the time a person needs to grow from birth to becoming an adult. Is that a concidence? If not — what does it tell for the year and time to come?
After observing the 2016 U.S. election outcome, Madeleine Albright turned seeing a parallel between past and present into her book “Fascism — A Warning” (together with Bob Woodward). Albright most visibly leads a line of authors making such comparison, like Anne Applebaum, Jeremy Arnold, Ron Formisano, Ron Rosenbaum, Timothy Snyder, and others. And populism’s recent successes have only made more visible something already noticeable before: Migration around 2015 also brought to mind that around 1900; both are connected with parallel waves of right-wing violence; the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan in 2001 was triggered by a terrorist attack like World War I in 1914; the economic crisis of 2008 suggested a comparison with 1929; when considering the rise in social inequality in market incomes, one may well think back to the “social question” of the 19th century; and don’t forget that currently the global balance of power transforms as quickly to the favor of non-Western societies as it did in the other direction in the late 19th century. We perceive a parallel of comparable developments that allow us to speak of two modernization crises.
Put it to the test and ask in any conversation whether your counterpart has ever noticed any of these parallels. My guess: Pretty sure, yes. And your counterpart will immediately say that of course you can’t compare them — even if they wanted to, a Putin is not a Stalin and a Höcke (the most ugly proponent of Germany’s contemporary right–wing AfD) is not a Hitler, and, of course, Donald Trump is not a mass murderer.
But we should not stop at pointing out such differences. Comparing is not equalizing. It allows to see both commonalities and differences clearer and to learn from both. In the 1980s, German eminent philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued for a comparison ban on the Holocaust, but today we see how the establishment of comparative genocide studies has promoted its understanding, left its singularity within German history untouched, and at the same time helped a more competent handling of newer large-scale phenomena of violence such as in Darfur.
A common understanding of the two modernization crises would analogously make commonalities and differences more clear and enable more competence in dealing with them. In the following, let us take a look at a model that offers these achievements.
1 Modernisation
Since the early 19th century, what we know and what we are able to do has changed in an incredible way. Historical data for prosperity show a clear break in its development around 1820: Average global per capita income previously grew at a relatively constant 4 percent per century from the Migration Period that ended Antiquity until 1820. Since 1820, the growth rate has been one to two percent per single year. Unfortunately, it is not possible to use any comparable statistics for knowledge available. Here the starting point may be Galileo Galilei in the 15th century. But with the founding of the modern university model by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1807, the growth rate has clearly increased here as well.
So when people know more and can do more, the way changes they interact with each other.
The first of these two changes is the shift from tradition to rationality, as already described by Max Weber: In a poor world with few resources and information, people cling to solutions once found. Once coordination has been established for any social process, the focus is on the so-established social order, simply because it would be too costly to try something else. In a rich world with sufficient resources and information, on the other hand, it is always possible to try something new and, if necessary, to bear the costs of change. Tradition can still be an argument, but it is one among many, far from the all-encompassing prison without any way out that it was before.
A second mechanism of change is taken from Jürgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms. Habermas grasps it as a normative concept, but it is also an empirical one: The transition from authority to deliberation. If in a poor world with few resources and information decisions have to be made and obtaining information is necessary, it makes sense that one person obtains the information and makes the decision, and this is usually the one with already most resources and information at hand, hence the one with the highest social status. In a rich world with sufficient resources and information, it makes more sense for all actors to gather information and feed it into a common decision-making process. People with more resources and a higher status still have many advantages today — but the idea that their status would automatically lead to authority, as was taken for granted in earlier times, sounds ridiculous for contemporary ears.
These mechanisms yield a simple theory of modernization as transition between distinctly different states. It is, however, yet a too simple understanding of modernization as a single step equally open to all societies, as naïve modernization theory once assumed in the 1950s. To avoid this naïveté, we need an understanding why modernity did not take the form of such a simple step.
2 Organizations and the four waves of Western modernity
To understand why Western modernization, and modernization in general, does not exhibit the simple form assumed by naïve modernization theory, one key point is essential. The two mechanisms for changing interaction from tradition and authority to rationality and deliberation relate to how actors interact with each other. And actors, in the language of sociology, are not only people, but organizations as well.
Not all individuals on Earth interact directly with each other. The term organization describes groups of people who have internal institutions among themselves that allow them together to appear to the outside world as an unified actor. People interact in households, companies, educational institutions or political parties, and within each of these groups internal institutions allow them to live and reproduce together, to act in markets and the educational system, or to influence political decisions. In the structure of human interaction, organizations thus form a middle level between the individuals and the institutions that shape whole societies.
Despite this general definition, organizations have their history. Organizations exist everywhere nowadays, but they do not have the same relevance everywhere and at all times. In their origin they are specifically European, and even more precisely a peculiarity of Western (non-Orthodox) Christian societies.
We can imagine the emergence of this Western peculiarity as follows: When the Roman Empire collapsed, it left Europe as a continent that had been made connected for information flows by Roman roads, but was still too mountainous for permanent central control. From the Church Fathers onwards, Western Christianity gained its shape and significance from the fact that it allowed, indeed promoted, the coexistence of different levels for such a geographical are in which military power was local but ideological power was all-encompassing. It implemented the Jewish separation of secular and spiritual authority in a form that allowed different state authorities under a common spiritual roof. The structure of the Trinity allowed believers to balance in their minds the conflicts between their different expectations. This schooled individuals in balancing the claims of interactions within organizations and interactions between organizations.
By conditioning people to divide themselves into groups in such a way that normally each individual belonged to exactly one group, and yet allowing these groups to coexist, Christianity encouraged and pacified competition and contributed to the process of modern growth in information and resources in the West. And once modern growth had kicked in in the 19th century, the existence of organizations in the West had consequences for how rationality and deliberation were implemented. Through organizations there are two different levels of how people interact with each other and which institutions regulate their interactions: The micro-level of individuals within organizations and the macro-level of organizations within society as a whole. This affects both the process of modernisation itself and its institutional regulation. History shows two transitions of modernity and within each of them two waves of institutional regulation. A simple discontinuity becomes a quadruple one.
First, the existence of organizations in the process of modernization leads to two transitions of modernity, namely to an industrial first modernity and a post-industrial second modernity. Rationality and deliberation are initially introduced only outside of organizations, i.e. in the interaction between them or where individuals establish organizations. Only later, after the stable interim phase of industrial society, does this happen within organizations.
The two transitions thus distinguish three phases in the social development of Western nations: In the beginning a pre-modern one, completely shaped by tradition and authority, and in the end one in which both levels are shaped by rationality and deliberation. In this view, the term industrial society describes that middle phase in which organizations were already active in a modern environment, but individual interactions within the organizations were still largely shaped by tradition and authority. The significance of 1968 lies in the fact that it was the first time that the best-educated young people of the richest nations rebelled against tradition and authority in their individual lives.
The significance of these two steps is well illustrated by the changes in intimacy over the 19th and 20th century. The concept of Romantic Love, in which spouses were no longer chosen by families, emerged in the late 18th century and spread over Western societies until the early 20th century. The young people involved, especially the young women, eked out their right to decide with whom they wanted to share their lives and establish the organization of their household. But after marriage, expectations were still traditionally fixed with regard to the form and extent of intimacy, including its lifelong form, the authority of husbands over their wives, its limitation to heterosexual forms of partnership, and the acceptance of sexual intimacy alone within marriage. Although celebrated in its time as „modern family”, today we see it as internally a very traditional concept.
From 1968 onwards, the second transition begins with the acceptance of diversity in the formation of intimate relationships and households. Since then, the idea of the traditional understanding of family as the only acceptable one has been replaced by a contract-oriented understanding of intimacy in which the free will and long-term well-being of those involved are central and the former leads to the latter through rational and deliberative negotiation processes. The acceptance of cohabitation, divorce, same-sex partnerships and blurred gender classifications are all parts of this complete modernization of intimate relationships.
At times, these two processes resulted in major disputes for individual participants. But these were small disputes from the perspective of whole societies, with many of them side by side and one after the other. As in the area of intimacy relevant repercussions at the level of society as a whole are missing, they did not lead to crises in society as a whole. In other areas, mutual interdependencies between organizational and institutional structures are however much more relevant. This is the reason for the parallel of crises that motivates this text.
Second, through the fact that organizations structure the institutional regulation of the modernization process, every transition has two phases. In the first phase, changes occur within organizations. In the area of intimacy, these were the phases from the early 19th to the early 20th century and since 1968, and we will see that similar developments in other areas occur at about the same time.
While households act more or less autonomously, organisations in other areas are very much oriented towards institutions of the overall social framework such as constitutional or competition law, in which important changes are only established in a second phase. It would be clearer to speak here of institutional self-evidence, in order to make it clear against everyday language, that this is not only about legislation, but about long-term expectations: the Weimar Republic already „institutionalised“ democracy in Germany, but the general insight that industrial societies necessarily need democratic institutions instead of authoritarian leaders only became established after 1945. Churchill’s words about democracy as „the worst form of government except all others“ put into words the continent’s epiphany: In the 1930s, most observers had thought that democracy was perhaps only a cultural idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Saxons, but twelve war years later, the insight had prevailed that there was no better alternative for the governance of industrial societies. Generally speaking: A transition is complete only when the necessary new institutions at the macro level are in place. As long as they are missing, the tension between new organizations and old macro-institutions creates a social crisis.
For those areas of society in which the overall societal frame of reference plays a substantial role, a total of four waves of institutional innovation and two crises have thus emerged. We can study them in the social history of the last 200 years in education, the economy, and politics.
3 Changes in education and the economy
In the field of education and economy, the 19th century saw the emergence of compulsory primary schooling and ‘modern’ bureaucratic enterprises. Again, the adjective ‘modern’ has to be taken in parentheses, as the then-emerging bureaucratic hierarchies with rigid positional assignments are, again, characteristics of a past era in contemporary view. As well, the concurrently emerging compulsory elementary school was internally hierarchical and characterized by coercion and meaningless routines. But it prepared young people for a life in a macro-social world that had become economically modern, namely rational and deliberative, characterized by competition and freedom of choice, and the bureaucratic enterprise operated in this new world, in markets and competition. Internally, both the bureaucratic organization and the elementary school remained largely pre-modern. Schools were attached to state bureaucracies that required discipline rather than initiative, and workers were defenselessly at the mercy of the “iron cage” of instrumental rationality within their companies. They lacked the resources and information to escape it. It is no coincidence that Max Weber’s theory which provided the base for the ‘bureaucratic enterprise’ concept, was developed in the context of discussing legitimate domination and not within his economic sociology, and became only later recognized as relevant for understanding industrial enterprises.
But within the old frame of reference, these new organizations led to a social crisis in the 1930s. At the beginning of the emergence of bureaucratic organizations, a liberal ideology of free markets and the resulting lack of regulation had released productivity. But as time went on, this renunciation led to the competitive character of the economy being increasingly undermined, giving way to tight oligopolies or even monopolies. Appropriate feedback on the destructive effects of this oligopolistic market structure was lacking, especially where economically powerful people like Alfred Hugenberg also gained media power and thus influence on public opinion. The traditional understanding of school also contributed to the crisis: The qualifications that elementary school brought were undifferentiated and practically identical for everyone. As a result, workers were basically productive, but easily interchangeable and without the bargaining power that comes from differentiated qualifications. Another contribution was a traditionalist self-image of labor unions which still had the revolution in mind, i.e. simply wanted to take the top position in a traditional, hierarchically structured society, instead of being efficiently concerned with bargaining power to negotiate better conditions for their members. The resulting high level of social inequality created economic vulnerability to crises, since a large part of national products was used depending on volatile economic expectations, and a smaller part went into more stable mass consumption. And again, adequate feedback lacked for these destructive consequences of ineffective competition legislation, undifferentiated education and inappropriate trade union strategies.
These problems were corrected in the second wave of institutional innovation, that started with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933 and installed the main new solutions in the United States, in the United Kingdom and Switzerland over the 1930s and in the rest of Western Europe after the end of the Second World War. With the rise of secondary education, the differentiation of qualifications began, unions found themselves in a non-revolutionary role in negotiating processes and became accepted social partners, and effective competition laws were established. All three developments contributed to an institutional framework of accountability for the long-term consequences of organisational action.
With the long period of growth in the post-war period, the relationship of people to their companies and educational institutions changed. In economic sociology we see how Weber’s “Iron Cage” became described as a constructed myth from the late 1970s onwards, as timely description of a new social fact. Since that time, the total assignment of individuals to groups that employees had fixed to companies and occupations (and vice versa) has lost its self-evidence. The communicative necessities of the “new”, necessarily communicative enterprise and the new “boundarylessness” of careers and “do-it-yourself biographies” are other aspects of internally modernised corporate structures since 1968. The individualisation of career paths does not mean that all employees would become entrepreneurially oriented “manpower companies” in the same way. There are enough rational reasons for employees to continue to accumulate company-specific human capital, and for companies to continue to reward this, especially with highly qualified employees. But the general inclusiveness of a system geared to lifetime jobs has suffered greatly in all Western societies, and an alternative system is missing.
So here is one reason for the parallel of the crises. An economic system in which individuals are completely on their own leads to great inequalities, and this is exacerbated by the fact that each phase generates its own concentration processes and the corresponding monopoly profits. And these inequalities generate dissatisfaction and support for unsustainable, violent or symbolic policies. The industrial society solved the problem on a group-based level, and corresponding solutions for individualized social societies are still pending.
4 Changes in politics
In politics, the European group structure created the level differentiation between domestic and supranational. For the upper level, the concept parallel to love-founded nuclear family, school class or enterprise is the nation state. Like them, it placed an internally hierarchical structure into a modern, i.e. competitive, institutional framework. The nation state asserted itself as the new normality of political organisation from 1820 onwards until it shaped the Western core of the world system in the 1870s (and, later, the entire world in the 1970s). But the old macro-institutions of diplomatic networks and limited warfare, which in the traditional setting had provided feedback on the performance of territorial state actors, were no longer able to absorb the new dynamics of national and nationalist upsurges, and this contributed to the crisis from 1914 to 1945.
Only the United Nations system, with its balance between the formal equality of state organizations in the General Assembly and many sub-organizations, and the consideration of military strength in the Security Council and economic strength in the Bretton Woods organizations, re-established a stable international system that (despite repeated ineffectiveness in the military sphere) maintained its internal structure throughout the entire period of stable 1:1 allocations of individuals to groups.
On the lower level within nation states, the new form of political organization was the mass party that merged elite groups and social movements in the 19th century. Their mixture of externally modern orientation towards political competition for votes and internal validity of an “iron law of oligarchy” (as German sociologist Robert Michels put it) exemplifies the combination of internally pre-modern structure and externally competitive interaction.
The effort to win votes did, however, not imply for each of these new parties the acceptance of continuous feedback by measuring popular support in democratic counting processes. An important part of the social crisis of the first transition were two social movements and their respective parties, which relied on imperfectly modern conceptions during the crisis. For both of them, failure in elections was not an acceptable feedback and part of their democratic responsibility after suboptimal performance for the voters, but a result of “Western decadence” or “capitalist blindness”, which justified their joint rejection of lasting democratic competition. While the communist combination of modern ideology and traditional practice was able to survive for a long time and only collapsed decades later due to internal inefficiency, the fascist combination of traditional ideology and modern practice largely disappeared from the scene much faster. It made way for the insight of Churchill’s dictum of 1947: the general acceptance of democracy as appropriate form of feedback for parties as responsible organizations.
The comparable dictum of expecting an “end of history” (Francis Fukuyama) after the end of communism was however so much more short-lived because it naively expected that industrial institutions would be enough to cover the global demand for popular self-determination, without understanding what was to come.
In the first part of the second transition from 1968 onwards, the European 1:1 allocations of individuals to organisations since 1968 have lost their former monopoly in several respects. In practical politics, the industrial assignment of tasks to institutional levels (usually that of the nation state) lost its primacy; it was challenged both by the growing importance of supranational coordination from above and by the demand for subnational legitimation from below.
In normative terms, unquestioned identification with one’s own nation-state organization lost its self-evidence. As early as 1961, the Eichmann Trials made clear the limits to the legitimization of individual action through organizational integration. Later in the 1960s, the fact that nation-states as actors make mistakes and must take responsibility for these mistakes began to become a broad topic. With the USA during Vietnam and with Germany and the incipient realisation of the responsibility of society as a whole for the crimes of the Nazi era, this began with two societies sharing the highest levels of development and of visibility with their nationally responsible misconduct, but in the following decades the norm spread internationally to a general understanding of nation states’ historical responsibilities (although the diffusion of this norm is not yet complete).
The same period saw the rise of a new type of civil society organisation, which took on the task of representing all kinds of specialised interests. Their spectrum is broad: it includes the representation of specialized altruistic motives in animal protection and human rights as well as selfish motives that can be fed by concerns about infrastructure projects or professional interests. But even the latter, unlike the organizations of social movements of the 19th century, which had become parties, no longer have the objective of grasping the individual from his socio-structural (in the case of the workers’ parties) or normative position (in the case of most conservative parties) with his whole person, but are limited to the representation of their specific interests.
Multi-level politics, the awareness of national responsibility, and the rise of civil society interest organizations are all innovations at the level of organizations that challenge the framework set by nation states and party democracy. However, an appropriate change towards a new framework is still pending. In multi-level politics, democratic legitimacy is only symbolic and in most cases no longer supported by the fact that the relevant actors really have a mandate for what they do, which means that effective action is lacking, for example in climate policy. Civil society organisations, on the other hand, have clear mandates but are not involved in the process of responsible decision-making. And although the awareness of national responsibility is surely a good thing to stay, it does not help too much in times when the ecological existence of the whole planet is at stake.
5 What is to come?
The emergence of new institutions thus takes place in two times two equal four thrusts. The first three fields can be assigned to the historical phases 1820 to 1920, 1938 to 1949, and since 1968. The fourth phase is still missing or is in its first stages of development — if one takes the terrorist attacks of 1914 and 2001 as the beginning of a general awareness of the need for change, by the beginning of 2020 we are analogously as far advanced as at the end of 1932, with the start of a new “New Deal” right in front of us. So, what are the “New Deal” changes necessary for our time?
This fourth phase is about the individualization of institutions that were developed within the framework of industrial society for groups to which each individual belonged with his or her entire identity — in the economic sphere through professional identity and corporate affiliation, in the political sphere through party identification. In both cases, the industrial society organizations will not disappear, but will give up their monopolies in favor of a responsible involvement of a much greater variety of actors within the individual networks.
In the area of individual decisions in education and business, it is a matter of individual responsible support: The schools and trade unions of the industrial society supported people, took over some of their responsibility and thus had a socially balancing effect, but they did so for whole groups. This world has passed through individualisation, and at present there is a lack of organisations that would equally have a lasting interest in helping people to succeed and protecting them against social decline. An unconditional basic income may or may not come, but in order to prevent the negative consequences of high social inequality, it makes more sense to create an appropriate institutional structure that supports more equal marketable skills.
In the area of political decision-making, it is also a matter of drawing the consequences of individualisation in relation to political institutions.
Individualization refers on the one hand to the interest in participation, on the other hand to the form of representation. Representative democracy solved the dilemma of grassroots democracy, which is in danger of demanding too much of the citizen, by the concept of representation.
But the industrial concept of representation is rigid in two respects. On the one hand, in the institutions of industrial society every decision is defined as either representative democracy or direct democracy; there is no provision for an individual meta-decision in each case as to whether one wants to participate or whether one prefers to be represented.
On the other hand, representation by parties and politicians alone is provided for; the whole new wealth of civil society interest organisations is not involved in responsible decision-making, but is instead relegated to the lobby of non-transparent decision influencing.
Pia Mancini already pointed out that the ballot paper, which uses paper and pencil to store the trust in representative actors, is an inflexible media technology for which there are better digital alternatives. The digital storage of trust enables both the actor-open involvement of all civil society interest groups in responsible decision-making and the freedom of meta-decision between direct democratic participation and passive representation in political decision-making. By combining the higher legitimacy of direct democracy with the greater stability of representative democracy, there is much to be gained in tackling current political problems.
Since meta-decision-making freedom takes the citizens in their individual responsibility more seriously and actor openness responsibly involves civil society, it is appropriate to speak of a Civil democracy for the expected and necessary concept. Since civil society organisations have the same profile across different nations much more than parties, it is also a useful basis for supranational decisions.
6 2020 and 1933
1933 is mostly remembered for Hitler seizing power, but it should be remembered even more for FDR’s New Deal policies that started over his famous first hundred days in office. It was the beginning of the dynamics that created industrial society, a definite role model for what we need now: The establishment of a stable institutional order with legitimate and well-performing political decisions and a relatively fair distribution of what people earned by marketing their skills. Of course, the industrial order had many flaws and problems that we should not wish to get back, mostly their hierarchical nature in everyday life and in relation with the dominated rest of the world. But the modern dynamic of growing information and opportunities has continued, and we have the chance to create a really modern institutional order without such downsides.
If we do that, the five parallels mentioned above — populism, migration, terrorism, economic crises and social inequality — become phenomena of transition that can be resolved with the new institutions of a fully developed second modernity. Let us proceed in reverse order:
In the perspective of the presented model, the two waves of rising social inequality can be assigned to the two transitional phases, in which in each case organizations already function or begin to function according to a new logic, while for reasons of institutional persistence the connections and feedback mechanisms at the social macro-level still remain in the old logic. In concrete terms, for the first transition this means that what was observed as the first Kuznets cycle of rising and later falling inequality was in fact a process of decoupling and reintegration, and the social problem was solved by new connections and feedback mechanisms in the form of group-based organizations that provided differentiated qualifications and offered differentiated negotiation support. The last decades of rising inequality can now again be seen as the phase in which industrial society’s links and feedbacks have lost their effectiveness, while organisations have long since adapted to the new conditions of global competition and individualised recruitment practices, and new institutions of individual accountability and supranational decision-making are expected to have a compensatory effect.
The reappearance of economic crises after a forty-year break can be explained directly on this basis — the Marxian and Keynesian argument that in times of high inequality the share of the stabilizing general consumption in the national product decreases would be the entry into a discussion too far from the focus here.
Terrorism and migration have something to do with inequality and at the same time directly address the crisis-prone loss of efficiency of the established institutions — terrorism as an anarchist project in the feeling of being able to shatter something that is already disintegrating of its own accord, and migration from the feeling of having to seek security and chances of happiness elsewhere in a world that is disintegrating at home. New sustainable political institutions will be able to change this — the fact that party democracy is based on a specifically European tradition also explains why Europe’s current problems with democracy have long been occurring outside the continent. For good self-government in non-European societies, civil democracy is the only appropriate way.
In both phases, populism builds on inequality and a desire to hold on to what is tried and tested — it was not the unemployed who voted for Hitler, after all, and even now it is not so much those who are at the bottom of the ladder as those who fear losing something and who cling to old concepts of group identity and authority, who are open to dubious promises.
At the same time, however, the differences become clear. The good news is that the current crisis will not become violent on a scale of the 1940s in the form of battles between large armies or industrialized mass murder by task forces of authoritarian characters, because today’s world is far too individualized for that. But the potential of rapid reaction forces, the individual handling of nuclear weapons and the climate consequences of non-functional global governance are worrying enough.
7 Conclusion
In response to the parallels between problems of the present and the first half of the 20th century, we have developed a model of first and second modernity: Growth and the increase in knowledge generate complexity and lead to the introduction of rationality and deliberation, but in the first transition of modernity until 1949 this only occurred outside of organisations, i.e. between them or where they were being formed. Only later, visibly since 1968, does the transition to a “Second Modernity” take place, in which rationality and deliberation also become a matter of course within organizations. Problematic parallels such as the rise in inequality, susceptibility to crisis, politically legitimized violence, or populist electoral successes can be placed in the model, and a large part of social dynamics in fields as diverse as intimacy, education, economics, and politics support hypotheses that can be derived from it.
Models enable predictions to be made, and this also applies here: It can be deduced that in the coming years there will still be institutional changes which will make individual responsibility and its necessary, but freedom-based support by appropriately oriented actors clearer. The concept of civil democracy with the electronic storage of political trust, which enables meta-decision freedom and actor openness, is at the centre of expected and normatively required institutional developments.
In both transitions, the visible outbreaks of violence in 1914 and 2001 made it clear that the world is changing. Organisations are no longer as they were before, and the macro-social world must follow this change. In the first transition, it took a long generation of 35 years from the beginning of hostilities in 1914 to the establishment of industrial institutions in 1949, a time when the generation of those who had grown up in the “good old days” before 1914, trusting in tradition and authority, was replaced by those who understood that rationality and deliberation at the macro-level needed new institutions. Between these two dates social problems and violence escalated.
It is relatively likely that in the current second transition the escalation of problems and violence will continue at the same rate as long as the institutions of industrial society are not reconsidered. In part this is already happening, but more in a way that is closer to established routines and therefore further away from sustainability. But the generations that have grown up in the stuffy industrial security of clear group assignments are being replaced by younger ones for whom it is taken for granted that industrial society is over, and who nevertheless expect responsibility and support in public decision-making. If one takes the terrorist attacks of 1914 and 2001 as the beginning of a general awareness of the need for change, an end to the transition process analogous to the establishment of the German Grundgesetz and the UN would be expected only for the summer of 2036. But solving the problems started in 1933 in the first wave, and can start in 2020 this time. The global climate issue suggests that it would even be good to be faster. After all, the existence of a clear understanding makes this easier than it was then.
Admittedly, there is still a lot to be done, in the form of research to further clarify the framework and its conditions, and in the form of a long political process to negotiate the details. So far, the current transition is not yet as bloody as its predecessor, despite the high blood toll of civil wars, migration, terrorism and right-wing violence. It may yet become as bloody, although, as already mentioned, not in the same form as it was then. Let us hope it will not.
The new institutions are inherently more complex and thus more in need of precise analysis and unbiased experimentation than those that prevailed in the 1940s. But each and every one can, and needs to, make a contribution to giving Civil democracy a chance. There are enough social resources available for this. Few of us are foundation boards, professors or journalistic gatekeepers. But as a member of civil society organisations or simply as a citizen, anyone can participate.
For the how-to, stay tuned to my next texts, visit civil-democracy.org or send me an email.
