Phantom Borders

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Post-war Germany was perhaps the largest natural experiment into the relative effects of free market capitalism and socialism. Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, West Germans remain more liberal by most measures, but there are considerable differences in attitudes between those areas able to access West German television and those left in the dark. Access to western TV seemed to have a strong liberalising attitude and this had less of an effect in the areas sarcastically nicknamed ‘Valley of the Clueless’.

I only mention this nugget because the German elections have taken place and so Twitter is again bombarded with images of the country’s ‘phantom border’ between the old East and West: not just a phantom border in voting patterns, but in economics, too.

I’m interested in how ancient historical paths influence politics today; in Britain, for instance, Brexit voting patterns in Wales still reflect Anglo-Norman colonisation from the time of Henry II, and Conservative vs Labour voting divides well into the 21^st century still mapped onto Victorian divisions between Anglicans and Nonconformists. I’m not sure that still holds, now that British politics has descended into chaos, but the Liberal Democrats remain curiously powerful within Alfred the Great’s kingdom. François Valentin, one of Twitter’s greatest map nerds (I say that as a compliment), has also shown how Phantom Borders can be seen in Poland and Romania, France and elsewhere.

These patterns can sometimes be truly ancient, and Germany’s voting divisions are certainly much older than communism, showing up in pre-war voting and in the time of the Kaiser. James Hawes’ thesis in The Shortest History of Germany was that there were always two political cultures in the country, centred on Prussia and the West. Hawes wrote: ‘Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives — conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite — depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.’ Although many western Germans viewed the Prussians as instinctively reactionary and autocratic, and blamed them for the country’s wrong turn, pre-war eastern Germany also had a larger working class, more leftists, working women and births out of wedlock.

Some of this was down to contrasting agrarian social structures and industrialisation, but the biggest factor was the ancient divide between Catholics and Protestants. Alternative für Deutschland today is stronger in historically Protestant areas of the country, both in the West and East, as was the Nazi vote, and neither of these patterns are entirely coincidental.

Joseph Henrich observed that Protestantism had a large, measurable effect on literacy in Germany. In 16^th century Brandenburg, the principality which evolved into the Kingdom of Prussia, the number of boys’ schools doubled, from 55 to 100, but the number of girls’ schools increased more than ten-fold, from four to 55. Henrich noted that in Germany in 1816, the higher the percentage of Protestants, the more educated the girls; in the 1871 Prussian census, counties with more Protestants had higher rates of literacy and shorter travel times to local schools.

The German Democratic Republic had very high rates of female employment, literacy and gender equality, and while the communists might rightfully claim this as one of their successes, they were certainly swimming with the current of the country’s religious culture. It’s not like raising female literacy in Afghanistan, which the communists also tried to do - and which provoked an uprising.

The DDR was the one eastern bloc country where a sizeable proportion of the population believed in the system, and I don’t think this is entirely unrelated to its Protestantism, which in effect means secularisation. Likewise, while communism had some genuine support among the semi-Protestant Czechs, in Poland it faced much stronger resistance intimately tied to the Poles’ loyalty to the Catholic Church. Secularism probably plays some part in distancing voters from traditional parties tied to the Roman Church, and today, the ‘stronger the Catholic presence in a Germany region, the more dominant the lead of the Christian Democrats or their Bavarian sympathisers’. Presumably, as Germany’s younger, more irreligious cohorts come to predominate, that may change, and as Ross Douthat once put it, ‘if you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right’.

Indeed, it is not Saxony or Thuringia which is Germany’s most right-wing state, but Bavaria, and some parts of that region are incredibly conservative - they just vote for a churchier wing of the Right. This religious/secular divide probably better explains the country’s divisions than the western belief that eastern Europeans are inherently authoritarian, indeed ‘Asiatic’. Hawes cited the example of post-war leader Conrad Adenauer, who ‘when he had to visit Berlin… would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering “Here we go, Asia again!” (“Schon wieder Asien!”) After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.’

He was not the only westerner to view the east in such terms. After the war, millions of Prussian refugees had to be resettled in the West, where resentful locals called them ‘Polacks’, and Harald Jähner wrote that ‘the attitude of many Germans towards their expelled compatriots was no less hard-hearted than their behaviour towards the foreign DPs,’ much of it due to their ‘Slavic’ habits. Hawes observed that historically ‘East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs’, and it is true that East Germans are more Slavic in ancestry - but, again, that is unlikely to explain any political tendencies.

Besides which, Germany’s divisions are somewhat exaggerated. One of the big stories of the election was the AfD’s success in the West, where the party enjoyed significant gains. Likewise, the ex-communist Die Linke made huge advances in the former West Germany. The idea that Right-wing populism was going to be an eastern phenomenon was always a fantasy, considering it has become established almost everywhere in western Europe.

It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of the east-west divide is just class - 38 per cent of the working-class vote went to the AfD, and there are just more of them in the East. This is also the case with British politics, where the economic divide between the north and south of England is larger than the east-west split in Germany. For the Brexit referendum, a white working-class Englishman in London was just as likely to vote Leave as his counterpart in Teesside, Sunderland or wherever: there are just fewer of that demographic in the capital. Despite this, London’s political leaders were able to convince themselves that they somehow represent a more liberal part of the country, despite both income and racial inequality being larger there than in the provinces.

I tend to sympathise with Katja Hoyer’s argument that much of this divide between a liberal west and authoritarian east is a smug fantasy, only because I see that it is true of England. On the other hand, there is such a thing as ‘Core Europe’, the corner of the continent where western civilisation as we know it was birthed after the rise of Islam had divided the Mediterranean in two, causing western Christendom to be ‘bottled up’. This roughly corresponds to Charlemagne’s kingdom – France, the Low Countries, northern Italy and western Germany - and the region still has distinctive traits today. Had a separate Rhineland state successfully emerged, it seems plausible that it would have developed a political culture much more like the Netherlands, although I think Germany’s wrong turn was due to size more than anything (Denmark was further from Core Europe, and they turned out pretty well).

Authoritarian Prussia tended to look east in its foreign policy, and one reason that the AfD concerns so many people is a fear that they are too sympathetic to Russia. It is certainly true that the AfD, as with Die Linke and its offshoot the BSW, are less animated by the Ukrainian cause, to put it mildly, although I’m not sure that reflects any great admiration for Moscow. From what I’ve heard, East Germans tend to have stronger views about Russia than their compatriots in the West, but this goes in both directions - among both the most pro and anti.

They do, however, tend to be less pro-American, as one might expect after 45 years of Soviet propaganda, and the most convincing explanation I heard for this difference is the gap in English proficiency between the two parts of Germany. If true, that seems to echo the ‘valley of the clueless’ theory of cultural influence - although, having said that, English is now the global language of radical progressivism. Perhaps western popular culture is not having the same effect as it once did.