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PARTISAN REVIEW
patriotism," which distanced patriotism from nationalism, and oriented
itself to the cosmopolitical values of Western democracy embedded in
the Federal Republic's constitution. Western Europe had been identified
with peace, reconciliation between former enemies, and a social order
founded on the principles of justice and liberty. Germany stood for au–
thoritarianism, two world wars in this century, for nationalism which
turned into National Socialism, for terror and repression, and for the
crime of the Holocaust. National reunification puts into question the
special West German political and ideological construct on which the
identity of the Federal Republic was based, its self-perception as a post–
national society, a democratic system.
During the forty years of the GDR's existence, national unity and
German identity was co-opted by the SED. Oscillating between post-na–
tional socialist internationalism, and the concept of the German Demo–
cratic Republic as a socialist nation-state, the regime unsuccessfully tried
to separate its people from the capitalist West. While West Germans
identified "Europe," as the incarnation of the West, their East German
counterpart considered the Federal Republic itself symbolic of the values
of the democratic and prosperous West. The perceptive French scholar
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec puts it in the following way, "In Communist
Germany surrounded by the Wall, the Federal Republic became the ob–
sessive measure of all things - acts and ideas. ... West German images,
information, values, and standards invaded East Germany; they nurtured
both the culture and the counterculture." East Germans identified " the
West" with a nation-state - the Federal Republic . In 1989, when
shouting the slogan "Wir sind ein Volk" ("We are one people"), East
Germans were not inspired by a backward, anti-democratic nationalism
but by liberal - meaning democratic capitalist - and social-democratic
ideas which had become the underlying norms of the Federal Republic.
Their exit from Communism and longing for Westernization took the
form ofjoining the West German nation-state. These completely differ–
ent perceptions explain - at least partly - the different attitudes toward
the nation-state in both parts of the unified country. In the West, na–
tionalism induces fear of losing the democratic achievements that made
the country a Western one. In the East, the nation-state symbolizes be–
longing to the democratic West.
The resurrection of the concept of the nation-state in the current
German debate about national identity is too often and too easily de–
nounced as a reactionary renunciation of the values of the democratic
West - both by left-wing intellectuals in Germany and by observers
abroad. East Germans are perceived as vehemently anti-American, dismis–
sive of liberal democracy, hostile to anything Western, and contemptu-
