FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
551
ous of the constitutional patriotism which framed much of the identity
of the old Federal Republic's elite. But the contrary is true: it testifies to
everything
but
the rebirth of an anti-liberal
Volksgemeinschqft.
The debate
is about the alternatives of Westernization: developing liberal democracy
in the framework of "Europe," whatever that means, or in the frame–
work of the newly reunited nation-state. These concerns should not be
mixed up with the emergence of the so-called post-World War II new
nationalist right, which is almost exclusively West German.
It
harks back
to the conservative revolutionaries of the 1920s and the exposure of the
values of the West as alien to Germans. Ironically, there is an obvious
affinity between the anti-Americanism of the new nationalist right and
the left-wing pacifist milieu that has survived the defeat of the early
1980s.
Aside from intellectual minorities, both East and West Germans share
a wish for Westernization, not in Bismarck's but in Adenauer's tradition
of unambiguous commitment to Western Europe and Western values. In
this sense, European integration and transatlantic cooperation remain the
core of the German nation-state's
raison d'etre.
For the first time in its
history, Germany can integrate the values of democracy and national
identity within the concept of the nation-state. Liberal democracy and
Germanhood can be brought together. The peaceful revolution in East
Germany which led to the unification of the country was a defining
moment within this process. The national statehood which Germans had
first gained by war in 1871, and which they lost as the result of the
bloodiest war in European history, was suddenly achieved by a demo–
cratic revolution without the force of arms or the spilling of blood.
Even if the common German language downgrades the peaceful revolu–
tion into a simple turnabout
(Wende),
it established the legitimacy of the
new Germany as a result of a revolutionary process in East Germany, in
which the entire German people has achieved freedom in peace, joining
unanimously the democratic West, and in accordance with its neighbors.
With the infusion of East Germans into Germany's traditionally West
German foreign policy elite, the self-conscious post-nationalism, both in
the form of Europeanism and Atlanticism, is destined to steadily erode.
The ongoing debate on the Germans' national identity evidently
demonstrates that reunification as a result of a popular revolution is still
an occasion for recasting the existing state of the society, thus enabling
the Germans to regain national self-consciousness and renewed patrio–
tism. The post-1990 Federal Republic is no longer a form of democratic
government for the Germans on European soil. It again has become a
nation-state. United Germany is not merely an enlarged version of the
