The Rise and Fall of National Stigmas: Evidence from post-WWII Germany

• In Event: Panel I on Democratic Backsliding/Erosion

Abstract

New democracies tend to develop norms that stigmatize the public expression of support for the past authoritarian regime. Perhaps nowhere else has this tendency been more evident than in post-war Germany, a country marked by the legacy of the Nazi atrocities in World War II. Such has been the impact of public debates about the Nazi past on the German political culture, that public expressions of national affinity have been “taboo” for much of the postwar period. More than half a century since the end of the Nazi regime, we ask how persistent these norms are and how do they evolve over time. We examine this question by looking at what is probably the archetypical symbol of national identity, namely the national flag. We conduct two nation-wide representative surveys, one in Germany and one Austria, a country that developed a more victimhood-oriented narrative about its involvement in the WWII and is thus not expected to have developed as strong a norm against national identity. In both countries, respondents were asked to express their feelings towards their national flag. We start by comparing the extent to which German respondents are more or less willing to profess positive feelings towards the German flag in a standard survey item as compared to a list experiment that keeps their answers private. The difference between the two formats constitutes our proxy of norm compliance. We then look at how this difference between public and private conditions varies across year-of-birth cohorts. For each year-of-birth cohort, we compare Germany to Austrian respondents. We plot the resulting differences as a way of trying to explore cohort-variation in public expressions of national affinity.
We then try to explore four possible sources of heterogeneity in the strength and durability of this norm. The first relates to regime socialization policies. We compare West and East Germany. The GDR tried from the beginning to distance itself from the Nazi past in a way distinctive from the West German model. Did this strategy eventually weaken the stigmatization of the German flag? Second, we compare native Germans with Germans who arrived in the country only after WWII, ousted from Central and Eastern Europe. This latter group, known as German expellees, also experienced significant victimization, narrated to the new generations within the family. By the same token, we thus expect descendants of expellees to be more willing to openly express their affect towards the German flag than non-expellees. Third, we look at the impact of German unification in 1990 by examining whether east German regions marked by greater disruption of massive outflows of young people since 1990 are more prone to nationalism. Fourth, we look at the role of ideology. Is the change found between cohorts driven by the left or the right of the political spectrum? By looking into ideology, we can better grasp recent developments in German politics, such as the appearance and electoral success of the radical right.
Our study sheds light on a crucial and timely, yet largely overlooked, question in the study of political culture, namely how norms evolve over time and along the process of democratic consolidation. Our results will inform a young but growing literature on authoritarian backsliding in industrialised societies, pointing to the role of norm change as opposed to underlying attitude change in accounting for some of the otherwise worrisome trends concerning the decline of democratic preferences.

Authors

• Elias Dinas, European University Institute

• Daniel F. Ziblatt, Harvard University