Our boilerplate introduction to the author of this piece, Wolfgang Streeck:
Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
If you can plow through some of the econo-political rhetoric in this essay to the core ideas you get the sense he may be on to something.
From the London Review of Books, August 15:
Anti-Constitutional
Wolfgang Streeck
Verfassungsschutz: Wie der Geheimdienst Politik macht
by Ronen Steinke.
Berlin Verlag, 221 pp., €24, June 2023,978 3 8270 1471 9 The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) owes its existence to the Allies. When the Western powers gave the green light for the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in their zones of occupation in 1949, they also gave the constituent assembly permission to set up ‘an office to collect and disseminate information on subversive activities against the federal government’. According to Ronen Steinke, the intention was to nip in the bud any attempt at a coup d’état, whether fascist or communist, that would have given the Soviet Union an excuse to invade western Germany. (Instead, the Soviets founded their own German state, the German Democratic Republic.) In post-fascist Germany, where memories of the Gestapo were still vivid, setting up a domestic intelligence agency for political surveillance was a politically sensitive move. The Allies had already passed a statute in 1946 disbanding ‘any German police bureaux and agencies charged with the surveillance and control of political activities’. Three years later, writing to the constituent assembly, they reiterated that the new agency ‘must not have police powers’.
This injunction is still observed. BfV agents aren’t allowed to arrest people; they don’t wear uniforms or carry guns. ‘They’re meant to listen as inconspicuously as possible,’ Steinke writes, ‘and take notes.’ Their job, as stated in the legislation, is ‘the collection and evaluation of information
... on activities against the free democratic basic order’. Defending the state against threats to this order is the domain of the police and public prosecutors, sometimes acting on information provided by the BfV. The BfV is subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, and is therefore subject to political instruction, in a way that, say, the office of the public prosecutor is not. Today, nudged by its masters, it has extended its responsibilities from the observation of subversive activities to their prevention.The BfV was founded in 1950 with a staff of 83. Little is known about its early activities, other than that the majority of its staff were former Nazis, as was the case in most branches of the federal bureaucracy. Its first president, Otto John, had been active in the resistance, escaping to London after the failed putsch of 1944. In 1954 he popped up in East Berlin and revealed in a press conference that the soon-to-be West German Ministry of Defence and the foreign intelligence service that was about to become the BND both employed former SS leaders. After two years in the GDR he returned to West Germany, claiming that he hadn’t gone east voluntarily, or switched sides, but had been abducted. He was sentenced to four years in prison for treason and conspiracy.
Within a few years, the BfV had helped the federal government ban two political parties that had been deemed anti-constitutional, the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in 1952 and the Communist Party (KPD) in 1956. The categorisation of political parties as anti-constitutional and their subsequent outlawing is peculiar to the German system. Cases are brought by the government and adjudicated by the constitutional court using evidence collected, typically, by Verfassungsschutz officers. The Allies shared the state’s interest in seeing the SRP and the KPD disbanded – the SRP was by its own admission a successor to the Nazi Party and the KPD was essentially the West German branch of the GDR’s ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). German governments have always viewed party bans as primarily a political, rather than a legal, matter. This was made clear in 1968 when the then minister of justice, Gustav Heinemann, a Social Democrat, invited two representatives of the KPD to his office to inform them that if a new communist party were founded nothing would be done to suppress it. Shortly afterwards that party came into being – as the DKP – and lasted until German unification, when it merged with the SED to form the party now known simply as Die Linke (‘The Left’).
Under Willy Brandt, who became chancellor in 1969, and his successor, Helmut Schmidt, the BfV thrived. Its staff more than doubled from around one thousand in 1969 to more than two thousand in 1980. It expanded again during the war on terror, and then in the wake of Angela Merkel’s opening of the German border in 2015. By 2022 it had a staff of more than four thousand and a budget of €440 million. In the meantime all sixteen federal states, the Länder, had established Verfassungsschutz offices of their own, employing an estimated 2600 officials. Add to this the unknown number of so-called V-Leute – paid informers who spy and report on suspected anti-constitutional activities; Steinke estimates that there are around 1500 of them – and you get roughly 8400 fighters for the constitution fielded by the seventeen governments of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Steinke gives a fascinating account of the way the BfV’s activities and concerns have changed over time. Unsurprisingly, the former Nazis tasked with protecting the democratic constitution in its early years were keen to go after the left, and this remained the BfV’s priority well into the years of student revolt. In 1972, the Brandt government and the Länder passed a decree banning the employment of ‘enemies of the constitution’ (Verfassungsfeinde) in the public sector, aimed primarily at a new generation of teachers and academics who were seen as potentially lacking loyalty to the state. Under the decree, which was rescinded at the federal level in 1985 and by the final Land, Bavaria, in 1991, 3.5 million people, both applicants for and holders of public sector jobs, were subjected to loyalty checks, carried out by the relevant Verfassungsschutz office. In total, 1250 applicants were refused employment and 260 employees dismissed, almost all of them deemed too far to the left to be capable of serving the public interest.
After the collapse of the GDR, and with the post-communist transformation of leftism into what Jürgen Habermas has called ‘constitutional patriotism’, the BfV’s attention began to shift to the right. After unification, right-wing ‘populist’ political parties came to be seen as electoral competition by Germany’s centre-right and centre-left: the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 2001, Gerhard Schröder’s government and both chambers of parliament filed a joint motion to the constitutional court to outlaw the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), which seemed close to crossing the threshold – 5 per cent of the vote – that would give it representation in parliament. As in the 1950s, it fell to the BfV to assemble the evidence. The case was thrown out by the constitutional court in 2003, on the basis that it was impossible to know how much of this evidence – mostly speeches and party resolutions – had been produced by undercover V-Leute who had joined the party. The problem was exacerbated by the refusal of the BfV to identify its agents, for fear of retribution by genuine party activists. It transpired that the federal and Länder bureaux had kept their agents secret from one another. They continued to do so during the trial, raising the possibility that a majority of those serving on the NPD’s internal committees may have been V-Leute who didn’t know who was and who wasn’t on their side. The BfV was ridiculed for allowing its spies to become indistinguishable from the party they were spying on.
In 2012, when Merkel was chancellor, there was another attempt to have the NPD banned....
....MUCH MORE
Previous visits with Streeck:- "Wolfgang Streeck: Life is easier if you’re not telling others how to behave"
- Streeck über den Krieg, Or, Why Are Germany's "Greens" More Aftraid Of Nuclear Power Than Nuclear War?
- Europe: Who's In Charge, NATO Or The EU?
- "Wolfgang Streeck Sees An Increasingly Chaotic and Violent System As Inevitable"
- At Inference Review (reviewing Mr. V.): Varoufakis: "My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment"
- Streeck: "The EU after Ukraine"
