Gary Bonham - Ideology and Interests in the German State (Rle: German Politics)

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: GERMAN POLITICS

Volume 1

IDEOLOGY AND INTERESTS IN THE GERMAN STATE

Ideology and Interests in the German State

Gary Bonham

First published in 1991

This edition first published in 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1991 Gary Bonham

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-83837-6 (Set)
elSBN: 978-1-315-72630-4 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-83963-2 (Volume 1)
elSBN: 978-1-315-73332-6 (Volume 1)

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Ideology and Interests in the German State

Gary Bonham

Garland Publishing, Inc.
New York & London 1991

Copyright 1991 by Gary Bonham
All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bonham, Gary, 1951
Ideology and interests in the German state/ Gary Bonham.
p. cm.[Modern European history. Germany and Austria]
Originally presented as the author's thesisUniversity of California, Berkeley, 1985 .
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8153-0473-0 [alk. paper]
1. GermanyPolitics and government1888-1918.2. BureaucracyGermanyHistory.
I. Title. II. Series.
DD228.5.865 1991
320.943dc20 91-17759

Designed by Marisel Tavrez

Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper.
Manufactured in rhe United States of America

Preface to the Garland Edition

American students of pre-WWI German bureaucracy are doomed to fall into a professional black hole. At an early stage in my research, I came across an interesting dissertation on the German administration in the early twentieth century by Paul Robert Duggan, which was submitted to Harvard in 1968. I was eager to read more of his work on the German bureaucracy, but was only able to locate one publication, an article in an obscure Italian journal from the following year. I asked a number of historians, some of whom had met him in the German archives, about him, but nobody seemed to know what had happened to him or why he had not published more on German bureaucrats. Just before I left for the East German archives, I finally managed to track him down at Michigan State University. Much to my disappointment, he said he had given up researching this topic long ago and had moved on to other areas such as the study of American jurisprudence.

Little could I imagine then that I would replicate Duggan's path. As it turned out, I surpassed his separation from the field by light-years. Not only did I abandon the study of German bureaucratic history, but I left academia altogether. For future students of this topic who wish to track me down too, I now manage industry affairs for LSI Logic, a semiconductor company in California's Silicon Valley.

Pre-eminent scholars in this field who have known both Duggan and me, such as Peter-Christian Witt, will now have to consider very carefully before they advise American students to enter the Bermuda Triangle of German bureaucratic history.

Seriously, my decision to leave academia for the private sector had nothing to do with a loss of interest in the topic of my doctoral thesis. However, my current job commitments have left me with little time to pursue that interest in print. That my dissertation is finally being published is the result of the considerable efforts of two historians who have long supported my work and (for God knows what reason) want to see it disseminated: Jim Retallack and Jerry Feldman. I want to thank them for their perseverance.

This book is also only made possible by the accommodating attitude of Garland. They were generous enough to allow my dissertation to be published as it standsgrammatical, typographical and substantive warts and all because I do not have the time to revise it.

And finally, I would like to thank my boss, Bruce Entin, who was nice enough to give me the day off to write this preface.

In the remainder of this essay I would like to discuss the relevance to my work of some important trends in politics and political science that have occurred since the bulk of my research in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

One of the central arguments of my work is that ideology canand in the German case didserve as a unifying force for at least parts of the state bureaucracy and the basis for state action independent of, and sometimes in opposition to powerful interests in society.

The world has changed substantially since my research. The events of the last decade seem to demonstrate that state ideology and intervention into society are increasingly irrelevant for today's world. For example, advanced industrial democracies in the United States and Western Europe have significantly reduced the level of public regulation of the economy as well as government expenditures and programs. Even more dramatic is the dismantling of communist systems, which strongly suggests that we are no longer living in an age of state ideology.

The assumption that state ideology is no longer important is, however, quite misleading. While state officials may have rejected some ideologies such as New Deal liberalism or Marxism-Leninism, other belief and value systems still hold sway in a number of cases.

In the United States, a commitment to New Deal liberalism has been replaced in many public quarters by a dogmatic adherence to neoclassical, laissez-faire economics. This world view has had a profound impact on the American economy. Officials committed to a neoclassical belief system reject government support for industry, failing to distinguish between subsidizing sunset industries and strengthening industries with high growth potential. Their indifference to growth industries has impeded national economic competitiveness.

U.S. officials' laissez-faire values have earned them the wrath of industry leaders, many of whom are now willing to support the Democratic Party. Adherence to a neoclassical ideology has also brought these officials into conflict with a less influential group of bureaucrats committed to a more active role by the state in promoting national economic competitiveness. This pattern of ideologically motivated conflict both among state bureaucrats and between a group of administrators and powerful outside social interests strongly resembles the patterns of conflict in my study of the German state.

In contrast to the laissez-faire ideology predominant in the American Administration, many other industrialized and developing countries today are being directed by a different kind of state ideology, one that stresses a leading role by the state to achieve national economic objectives. According to this view, national economic well-being is too important to be left to the vagaries of the "hidden hand" of the marketplace. Instead, the state identifies selected industries as strategicespecially because of their potential for high levels of growth, productivity, jobs and salariesand targets them for preferential treatment in order to establish a domestic base from which to gain market share abroad.

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