A paradigm is understood to mean fundamental ways of thinking and basic assumptions that are shared, developed and defended against competing paradigms by certain social groups. That’s what it says at Wikipedia:
Since the late 18th century, paradigm has referred to a particular type of worldview or doctrine. ….. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, paradigms are patterns or standards with which experience is compared and judged. They lie before experience (a priori) and provide orientation.
In the article recommended here says Andreas Rödder (including Professor of Modern History at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz), that the Federal Republic is currently in its fourth political-cultural paradigm shift. Every 15 to 20 years
the Federal Republic is experiencing such a paradigm shift: the first oil price shock in 1973 marked the end of the modernization ideology; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border marked the end of the Cold War; The global financial crisis of 2008 questioned the hegemony of neoliberal interpretation patterns. And the crises of 2023 destroyed the green paradigm that had since gained the upper hand in Germany.
These temporarily dominant paradigms formed the framework for what was and is generally accepted as right or wrong, as public opinion. Which means you can say it publicly without being sidelined.
Public opinion is not just a discursive or cultural phenomenon. It is also of enormous practical importance. In democratic systems, the limits of what can be said determine the scope of what is possible. Often you only notice it when someone moves out of the consensus zone of public discourse and into the limits of what can be said. And because Democratic politicians typically avoid this because of the risk of scandal and ostracism at these borders, this framework of thinking and speaking is so crucial. Without most citizens noticing it, it predetermines political decisions.
Anyone who succeeds in defining the space of what can be said, in presenting their own goals as the only true and moral ones, determines the public discourse space and thus has the “cultural hegemonyAs the Marxist Antonio Gramsci put it:
The dominance of a social group is manifested in two ways, as domination and as intellectual and moral leadership. A social group is dominant when it subjugates opposing groups and leads allied groups. A social group may, indeed must, have assumed leadership before coming to power; when she is in power […] it will become dominant, but it must continue to be a leader.
If the group loses intellectual and moral leadership, it ultimately loses power. This is what Rödder says in the article:
Anyone who has public sovereignty over interpretation and can establish their own ideas as generally desirable does not need majorities and does not even have to formally govern in order to exercise power in the state. An established paradigm reigns. This explains why the SPD, under the sign of the neoliberal paradigm at the turn of the millennium, promoted the concept of the “entrepreneurial university” even without the FDP’s government participation, which is primarily oriented towards the laws of the market instead of its educational mission. And the Greens were in opposition for 16 years, while all Merkel governments followed the green paradigm from nuclear phase-out to migration policy.
However, history shows that hegemonic paradigms are only valid for a limited period of time and that competing social-cultural thought patterns are always dynamic. It is often drastic external events that initiate fundamental shifts by questioning the absolute validity of the dominant paradigm and revealing its limitations. For Rödder, the oil price shock and the economic crisis in 1973 ended the phase of experiments in rational strategic planning for the future and excessive optimism about the future.
Everything seemed feasible and planned, science and technology were the key to manned space travel to the moon as well as supersonic flights between the continents…etc.
Rödder does not mention nuclear power with its promise of unlimited availability of energy, although that is exactly where it belongs. It should also be said here that not all assumptions of a repressed paradigm are refuted and the new paradigm is not necessarily the opposite of the old one. And so the exaggerated belief in feasibility was not followed by deep pessimism about the future (at least not yet).
But contrary to expectations, the lack of growth, high inflation, rising unemployment and national debt, and a global shift in power could not be overcome with the means of national global control, etc. In this phase of perplexity, a paradigm shift – which is now repeatedly demonized by the left – took place primarily in political economy,
with the move away from the Keynesian belief in political control of the economy towards the market orientation of Milton Friedman. In particular, it was the USA during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and Great Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s era that relied on the release of market forces through deregulation and privatization in the 1980s. All in all, there was a significant increase in prosperity and a significant reduction in poverty worldwide. At the end of the decade, the “Washington Consensus” prevailed throughout the Western world: the belief in the need for consolidated government budgets and stable currencies, free trade, deregulated markets and the reduction of subsidies.
With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, this surge in prosperity led to a new optimistic paradigm, which – according to Rödder – was more of a reinforcement of the previous one.
Believing that it had not only won the Cold War but also reached the “end of history,” the West relied on the global spread of its ideas, while digitalization and new markets ensured unprecedented volumes and speeds of circulation of capital. After 1990, market orientation experienced a massive strengthening – and at the same time its ideologization.
And here, in my opinion, Rödder himself is making a mistake in his thinking. Clinton’s Democrats, Tony Blair’s New Labor and the first red-green government in Germany certainly wanted dynamic global markets with less regulation and fewer hurdles. But unregulated free markets did not emerge. That never existed either. The number of free trade agreements, i.e. international agreements that are supposed to regulate exactly how, increased Free trade is to be designed. Where protectionism should be abolished and where not. Which rights and obligations apply. These complex rules and blanket discrimination (as neoliberal) were, among other things, the reason why many agreements failed.
Nor was it a “neoliberal market ideology”.
More and more areas of society from the “educational economy” to the “entrepreneurial university” to the healthcare system are based on the principles of the market
tried to redesign
and to control it through quantifying instruments: quotas and numbers, rankings and models took on a life of their own from a tool to a goal in itself.
Truly “free” markets would not need these tools. The conversion of the public sector from cameralistics to double-entry systems, for example, was not privatization but rather an attempt to measure and increase economic efficiency and efficiency through quantification in order to use public resources economically. The German healthcare system doesn’t really work in a market economy and doesn’t work really well. Even if some of the clinics and practices are privately operated. Prices, scope of services and access to the system are strictly prescribed. In the strictest sense, there is only limited competition in this sector. At best, you simulate a “market economy”. But that’s just incidentally. In any case, the global Western system was in crisis. Rödder is therefore right when he states:
With the global financial crisis of 2008, the neoliberal, market ideological paradigm lost just as much credibility as the Keynesian paradigm in 1973. In 2010, the West had to hear from the Chinese Prime Minister in Davos that his economic model was undisciplined, unsustainable and wrong. ….. States had to save banks, and with the criticism of the excesses of neoliberal privatization and deregulation, new demands on state regulation and control grew.
The “green” thought pattern that is now becoming dominant had been building up in Western democracies since the 1980s and so on Rödder in the WORLD
has dominated the political public sphere since the global financial crisis of 2008. She has determined the neuralgic zones of the discourse: climate and energy, migration and integration, gender and sexuality. And it defined the limits of what could be said: Anyone who was considered a “climate denier,” “racist,” or “transphobic” was banned from the debate.
In Germany, the new paradigm was initially represented by the party “The Greens” – founded in 1980 – and then spread widely. This green movement emerged in the 1970s with the peace movement, the environmental and anti-nuclear movement and the new women’s movement. She is intellectual
a child of the deconstructivist postmodernism that has spread to Western universities since the 1970s. Its essence lay in the criticism of the “grand narrative” (Jean-François Lyotard) of Western modernity, of civilizational progress through enlightenment and rationality, industrialization and technology.
Now in political power, this so-called green paradigm as a response to the new demands on the state quickly turns out to be problematic and unrealistic. Moralization as an instrument of power also makes a significant contribution to this. Again Rödder in the WORLD:
The green hegemony has overreached ideologically by narrowing the scope of what can be said and spreading the “Nazi” stigma more and more aggressively. At some point, what is called reactance sets in: “If that’s Nazi, then that’s just me Nazi,” people say to themselves. Added to this was the onset of reality: the Hamas attack and the expressions of sympathy from leftists and Muslims. The Russian attack on Ukraine, which reduced the German ideology of “civil power” to absurdity. And the heating law gave an idea that green climate and energy policy cannot work.
And now even Greens like Robert Habeck, Cem Özdemir and Ricarda Lang were talking completely differently. Public broadcasting also changed its language regulations. You can also see a loss of credibility
the migration culture that has been dominant since 2015 as well as the cosmopolitan culture of peace, the paradigm of gender fluidity and energy and climate policy. With the collapse of its cornerstones, the hegemony of the green interpretive culture collapsed.
What’s next? After the hegemony of more left-wing narratives, Rödder predicts a pendulum swing to the right. And he sees – despite all the fundamental openness of history – three more concrete scenarios:
Re-foundation of a conservative party between the Union and the AfD, which gathers dissatisfied people from both parties
Further strengthening of the populist movements that propagate models of national and social or nationalist and socialist politics
The established middle class (especially the CDU) largely absorbs the swing of the pendulum.
Unfortunately, many civil war-like or dictatorial disaster scenarios are also conceivable. I just hope that the new paradigm enables the country and the EU to pragmatically survive in an increasingly confusing, problem-filled, multipolar world with its different regionally dominant fundamental ways of thinking and basic assumptions.