Page 220 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

197 Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

rations) cannot be neutralized. The need for coordination at a supra-
national level cannot easily be satisfied as long as governments have
to legitimate themselves exclusively in terms of national decisions and
thus have to react to national developments that are extremely non-
synchronous.
3. Until the middle of this century, national identity in advanced
European countries was so strongly developed that legitimation crises
could be headed off by nationalistic means if in no other way. Today
there are growing indications not only that exhaustion has set in where
national consciousness has been overstimulated, but that a process of
erosion is underway in all the older nations. The disproportion be-
tween worldwide mechanisms of system integration (world market,
weapons systems, news media, personal communication) and the local-
ized social integration of the state may be a contributing factor. Today
it is no longer so easy to separate out internal and external enemies
according to national characteristics. Characteristics relating to opposi-
tion to the system serve as a substitute (as, e.g., in the recent ‘Radicals
Decree” in the Federal Republic of Germany). Conversely, however,
membership in the system cannot, it seems, be built up to a positive
identifying characteristic.
4. Nor are the sociostructural conditions particularly favorable for
the “planning of ideology’’ (Luhmann). Horizontal and vertical ex-
pansion of the educational system does make it easier to exercise
social control through the mass media. But the symbolic use of politics
(in the sense of M. Edelmann) thereby also becomes more and more
susceptible to exercises in self-contradiction. (On the evening news, one
watches the leaders of the Social Democratic Party spell out invest-
ment control as a “forward-looking industrial policy.” The next day
one reads Wehner’s denial in Der Spiegel: ‘‘We live at a time in which
semantics is decisive.” I am ignoring for the moment the selective
circulation of Der Spiegel.)
c. If under these restrictive conditions the state does not suc-
ceed in keeping the dysfunctional side effects of the capitalist
economic process within bounds acceptable to the voting public,
if it is also unsuccessful in lowering the threshold of acceptability
itself, chen manifestations of delegitimation are unavoidable. This
is marked at first by symptoms of a sharpened struggle over dis-
tribution, which proceeds according to the rules of a zero-sum
game between the state’s share, the share of wages, and the rate of
profit. The rate of inflation, the financial crisis of the state, and