Page 140 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

POLITICS AND PUBLIC OPINION 113

any final sense, public opinion shall be defined as the aggregation of all
citizens’ preferences and orientations towards political factual issues
expressed in free elections, opinion polls, petitions and newspaper articles.
Considering that ever since the Enlightenment, public opinion
bestowed an aura of legitimacy upon laws, policies, decisions and
convictions, and, following the Habermasian ideal of a deliberative or
discursive democracy in which legitimate lawmaking can only arise from
the public deliberation of the citizenry, one may therefore fundamentally
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expect a high government responsiveness defined by the continuing action
of government and policymakers in accordance with the preferences of its
citizens. With regard to both public opinion about the liberalisation of
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the economy and policy responsiveness of the first parliament, i.e. the
Economic Council, in post-war West Germany between 1945 and 1949,
however, there exists ambiguity even in scholarly writings and academic
research. What little there is appears contradictory and incomplete.
Whereas some argue that ‘the discontinuation of the government control
of the economy was embraced by the majority of the public,’ others
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assert that ‘the majority [...] could not conceal their appalling surprise’
and consider ‘the critics of the capitalist economy by no means as hopeless
in a minority.’ In order to balance this deficiency, this chapter aims to
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assess public opinion regarding the implementation of the Social Market
Economy in post-war Germany and to examine whether the decisions and
policies by the Economic Council were consistent with people’s
preferences. Although article 20 paragraph 2 of the Basic Law of the
Federal Republic of Germany promulgated on 23 May 1949 stated that all
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state authority is derived from the people, and, similarly, the first
Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer,
declared in the Bundestag on 21 October 1949 that it was not possible for
any political organisation in Germany to claim legitimacy for its existence
and action unless it rests on the freely expressed will of the people, this
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chapter argues that the liberalisation process and subsequent
implementation of the Social Market Economy were neither in accordance
with majority public opinion nor did the Economic Council show a high
level of responsiveness to public will.
With regard to the assessment of both public opinion and policy
responsiveness, it is essential to focus on salient aspects and elements of
the then political discussion and economic policy, such as socialisation,
government control of the economy, or the currency reform. In order to
gauge representative public opinion and its development over time, this
chapter considers representative public opinion surveys conducted by the
occupying forces, i.e. the Opinion Survey Section within the Intelligence
Branch of OMGUS which, under the direction of Frederick W. Williams,