Page 178 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

CONCLUSION 151

region. Decisive for the legitimacy of the emerging political institutions
and the introduction of the Social Market Economy as a democratic
economic system for the Federal Republic of Germany, however, were
not the degree of public acceptance and whether most laws were approved
by the people but rather that the first post-war government and parliament
evidently acted for the people; and, furthermore, they committed
themselves to political communication and policy responsiveness per se. In
their effort to encourage the general public to partake in the policy
discourse as politically mature actors rather than objects, and by their
ambitious media policy geared to create a public sphere, the campaigners
for the Social Market Economy were the main ancestors of the evolving
democracy in post-war Germany. For it is that democracy is government
for the people, but equally it is the role of the governed to enter directly
and/or indirectly into a political and constitutional dialogue in order to
determine the possible consistency between a preferred policy option and
a preferred constitutional structure. In addition, the academic, political and
public debate about the socio-political and economic model for a
democratic, liberal and social post-war Germany, and the mutually
accepted reciprocity between political conduct and public opinion not
only led to the formation, implementation, and validation of the Social
Market Economy in Germany, but also to international respect and
emancipation for the legal successor of the Third Reich, which thereupon
began its return to the table of power politics. Thus the period of Allied
occupation, from 1945 right up to the birth of the Federal Republic of
Germany in 1949, cannot be characterised as a mere interlude between
collapse and restart; but, rather, it must instead be seen as a definitive
phase of German economic, constitutional and democratic reconstruction.

What is past is prologue;
the fate of our civilisation will ultimately depend on
how we solve the economic problems we shall then face.