Consensus sauce.
Gesine Schwan’s term, easy to see it everywhere, once you’ve seen it. It is what you pour over the leftovers so nobody has to look at what is underneath. A consensus that has not passed through conflict, she says, is not consensus. It is inattention. Or indifference.
We had ended our first conversation on a diagnosis: Germany no longer has a shared value consensus. This time i wanted to know how you get one back. She took the question away from Germany first. Every Western democracy is built on the legitimacy of conflict. If individual freedom is the foundation, people will want different things. Different lives, different perspectives, different wants. The question is not how to prevent the conflict. It is what stops the whole thing flying apart.
Fraenkel’s mistake
Ernst Fraenkel, one of the theorists of pluralist democracy in post-war Germany, called it the Grundkonsens, the basic consensus. He had been a labour lawyer for the unions before he fled to America, and she suspects he was thinking of collective bargaining: employer and worker fight over everything except the one thing they share, which is that the firm should still exist next year. He assumed the same held for the republic: liberty, justice and solidarity would keep reasserting themselves through every fight about a forest or a road.
Wrong, she thinks. We do not have that consensus. Important segments of this society do not care whether the rest of it gets by. Rich and poor have separated into worlds that do not touch, and empathy does not survive that. If the money has never run out on the twentieth of the month, you cannot feel it. The sociologist Lewis Coser had a name for the fix: loyalties that cross, lives that overlap. Germany sorts its children into separate schools after fourth grade. The sauce comes early.
The toads and the apprentices
So how do you get a basic consensus back when the worlds no longer meet? She builds rooms, i wrote after the first conversation. This time she told me what happens inside one.
Herne, in the Ruhr. A brownfield where a coal mine used to be. The nature people wanted it left alone, and their symbol was the natterjack toad. The unions and the employers wanted apprentice training and apprentice housing, which means sealed soil. Toads versus jobs. You know where this goes.
Except it didn’t. Nobody won. Someone on the toad side noticed their position got stronger the moment they stopped saying toads and said biodiversity. One level of abstraction up, and it was a principle the other side could not dismiss, because they held it too. Gesine calls this the reason behind the reason. You almost never agree on the thing. You can agree on the standard by which the thing gets judged. That is what consensus is. Not agreement on details. Agreement on the yardstick.
Biodiversity and good work are both valid, nobody can rank one above the other without arbitrariness, and there is only so much ground. So the ground got split. The recommendations went to the city council unanimous and signed. Ten councils have adopted what came out of such rooms.
Two rules emerged from it. First: no veto positions. “Without healthy nature nothing works” sounds unanswerable until you realise that anyone can say it about anything. Without peace nothing works. Without jobs nothing works. Positions enter with equal standing and leave with the strength of their reasons, not the money-power behind them. Second: no horse-trading. If you keep this on pensions, i concede that on energy. That is not compromise. That is a power game in a compromise costume, and anyone with common sense can smell it.
As if we had a democracy
Now she is trying it at the national level, on inheritance tax, where the Constitutional Court is reviewing the current law and the lobby money is a different order of magnitude. Politics, business, civil society. Invitations out. Four Saturdays, nine to six, unpaid, October to February. Chatham House rule, so nobody can give a speech for the gallery. Signed recommendations for the Chancellor and the parliamentary group leaders.
I wrote in governance that sortition is the most overlooked part of how the Greeks thought about democracy, so i asked whether hand-picking those forty is a legitimacy problem. She was pragmatic: if we missed a group, we add them. What interests her more is how forty political professionals will react to a process (her irony:) “where we act as if we really had a democracy.” They all know that out there the argument does not count. In this room it is the only thing that does.
Habermas calls it the unforced force of the better argument. Her version: damn, yes, that’s right. Not submission to a person. Submission to your own insight. She counts that as freedom.
The survey after each session says the same thing every time. It was insanely exhausting, and it was the most golden thing we have done.
I told her that in the Switzerland of my childhood, when two adults met, they argued about whatever vote was coming, and stayed close. She said good conflict is a better form of peace than silence over the conflict.
It would be more contentious. It would be more peaceful.
Take the sauce off.
PS: We spoke in German. English subtitles run the whole way.
