Bespoke translation by yours truly. Original article [A] at Junge Freiheit
The German welfare state has once been created to safeguard citizens against life's risks - today is increasingly seems to transform into a global benefit system. Is that still sustainable?
In Article 20, the Grundgesetz [constitution] sets the Federal Republic of Germany to be a democratic and social federation of states. And according to Article 28, the constitutional order in the states must abide by the principles of the social law-bound state. Social state means a state that protects its citizens from life risks that come from illness, disability, age, and unemployment.
These are not empty declarations, but directly valid constitutional norms which bind legislation, administration, and the courts to maintain social security. This constitutional lesson learned from the final stage of the Weimar Republic, hamstrung by mass unemployment and social desolation, has the goal of contributing to volitional self-actualization by means of social participation, without which no stable democracy can survive.
Benefits for millions of workers, that's what the social politicians of the Adenauer era, following Bismarck's tracks, were thinking, are best ensured by a levy-financed community of pension, health, and unemployment insurees. Without integrating the broad, wealthless lower class, they were also convinced of that under the pressure of Soviet Russian system competition during the Cold War, no capitalist society can survive. Alternative social models, such as the contemporarily vitalized ango-American vision of the libertarian minimal state, were instead considered from a West German and continental European perspective to be pure unsocial utopianism, ignoring the realities of modern mass societies.
Before 1945, the welfare state consisted as naturally as exclusively under the spectrum of the national state. From the nation understood as a community of shared fate came the solidary community. Its dissolution, which first happened stealthily after 1945, then coming to fruition with the second rapidly spreading globalization in the 1990s, is the background for a field study by the Bremen-based sociologists Arne Koevel, Uwe Schimank, and Stefan Holubek-Schaum.
After the Second World War, so the Bremen trio determines historically correctly, coming from the United Nations, a new cultural, soon discourse-dominating guiding virtue has been internationally established: the universalist justice of needs, which replaced citizen rights bound to particular, regional, and national communities with universal human rights. Accordingly, every human who needs help shall, in principle, receive a sufficient amount of help from whatever state is responsible.
Everyone in need can, wherever they may reside, register basic needs as claims for welfare state services. Surely, this forced universalization of the German welfare state in the name of human rights first came with the far-reaching staged welcome culture of the summer of 2015.
Ten years after Angela Merkel's suicidal opening of the floodgates, 55 percent of the Syrians invited by her, 47 percent of Afghans, and 41 percent of Iraqis still aren't in the German labor market, but have arrived in the thickly insulated German welfare system. Since 2022, 500,000 employable, but still unemployed Ukrainian "war refugees" accompany them in their parasitical laziness.
In June 2023, the statistics of the Federal Employment Office determined 62 percent of the 3.9 million Bürgergeld [unemployment money] recipients to be people with a migration background. Shocking numbers which the political-medial complex likes sweeping under the rug to spare the nerves of the German tax mule who sacrifices irrecoverable labor and life time to finance the transformation of a national social state to the World's Welfare Office.
The politically desired medial silence of the insane costs and the marginal benefits of mass immigration has not been worth it according to the Bremen "questionnaire". Because the four employed women from the lower and upper middle class of Mecklenburg-Hither Pomerania, who were recruited for this, gave a representative statement on how universalist or particularist welfare state solidarity should be.
To advance to the cardinal question, gladly made a taboo in public, but always viral in the mind of the majority of the civic population: "When are welfare benefits shocking, because they are granted to people who, as foreigners, don't have any right to them?"
The answer: When the givers are considering the receivers as not "belonging" to them. This central differential category "belonging", labeled "populist and racist" by the askers, is only indirectly ethnically defined, to the extent that all women differentiate between Germans and foreigners.
More important, for them, is the categorization into people who are willing to work and people who refuse to work, who also want to exclude the ethnic Germans deemed "lazy" from the blessings of the welfare state. Thus, considered as belonging are those who accept the German performance culture as their guiding culture, and who "live" by its work ethic.
Koevel & co. see a characteristic of "Western modernity" in this performance culture, but are just writing around the fact that there still exist peoples who ethnically support the performance societies of the West. And who also have an effect on the sociologically determined, allegedly "xenophobic, partially racist" patterns towards immigrants.
With reference to the Bielefeld-based social psychologist and "conflict researcher" Andreas Zick, a social democrat sitting in the foundation executive of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, who has been publishing exclusively on the topic of "group-based misanthropy" since his doctoral dissertation on "prejudice and racism" over twenty years ago, his Bremen colleagues ultimately recognize "right-wing extremist and democracy-endangering stances" in the replies by their female subjects. For them, the problem is not the destruction of the social state by mass immigration, but the legitimate, but in their eyes morally very despicable, insisting of the "distanced center of society" of their German guiding culture as a performance culture.
Immigration
Germany's progression into the World's Welfare Office
The German welfare state has once been created to safeguard citizens against life's risks - today is increasingly seems to transform into a global benefit system. Is that still sustainable?
In Article 20, the Grundgesetz [constitution] sets the Federal Republic of Germany to be a democratic and social federation of states. And according to Article 28, the constitutional order in the states must abide by the principles of the social law-bound state. Social state means a state that protects its citizens from life risks that come from illness, disability, age, and unemployment.
These are not empty declarations, but directly valid constitutional norms which bind legislation, administration, and the courts to maintain social security. This constitutional lesson learned from the final stage of the Weimar Republic, hamstrung by mass unemployment and social desolation, has the goal of contributing to volitional self-actualization by means of social participation, without which no stable democracy can survive.
Solidaric benefits are being interpreted as universally valid human rights
Benefits for millions of workers, that's what the social politicians of the Adenauer era, following Bismarck's tracks, were thinking, are best ensured by a levy-financed community of pension, health, and unemployment insurees. Without integrating the broad, wealthless lower class, they were also convinced of that under the pressure of Soviet Russian system competition during the Cold War, no capitalist society can survive. Alternative social models, such as the contemporarily vitalized ango-American vision of the libertarian minimal state, were instead considered from a West German and continental European perspective to be pure unsocial utopianism, ignoring the realities of modern mass societies.
Before 1945, the welfare state consisted as naturally as exclusively under the spectrum of the national state. From the nation understood as a community of shared fate came the solidary community. Its dissolution, which first happened stealthily after 1945, then coming to fruition with the second rapidly spreading globalization in the 1990s, is the background for a field study by the Bremen-based sociologists Arne Koevel, Uwe Schimank, and Stefan Holubek-Schaum.
The universalization of the German welfare state started in 2015
After the Second World War, so the Bremen trio determines historically correctly, coming from the United Nations, a new cultural, soon discourse-dominating guiding virtue has been internationally established: the universalist justice of needs, which replaced citizen rights bound to particular, regional, and national communities with universal human rights. Accordingly, every human who needs help shall, in principle, receive a sufficient amount of help from whatever state is responsible.
Everyone in need can, wherever they may reside, register basic needs as claims for welfare state services. Surely, this forced universalization of the German welfare state in the name of human rights first came with the far-reaching staged welcome culture of the summer of 2015.
Ten years after Angela Merkel's suicidal opening of the floodgates, 55 percent of the Syrians invited by her, 47 percent of Afghans, and 41 percent of Iraqis still aren't in the German labor market, but have arrived in the thickly insulated German welfare system. Since 2022, 500,000 employable, but still unemployed Ukrainian "war refugees" accompany them in their parasitical laziness.
"When are welfare state benefits shocking?"
In June 2023, the statistics of the Federal Employment Office determined 62 percent of the 3.9 million Bürgergeld [unemployment money] recipients to be people with a migration background. Shocking numbers which the political-medial complex likes sweeping under the rug to spare the nerves of the German tax mule who sacrifices irrecoverable labor and life time to finance the transformation of a national social state to the World's Welfare Office.
The politically desired medial silence of the insane costs and the marginal benefits of mass immigration has not been worth it according to the Bremen "questionnaire". Because the four employed women from the lower and upper middle class of Mecklenburg-Hither Pomerania, who were recruited for this, gave a representative statement on how universalist or particularist welfare state solidarity should be.
To advance to the cardinal question, gladly made a taboo in public, but always viral in the mind of the majority of the civic population: "When are welfare benefits shocking, because they are granted to people who, as foreigners, don't have any right to them?"
Considered belonging are those who live the work ethic
The answer: When the givers are considering the receivers as not "belonging" to them. This central differential category "belonging", labeled "populist and racist" by the askers, is only indirectly ethnically defined, to the extent that all women differentiate between Germans and foreigners.
More important, for them, is the categorization into people who are willing to work and people who refuse to work, who also want to exclude the ethnic Germans deemed "lazy" from the blessings of the welfare state. Thus, considered as belonging are those who accept the German performance culture as their guiding culture, and who "live" by its work ethic.
Performance culture and guiding culture are "racist"
Koevel & co. see a characteristic of "Western modernity" in this performance culture, but are just writing around the fact that there still exist peoples who ethnically support the performance societies of the West. And who also have an effect on the sociologically determined, allegedly "xenophobic, partially racist" patterns towards immigrants.
With reference to the Bielefeld-based social psychologist and "conflict researcher" Andreas Zick, a social democrat sitting in the foundation executive of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, who has been publishing exclusively on the topic of "group-based misanthropy" since his doctoral dissertation on "prejudice and racism" over twenty years ago, his Bremen colleagues ultimately recognize "right-wing extremist and democracy-endangering stances" in the replies by their female subjects. For them, the problem is not the destruction of the social state by mass immigration, but the legitimate, but in their eyes morally very despicable, insisting of the "distanced center of society" of their German guiding culture as a performance culture.
