In modern society, every time feels extraordinary. A vocabulary for this extraordinary is that of the crisis. We are allegedly constantly living in one or more crises at the same time. Sometimes it is even said that there have never been so many crises and - not quite the same - so much and so rapid change as today. This is not only interesting because social stagnation is constantly being diagnosed at the same time. This also raises measurement problems. Fifty years ago, for example, there was the oil crisis, stagflation (downturn including inflation), the legitimation crisis in late capitalism, the “limits to growth” diagnosed by the Club of Rome, and there was terrorism from the left, including radical decrees and computer searches.The rates of change after 1945 for all or for parts of the population after 1989 are not even included in the comparison.
Jürgen Kaube
Editor.
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When Angela Merkel ends her time as Chancellor in a managerial position, the crises that she has to deal with will be listed in the retrospect.
She is considered the chancellor of the permanent crisis meetings.
In the financial crisis of 2008 after the insolvency of Lehman Bank, in the euro and national debt crisis from 2010 onwards after the impending bankruptcy of Greece, in the refugee crisis in 2015, in the pandemic of the past two years.
If you add the Russian attack on Crimea, the Islamist attacks and the ECB's zero interest rate policy, then thirteen out of sixteen years of Merkel's chancellorship were dominated by pan-European crisis diagnoses.
She had little time to rest.
Attempt to stabilize
Did the crises have something else in common? Angela Merkel recently announced that she generally avoided the term “refugee crisis” because a refugee is not a crisis, but a person. That was a curious, possibly ironic reason, because then there would be no banking crisis and no euro crisis, because neither a bank nor the euro are crises. But it was a strange explanation for an actual fact. The so-called refugee crisis lacked the self-reinforcing, all-captivating and accelerating moment.
Rather, the sharpest protests against the admission of refugees were concentrated in the AfD, in which they took the fanatical form that a “re-population” was planned, “knife men” and “headscarf girls” were in the process of destroying the community.
There were acts of violence, just as there were acts of violence against migrants.
But not a spiral of violence as would be assumed in a crisis.
Conflicts increased, but the destruction did not materialize.
The AfD received thirteen percent of the votes in the federal government in 2017, and eighty-seven percent of the voters did not agree with their point of view.
But even more important: since 2015, every election at the federal and state level has not documented a polarization of Germans, but rather a lively alternation of voters on all sides.