ABSTRACT
In any comparison of Christian and Social Democrats, the absence of an articulated Left/Right dichotomy makes Germany's political culture different from that of many other countries. The German preference for maximum stability, corroborated by the success story of the old Federal Republic, explains to a great extent their striving for the broadest social and political consensus. German patriotism is weakened from two sides. There is a premodern and a postmodern element in how Germans perceive their collective identity. The premodern element may be called 'regionalism' or 'regional tribalism' a spice in what has been called 'multi-German society'. The culturally conditioned striving for consensus and harmony as well as the institutional tendency toward political common ground compensates in part for the lack of a relatively homogeneous elite, formed in the grandes ecoles or at ivy league universities, which continually reproduces itself in an aristocratic-meritocratic system.
