ABSTRACT
Among political and economic elites as well as in public opinion a sense of malaise has spread across Germany since the mid-1990s, after the initial enthusiasm about German unification, the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of European integration. In the early 1980s West Germany was widely celebrated, and indeed celebrated itself, as an island of economic prosperity, social peace and political stability in an increasingly turbulent world. Reflecting the opinion of the time, West European Politics published a Special Issue in 1981 under the title of Germany: Perspectives on a Stable State. During the 1970s and early 1980s, when the United States was in a deep crisis of economic performance and public confidence, the German industrial strategy of ‘diversified quality production’ became an admired model world-wide, echoing Helmut Schmidt’s proclamation of Modell Deutschland in his first election campaign of 1976 when he prided himself on his government’s achievement of apparently unshakeable tripartite consensus with business and labour.
