The ‘borrowed language’ of German unification: State, society and party identity

Abstract

The political debate over German unification among the Federal Republic's party elites occurred in a highly compressed and potentially volatile political environment. As ‘fortune’, in Chancellor Kohl's words, assembled an agenda for German unification, party elites scrambled for conceptual frames to make sense of a rapidly shifting political terrain. In the nineteenth century dichotomisa‐tion of state and society, a powerful conceptual pairing in German political ideology predating both the FRG and the GDR, western party elites found a complex, versatile, and normatively meaningful set of categories with which to frame party identities and policy alternatives.