Ex-Family Minister Kristina Schröder (CDU) has founded a new think tank with 14 colleagues.
It's called "R21".
The R stands for republic.
The aim is to develop new concepts of civil politics.
There are, for example, the psychologist Ahmad Mansour and the FDP honorary chairman Hermann Otto Solms.
The head of the think tank is Professor Dr.
Andreas Rödder.
Together with Kristina Schröder, he explains in our interview how a courageous renewal of the bourgeois-liberal spirit can succeed in Germany.
Ms. Schröder, Professor Rödder, you both have the think tank “R21. New bourgeois politics ”was founded. Why now?
Schröder:
That has plagued us for years.
The bourgeois camp has shaped politics with too few independent thoughts and concepts.
Too often we have our backs to the wall in debates rather than intellectually surviving them.
Rödder:
We said a year ago that we had to switch from the eternal “You could, you should, you would have to” to the “We do it now” mode.
Voilà.
Are we too angry if we suspect that the think tank is also needed because after 16 years Merkel the Union is no longer a powerful bourgeois voice?
Rödder:
Why should that be bad?
That is part of the diagnosis, and the Union is currently feeling it bitterly.
Our goal is to give civil politics an intellectually satisfactory voice.
Not to surrender before debates have started.
You recently wrote that you want to be a forum for people who have the courage to express “non-conforming positions”. Do we have too many conformists in our German debate?
Schröder:
You can already see that there are certain topics for which you need a lot of steadfastness.
These are, for example, all topics related to migration, immigration and integration.
In some cases I have also noticed improvements: You can talk more openly about the subject of Islam today than ten years ago.
In return, the boundaries of debates about real or alleged discrimination against minorities are becoming narrower.
Legally, you can say anything in Germany, but you have to take into account that you will be personally attacked and put down.
Rödder:
We are seeing how the public debate is increasingly discredited and marginalized with moralizing arguments.
Bourgeoisie are not cowardly, but there are mechanisms of intimidation.
Schröder:
And in the identity-political debate, the space of discourse that is considered legitimate in this society is measured.
And we would like to expand this space again.
Even the Greens see themselves today as a bourgeois party!
Rödder:
In parts, the Greens are a bourgeois party.
Robert Habeck in particular is making an offensive effort to position his party there.
What the Greens cannot get rid of is the habitus of educating people and creating a new world.
There will still be major conflicts in the party between radical climate activists and the bourgeois Greens.
“Civil politics” - what is it actually?
Rödder:
Bourgeois politics can be traced back to the replacement of the premodern, class society by a bourgeois competitive society that starts with the individual. Specifically, this means firstly: the obligation to take personal responsibility. Second: individual freedom and pluralism. That sounds so banal, but it is very important: Pluralism is the large number of different individuals, while diversity is basically a class-based model, that is, organized according to group membership. The third is the rule of law. The rule of law protects order, for example against left-wing questioning of the monopoly of force, but also humanity, for example against those who would prefer to abolish the right to asylum. The fourth is regulatory policy and market economy,Competitive orientation and openness to technology.
Schröder:
For example, thinking in terms of collectivist group identities is not bourgeois.
I have always been frustrated with that, even if it is gaining more and more acceptance in the Union.
As the Federal Minister for Women, I always said: I am interested in equality, not equality.
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During the editorial visit: Ex-Family Minister Kristina Schröder and historian Andreas Rödder.
© Marcus sleep
You mean the women's quota debates in many parties - they then get caught up in “collective group identities”?
Schröder:
I still think quotas are problematic.
Nor do they fit in with Christian Democratic values.
Quotas must always ignore personal differences in performance or preferences in order to overcome alleged advantages or disadvantages based on gender.
And they make this gender the decisive criterion.
Rödder:
For commoners today, it goes without saying that you are not in the same position as Horst Seehofer in 2018 with the management department of his Ministry of the Interior ...
.... all men in ill-fitting suits, zero women.
Rödder:
That is a question of sensitivity and mindfulness.
Of course, the Union needs more women members and more women in leadership positions.
But parity quotas are neither civil, nor liberal, nor fair.
Christian Democrat would say: We have a common goal and we are looking for suitable methods.
Now the Greens say, if you exactly gender in the language, that is just that mindfulness.
Rödder:
The problem is that this debate is also extremely ideologized and leads to new exclusions. I gender very consistently by using the generic masculine. This is the smartest form of gendering because it includes everyone without excluding them. With all other means you fall into the trap that "citizens" unfortunately excludes trans people, while the gender star and glottal stroke impose a certain worldview, the idea of fluid sexuality, on society.
Schröder:
When I say: "Dear students" - then it is messing up the language to substantiate the participle.
Such language regulations are intended to enforce a bow to a certain ideology.
That gender is a fluid category that everyone can choose for themselves, with practically no biological anchoring - by then at the latest I have a different opinion.
Of course there is trans- and intersexuality, no question about it.
But most people are pretty clear about their gender, and it's not self-chosen.
“Germany as an immigration society” should be one of your first key topics. Do you want to reopen the migration debate?
Schröder:
Above all, the integration debate is crucial, because this is about our cultural foundations. What upset people in 2015 was not the operational questions: Do we have enough beds for the refugees? But in essence the question: Can our society withstand when so many people come to us from a culture with which there are clear integration problems? We have to state that clearly: Such problems are much more common with migration from Muslim countries. We can integrate many, but with a million people like 2015 we can feel it in our schoolyards and in the subway stations. That scared people.
It is rolling again, this time via Belarus. The Greens are demanding that we take in more people. Where is the opposing position of bourgeois parties?
Rödder:
We are approaching the same problem as in 2015.
We must continue to have compassion for the people who are on this flight.
Schröder:
... but we always have to see that those who make it to Europe are more likely to be men than women, more singles than families, more healthy than sick ...
Rödder:
... rather the middle class than the really poor.
As soon as we unpack the moral club, all differentiation is over.
But it is precisely this differentiation - who needs our help - must be made by bourgeois politics.
Will the FDP take on the role of the bourgeois force in the planned traffic light coalition?
Schröder:
You have to acknowledge that the FDP has delivered in the explorations so far.
I have great respect for that.
Rödder:
You can also see from the history of the FDP how unpredictable developments are for bourgeois parties.
Eight years ago all possible media held the death of the FDP sealed, today it is a stable party in the future government.
Otherwise I would say in the best bourgeois sense: competition stimulates business.
The CDU is currently repositioning itself, and two candidates, among others, are applying for the chair, one of whom, Norbert Röttgen, accuses the other, Friedrich Merz, of not wanting to occupy the “real center” but rather the “liberal- conservative middle ”. Has “conservative” become a term used to fight political opponents even in the Union today?
Rödder:
That is exactly a toxic problem in the Union.
The CDU always speaks of its three roots - the Christian, the liberal and the conservative - which combine to create something new, the Union.
Today, however, in the internal party discussion it sounds as if these are three pillars that stand side by side and against each other.
Anyone who stigmatizes some of the members with the label of “conservatives” is endangering the Union.
What do you recommend to the CDU before this choice of direction: does it need more edges and profile or more modernity?
Schröder:
The Union must position itself more broadly.
We need prominent conservatives, liberals, and social groups.
In the past it has all too often happened that the CDU took over positions from the left and withdrew ten percent in order to then present it as our new Union position.
I didn't find that incredibly convincing.
Ms. Schröder, some in the CDU complain that only men apply for the chairmanship. Why don't you compete?
Schröder:
I hear this question now and then, it honors me.
But my husband and I have clearly decided to reorient ourselves professionally after 15 years in the Bundestag.
I am happy when I can still be a political voice - but no more than that.
How “bourgeois” do you find it actually that there was little support for the Union Chancellor candidate Laschet from Munich and all the more teasing?
Schröder:
Now we have to think carefully about what to say.
Rödder:
That repelled me.
I could also make it clearer.
Are you disappointed with Laschet's failure?
Rödder:
I'm very worried, far beyond Laschet.
We are now experiencing in the third consecutive federal election that a candidate who started with a respectable profile was downright shredded in a media mill.
Armin Laschet 2021, Martin Schulz 2017, Peer Steinbrück 2013. I really care what is happening in our democratic public.
Schröder:
The lesson is: As a candidate, you may as little as possible commit yourself to content, show as little humanity as possible, and ideally be Teflon-like.
Do we want that?
Rödder:
And there is one more thing: Armin Laschet also had to experience that the old resentments against the Union are still alive.
Merkel was the projection screen for those for whom the CDU is acceptable when it is as little CDU as possible.
But that's not a solution either - neither for a party nor for democracy.
Interview: Georg Anastasiadis, Christian Deutschländer, Stefan Sessler
