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Narrating Crises and Uncertainty, or, Placing Germany: Reflections on Theoretical Implications of the Standort DeutschlandDebate

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14650040490478657

1557-3028

Judith Miggelbrink, Marc Redepenning,

Abstract This article deals with the mid-1990s Standort Deutschland debate, which is considered to be a distinct semantic means for the reproduction of the nation-state. This debate serves as a starting point for further theorising what we will call spatial semantics. In addition, but also in difference to research focusing too narrowly on (re)organisational aspects of economic state crises, we propose a view that addresses the role and function of space-related terms within mass-media communication. Against the fundamental background of Luhmann's version of systems theory, certain elements from banal nationalism, critical geopolitics and the place-concept in humanistic geography are revised to grasp the capability of spatial semantics to transform uncertainty of ‘the world we live in’ into seemingly ‘natural’ certainties. This elaboration is underpinned by a short empirical illustration that catches the main contents of the above mentioned debate by scrutinising the articles on the Standort Deutschland in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit between 1995 and 1999. Notes 1 This expression is used by N. Brenner, ‘Building “Euro-Regions”: Locational Politics and the Political Geography of Neoliberalism in Post-unification Germany’, European Urban and Regional Studies 7/4 (2000) pp.319–45. 2 Ibid., p.320. 3 Ibid., p.328. 4 Our use of the word ‘object’ does not refer to ‘an externally given thing’ but to tokens or self-values that are produced and stabilised by communication, i.e. that are internally construed objects. 5 M. Albrow, Abschied vom Nationalstaat: Staat und Gesellschaft im globalen Zeitalter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1998). 6 B. Jessop, ‘Narrating the Future of the National Economy and the National State: Remarks on Remapping Regulation and Reinventing Governance’, in G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1999) pp.378–405. 7 N. Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000) p.228. 8 M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage 1995). 9 C. Geulen, ‘Die Metamorphose der Identität: Zur “Langlebigkeit” des Nationalismus’, in A. Assmann and H. Friese (eds), Identitäten: Erinnerung, Geschichte, Identität, Band 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1998) pp.346–73. 10 B. Anderson, Die Erfindung der Nation: Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts (Berlin: Propyläen 1998) p.37. 11 R. Stichweh, Die Weltgesellschaft: Soziologische Analysen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001) p.52. 12 N. Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Bd. 4, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995) p.117. 13 Geulen (note 9) p.349; N. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997) pp.1045–55; Luhmann ‘Die Politik der Gesellschaft’ (note 7) pp.210; H. Willke, Atopia (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001) p.223. 14 Billig (note 8). 15 Anderson (note 10). 16 See K. Dodds, ‘Political Geography II: Some Thoughts on Banality, New Wars and the Geopolitical Tradition’, Progress in Human Geography 24/1 (2000) pp.119–29; K. Dodds, Geopolitics in a Changing World (Harlow: Prentice Hall 2000); Billig (note 8); J. Sharp, ‘Hegemony, Popular Culture and Geopolitics: The Reader's Digest and the Construction of Danger’, Political Geography 15/6–7 (2000) pp.557–70. 17 G. Ó Tuathail and J. Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse. Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography 11/2 (March 1992) pp.190–204. 18 Dodds, ‘Geopolitics in a Changing World’ (note 16) p.33. 19 Luhmann, ‘Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft’ (note13) p.235f. 20 Luhmann, ‘Die Politik der Gesellschaft’ (note 7) p.266. 21 E. Morin, La connaissance de la connaissance: La méthode (vol. 3) (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1986) p.15. 22 H.-H. Holzamer (ed.), Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschland (München: Olzog 1996). 23 A. Barthel, ‘Die Auswirkungen der Globalisierung auf den Standort Deutschland’, in K. Eckart and S. Paraskewopoulos (eds), Der Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschland (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt 1997) pp.183, 198. 24 S. Müller and M. Kornmeier, ‘Globalisierung als Herausforderung für den Standort Deutschland’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B9 (Feb 2001) p.11. 25 Brenner, ‘Building “Euro-Regions” ’ (note 1) p.320. 26 Ibid., p.319. 27 D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press 1994) p.264. 28 Brenner, ‘Building “Euro-Regions” ’ (note 1) p.320. 29 A. Ottnad and E. Linnartz, Föderaler Wettbewerb statt Verteilungsstreit: Vorschläge zur Neugliederung der Länder und zur Reform des Finanzausgleichs (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus 1997) pp.150. This corresponds also to several proposals the EU has made to keep and develop its competitiveness in a world-wide (neo-liberal) market system. 30 Jessop, ‘Narrating the Future’ (note 6) p.387; N. Brenner, ‘State Territorial Restructuring and the Production of Scale’ Political Geography 16/4 (1997) pp.273–306; J. Hirsch, Der nationale Wettbewerbsstaat. Staat, Demokratie und Politik im globalen Kapitalismus (Berlin and Amsterdam: 1996). 31 Y.-F. Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1974) p.93, emphasis added. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p.100. 34 Ibid., p.1ff. 35 Ibid., p.101. 36 Y.-F. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press 1977) p.18. 37 Ibid. 38 This issue is taken up by V. Della Dora, ‘Logos and Pathos in the Anti-terrorism Cartographic Discourse’, in International Critical Geography Group (ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Critical Geography, Békéscsaba, Hungary, June 25–30, 2002 (Békéscsaba: ICGP 2002) pp.49–61. 39 Tuan, ‘Space and Place’ (note 36) p.18. 40 Ibid. 41 Y.-F. Tuan, ‘Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81/4 (1991) p.685. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., p.684. 44 Ibid., p.693. 45 It therefore seems legitimate to extend Tuan's notion of topophilia as Della Dora does: ‘in many cases the very idea of nation state is affected by some kind of topophilia, although it is necessarily more idealised and abstract than Tuan's local topophilia’ (Della Dora, (note 38) p.55). Duncan and Duncan seem go in the same direction when they state that ‘topophilia manifests itself most often in attachment to home places, places that vary in scale from the nation to the bedroom’ (Duncan and Duncan 2001, p.14 quoted in Della Dora (note 38) p.55). 46 P. Taylor, ‘Places, Spaces and Macy's: Place–Space Tensions in the Political Geography of Modernities’, Progress in Human Geography 23/1 (1999) p.12. 47 This process of stabilising an entity, i.e. the creation of identity – as Della Dora (note 38) p.51 reminds us – is always a process of ‘othering’ too. 48 Geography as an academic praxis is also involved in place construction – naming and producing spatial schemes is an important aspect of geographical knowledge. Insofar as it takes part in a permanent negotiation of place-related meaning, it can be confronted with the moral implications of place-constructing praxis. 49 N. Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1996) p.9. 50 M. Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age (vol.2) (Oxford: Blackwell 1997) p.317. 51 N. Luhmann, ‘Veränderungen im System gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation und die Massenmedien’, in N. Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 3: Soziales System, Gesellschaft, Organisation, 3rd ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1993) pp.313, 319. 52 Luhmann, ‘Die Realität der Massenmedien’ (note 49) p.10. This distinction is necessary to exclude academic publications, insofar as their addressee is highly specialised and competent. Furthermore, it involves another distinction between the technical requirements of communication in general (the materiality of communication) and mass media communication in particular. Because they address a specialised audience, academic papers published on the Internet are not mass media communication, even if they use a mass medium in the technical sense. Of course, it is possible for scientists to write for an ‘indeterminate addressee’ (that is to engage in mass media communication), but this places certain conditions upon them: for example, they must refrain, more or less, from the use of scientific, and therefore limited and rigidly defined, vocabulary. 53 The weekly newspaper Die Zeit was founded in Hamburg in 1946. In the third quarter of 2001 it had a circulation of 438,000 copies, 248,000 of these via subscriptions (www.gwp.de/data/download/a2zeit/Basispraesentation2001.pdf), reaching over 1 million readers per edition. These sales and readership figures are just short of the weekly Welt am Sonntag, but ahead of the dailies Süddeutsche Zeitung (418,000 copies) and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (393,000). 37 per cent of the readership have a university education, and 27 per cent have obtained the Abitur (school-leaving examination), making Die Zeit the publication with the qualitatively best-educated readership of all the larger print media in Germany (Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Welt, Welt am Sonntag (WamS)). According to an analysis by gwp media marketing, Die Zeit is a liberal opinion maker. This is underlined by comments by a founder and former co-editor of the newspaper, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, in her portrayal of Die Zeit, which highlight the goals of rationalising emotion and balancing out politics:‘We have to counter when people get upset, we have to lead and encourage when they just sit and stare while something unmentionable is happening...the legitimate place for liberals is between all chairs. It shouldn't bother them when they are insulted from all sides’ (K.H. Janßen, Die Zeit in der ‘Zeit’ (Berlin 1995) p.346). With this self-assurance and goal of political independence, Die Zeit intends to be forum for differing opinions. Ludwig sketches the development of Die Zeit, as an ‘authors’ newspaper’, conceptualised as a place where diverging opinions are expressed (J. Ludwig, ‘Wie sich publizistische Hochkultur rechnet. Ein ökonomische Porträt der “Zeit” ’, Publizistik 41/3 (1996) pp.277–97). On the one hand, the term ‘authors’ newspaper’ clearly shows the importance attached to the role of the authors of the articles, but on the other, it provides no indication of who these authors are. Nonetheless, the status of Die Zeit as an authors’ newspaper has at least three consequences: First, because the name of the author is indicated in the article, author turnover is apparent, which introduces an element of surprise for the readers. The identification of the author also configures the building of expectations. Second, the clear identification at the article level as well as the author level fulfils an important prerequisite for news pieces and reports. They ensure identification with the opinions, intentions, or even interests of the author – and this at a conscious distance to the mass medium that they were published in (Luhmann, ‘Die Realität der Massenmedien’ (note 49) p.179). Third, the perpetual turnover prevents the crystallisation of a unified profile, making it possible to create a profile based on this rejection of a unified profile. This constellation allows empirical analysis to identify and categorise spatial schemes according to their authorship, thereby testing the self-description in the mass media for selectivity and placing its origin. Therefore, we do not assume the presence of ideology in articles to be the problematic issue in the mass media in general, since – as in the case of Die Zeit – ‘a unified ideological line’ (O. Jarren, ‘ “Mediengesellschaft”: Risiken für die po litische Kommunikation’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 41/42 (2001) p.15) can hardly be identified, but rather that the problem relates to the particular part of public opinion represented in the mass media. If – and this should not be left out – ideology can be assumed at mass media level, then only within the framework of the criteria for selecting news reports and articles for publication. 54 Articles were selected from a CD-ROM containing all the articles published in Die Zeit between 1995 and 1999. A contents analysis was performed on every article in which the term ‘Standort Deutschland’ was used. 55 A. Daniels and E. Martens, ‘Erneuerung oder Abbau’, Die Zeit, 29 September 1995; H. Blüthmann and E. Martens, ‘ “Immer Trendsetter sein” ’, Die Zeit, 2 June 1995. 56 C. Wernicke, ‘Die Dritte Welt rückt näher’, Die Zeit, 26 July 1996; R. Eppelmann, ‘Zurück an den Tisch’, Die Zeit, 3 May 1996; N. Piper, ‘Angstfaktor Weltmarkt’, Die Zeit, 5 April 1996; E. Martens, ‘Und sie bewegen sich doch’, Die Zeit, 5 April 1996; D. Buhl, ‘Deutschland auf der Kriechspur’, Die Zeit, 1 December 1995; C. Noé, ‘Standort Bayblon’, Die Zeit, 17 November 1995); H.-G. Kemmer, ‘Geld macht mächtig’, Die Zeit, 20 January 1995. 57 Daniels and Martens (note 55). 58 D. Kurbjuweit, ‘Der Sozialstaat ist sein Geld wert’, Die Zeit, 9 August 1996; H.P. Grüner, ‘Lob der Vermögenssteuer’, Die Zeit, 12 July 1996; Martens, ‘Und sie bewegen sich doch’ (note 56); S. Leibfried and E. Rieger, ‘Fundamente des Freihandels’, Die Zeit, 2 February 1996. 59 Blüthmann and Martens (note 55). 60 H.M. Groscurth, O. Hohmeyer and K. Rennings, ‘Von den Zinsen leben’, Die Zeit, 10 November 1995); H. Simonis, ‘Keine Angst vor Ökosteuern’, Die Zeit, 6 October 1995. 61 ‘Schmachvoll’, Die Zeit, 6 September 1996. 62 Grüner (note 58). 63 D. Creutzburg and T. Fischermann, ‘Ende der Schonzeit’, Die Zeit, 27 September 1996; Martens (note 55). 64 U. Schnabel, ‘Heilige Neugier’, Die Zeit, 1 December 1995; J. Fritz-Vannahme, ‘Geiz und Ehrgeiz’, Die Zeit, 14 July 1995; P. Pinzler, ‘Boom aus dem Reagenzglas’, Die Zeit, 24 March 1995. 65 R. Herzog, ‘Aufbruch ins 21. Jahrhundert: Ansprache von Bundespräsident Roman Herzog im Hotel Adlon am 26. April 1997’ www.bundespraesident.de/dokumente/rede/ix_15154.htm (06 June 2002). 66 P. Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Paris: Edition Fayard 2001) p.321. 67 R.D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986). 68 R.D. Sack, ‘The Power of Place and Space’, The Geographical Review 83 (1993) p.328. 69 Sack, ‘Human territoriality’ (note 66) p.32; M. Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1994). 70 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford and Malden: Blackwells 1991). 71 See for example R. Schank and R Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale 1977) and D.E. Rumelhart, ‘Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition’, in R.J. Spiro et al. (eds), Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension (Hillsdale 1980) pp.33–58. 72 Rumelhart, ‘Schemata’ (note 71) p.34. 73 D.A. Gioia and Ch.C. Manz, ‘Linking Cognition and Behavior: A Script Processing Interpretation of Vicarious Learning’, The Academy of Management Review 20 (1985) pp.527–39. 74 J. Agnew, ‘Disputing the Nature of the International in Political Geography’, in H. Gebhardt and P. Meusburger (eds), Reinventing Geopolitics: Geographies of Modern Statehood. Hettner-Lecture 2000 with John A. Agnew (Heidelberg: Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg 2001) p.34. emphasis original. 75 N. Luhmann, Erkenntnis als Konstruktion (Bern: Benteli 1988); N. Luhmann, ‘Das Erkenntnisprogramm des Konstruktivismus und die unbekannt bleibende Realität’, in N. Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 5: Konstruktivistische Perspektiven, 2nd ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1993) pp.31–58; H. Maturana, Was ist erkennen? Die Welt entsteht im Auge des Betrachters (München: Piper 1994); H. von Foerster, Wissen und Gewissen: Versuch einer Brücke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993); R. Glanville, ‘An Observing Science’, Foundations of Science 6/1–3 (2001) pp.45–75. 76 Von Foerster (note 75) p.116. 77 H.R. Maturana, ‘Cognition’, in P.M. Hejl, W.K. Köck and G. Roth (eds), Wahrnehmung und Kommunikation (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1978) p.30. 78 Ibid., p.31. 79 M. Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1986) p.48. 80 R. Glanville (note 75) p.58. 81 J.R. Searle, Die Konstruktion der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit. Zur Ontologie sozialer Tatsachen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1997). 82 Castells (note 50) p.7.