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A distinctive feature of public debate in Germany involves prominent literary authors, especially novelists, expounding on current political matters in major newspapers. Thomas Brussig’s essay “Risk More Dictatorship,” translated here, belongs to this genre. Known especially for his satire of East Germany, Heroes Like Us, Brussig chose a provocative title that seems to echo and respond to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s appeal more than fifty years ago to “risk more democracy.” Brandt was speaking in 1969 at a pivotal moment in the history of West Germany, indeed of the whole world, in the face of the protests during the previous year; Brussig in contrast appeals for “more dictatorship” in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, which he depicts as a potentially similar turning moment, with an accelerated “learning process,” that calls old certainties into question. These include the “end of history” claim that liberal democracy is inevitable; Brussig suggests that the “impotence” of democracies in the face of the pandemic raises the question as to whether other forms of government might be superior. The Chinese model of dictatorship casts a shadow across the essay.
Brussig’s article elicited a brutal response in the German press, in part because of an editorial decision to pluck a phrase from the essay and to use it as a teaser, with the incendiary word Ausnahemzustand. The term is typically translated as “state of exception” and is associated both with the rule by executive order at the end of the Weimar Republic—in other words, the erosion of democracy as a prelude to the Hitler dictatorship—as well as with the writings of Carl Schmitt, the political and legal thinker whose own path intersected with that dictatorship in much debated ways. A “state of exception” in that sense implies a suspension of normal governance, legal procedures, and individual rights. However Brussig does not really engage in that register of political-theoretical debate; on the contrary, he has indicated separately that his intent in the article was to describe the extraordinary abnormality of the challenge of the pandemic. Semantically one might want to distinguish between a Schmittian “state of exception,” indicating an exceptional regime, exempt from normal processes, and, alternatively, a descriptive “state of exception” as a set of exceptional conditions (the pandemic). Brussig wanted to refer to the latter, not the former.
Of course, one might well skip the terminological debate over the state of exception, since there was provocation enough in the appeal for “dictatorship” (especially given Brandt’s famous call for “democracy” in the background). Brussig can be seen as staking out a position at the statist end of a spectrum of the possible responses to the public health emergency: in the face of extreme danger, extreme, even dictatorial steps are needed, and hence the call for the exercise of more state power. At the other end of the spectrum one finds warnings about the dangers of intrusive state power and the need to maximize freedom. Otfried Höffe has developed that liberal perspective.
This is the debate that has unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic during the past year: how much lockdown versus how much liberty, how much directive power from the state versus how much citizen responsibility and unregulated initiative. No one should pretend that the policy conclusions to be drawn from these alternatives are easy to reach. Unfortunately in today’s highly polarized environments, proponents of heterodox views—at either end of the spectrum—face quick vilification in a public sphere eager for targets. In the American debate, proponents of less stringent measures, i.e., the opposite of Brussig’s view, have been denounced as rejecting science, as if science offered only a single unambiguous answer to complex and difficult public health questions. In the German debate, Brussig’s outlier view attracted a similar assault. One evident casualty of the pandemic has been the willingness to tolerate disagreement.
Brussig’s argument is not about a celebration of dictatorship. Instead he identifies a legitimation deficit in contemporary democracy when it is perceived as ineffective. He does not associate the model of dictatorship with restrictions on rights; one might of course judge him naive to have underplayed that connection, which was certainly the source of the polemics he faced. Yet instead of a focus on the repression inherent in dictatorships, he makes a claim about outcomes. He is concerned that democratic proceduralism works against the implementation of an effective strategy in the fight against the pandemic, and he therefore concludes that the extraordinary challenge of the coronavirus requires exceptional activity on the part of the state. To be sure, Brussig does express doubts about what he perceives to be an excessive attention to data privacy, and that one point might be seen as evidence of a critical perspective on a liberal right (the right to privacy). In general, however, Brussig’s argument is less about rights denial to individuals than about state power in combatting a deadly challenge to the community, i.e., dictatorship not (only) as repressive but as (hypothetically) effective.
From this vantage point, Brussig’s account belongs to that genre of political criticism that sees its target—whether Germany, other European countries, or the democratic West as a whole—as painfully incapable, in the pandemic response but more generally as well. The botched response to the coronavirus is cut from the same cloth as the error-fraught construction of the new Berlin airport. What happened to German efficiency? If Chancellor Merkel was initially celebrated for calm leadership at the beginning of this plague, the current mood in Germany has shifted to extensive disappointment across the board: the negligent strategy to leave vaccine acquisition up to the European Union (rather than to the individual member states that might have acted more nimbly), the catastrophic rollout of the vaccination process itself at a snail’s pace, and the appearance of government intransigence coupled with terrible messaging around plans for an end to the lockdowns. Matters are even worse in France, where the failure of the French champion Sanofi to end up among the leaders in vaccine development has been a blow to national pride. Add to this, across the European Union, the incomprehension that Israel, a regular target of EU foreign policy criticism, and—making matters even worse—the UK, despite or because of Brexit, not to mention the United States too, are all far ahead in the race to vaccinate. Brussig’s passing remarks on Trump and on Brexit should be understood in that context. While some unjabbed European Union citizens may now be looking enviously to the Anglosphere, or even Israel, Brussig points to China.
It is easy to criticize Brussig’s call for dictatorship as illiberal. More important though is his unquestioning orientation toward science, and the suggestion of a compatibility of science with dictatorial authority. Is this the legacy of enlightened despotism? Brussig’s China might fit that model, as he praises it for its scientific-technological accomplishments. This is not a leftist China by any means; Brussig does not address questions of equality or the reduction of poverty. It is however a kind of techno-utopia and in that sense reminiscent of aspects of East German ideology, the aspiration for a “scientific socialism.” The architectural embodiment of that technology project of socialism remains the “Television Tower,” still looming over the center of Berlin.
Brussig, who avoids the question of repression in dictatorships, loses no words about the rights abuses in China and certainly not about the Uighurs. One can fault him for that. But in this hesitancy to criticize China, he is hardly an outlier in Germany, for which China is a vital trading partner. There is a “pivot to Asia” going on in parts of Europe that involves a reluctance to criticize, if not to directly embrace, the dictatorship. The “Chinese virus” is not the coronavirus; it is the attraction to authoritarian rule, and it is spreading.
The importance of Brussig’s comments lie in their pointing to how the Chinese model, its dictatorship, can be perceived as an attractive alternative if democracies prove ineffective. Brussig’s argument implicitly describes the fundamental competition between China and “the alliance of democracies” that the Biden administration hopes to pursue. The terms of the competition will be harsh. Brussig shows that democracies cannot rest on laurels from the past if they cannot solve the problems of the present. China represents a model of technological progress and advancement as well as success in its containing the pandemic, in contrast to Western democracies perceived, fairly or not, as inefficient, incompetent, and at risk of losing the scientific and technological competition. At stake is the question of whether Western societies can mobilize their resources to face contemporary challenges—not only the pandemic, which ought to elicit a new “Sputnik moment,” a whole-of-society mobilization to compete effectively with China without becoming a dictatorship like China.
