The State as a Clearing House: Interest Organizations, Anti-pluralism, and the Arduous Rise of Liberal Democracy in Postwar Germany

This paper examines the postwar democratization of Germany – the adoption of Western-style liberal parliamentarianism, the party state, and societal pluralism and their normative acceptance as constituents of the country’s political culture and self-identity. I address this larger question via the analysis of an individual metaphor: that of the parliament as a clearing house, which I analyze from a intellectual history, conceptual history, and political metaphorology perspective. The function of clearing houses in regular business transactions is to act as a third party and settle trades by mediating between the buyer and the seller, bearing risks on both parties’ behalf in exchange for a fee. To speak of the state, government, parliament, or the party system in general as a clearing house is patently metaphorical. It links with a broader assimilation between political and economic categories, reflected in the idea of politics as the competition on a political market. I contextualize the clearing house metaphor with observations on the long-term normative shift toward affirmation of such discourse – typically described as liberal, Western, and Anglo-Saxon, and thereby traditionally rebutted in Germany. The idea of parliament as a clearing office is traceable to Carl Schmitt’s writings on the pluralism, parliamentarianism and the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s, wherefrom it was transferred to Frankfurt School parlance via Otto Kirchheimer, on the one hand, and to postwar rightwing antipluralists like Werner Weber and Winfried Martini, on the other. For Weber and Martini, the clearing office stood for the wider "occupation" of the state by the private interests of the society, and the topos served antiliberal argumentative purposes. However, the clearing house metaphor was also reappropriated and normatively redescribed by defenders of the Bundesrepublik, such as the legal scholar and judge of the Federal Constitutional Court Ernst Friesenhahn, the philosophically oriented Aristotelian political scientist Dolf Sternberger, or the political sociologist Otto Stammer – in explicit opposition to rightwing skepticism. In their uses, the parliament as a mediator between rival interests and viewpoints became a moderately positive image and one not only compatible with the common good but in fact serving it. This creative reinterpretation had parallels with broader postwar arguments by Gerhard Leibholz on the modern party state and Ernst Fraenkel’s propositions on the utility of "liberal" public competition of ideas on a "marketplace of opinions". The clearing house metaphor captures, in a microcosmic fashion, a great deal of Germany’s postwar "liberalization" on the discursive level and exemplifies how liberal democracy lives off the linguistic resources at its disposal, occasionally by creative redescription.