The Mirage of Democratic Socialism

A guy called Kristian Neimietz has written an alternate history of a continued Socialist East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the scenario the anti-GDR socialists end up in charge and unification doesn't happen. As an employee of a right wing think tank he is fairly sceptical of how that would work in practise so some socialists might find it biased but I liked it.

The history described here is identical to ‘ours’ up until just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From then on, it deviates from ours. In this alternative version, German reunification never happens. Instead, East Germans elect a government of idealistic socialist reformers. East Germany remains a sovereign country, a democratic country with a socialist economy. The new government tries its best to democratise that economy from within. They try to move away from the old top-down way of doing things and towards a participatory model of socialism. Our fictional socialist leaders have the best of intentions. They share the ideals of Noam Chomsky, Nathan Robinson, Bhaskhar Sunkara and Owen Jones. There is no Stalin-like character among them.
Our alternative history is technically set in East Germany, but it is not about that particular example of socialism: it could, in principle, be set in any socialist country. East Germany is simply the example that the author
of this paper is most familiar with.

https://iea.org.uk/themencode-pdf-v...=111111011&lang=en-GB#page=&zoom=75&pagemode=
 

longsword14

Banned
The E. Germans simply start walking while the economy is in the sewers. The idea of unification would always be far more powerful than propping up a state that was hated by its own citizens.
 
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The "United Left" winning the 1990 GDR election is a fantasy. In OTL, all the left-wing groups that for one reason or another opposed reunification (at least in the form it took) --the PDS, the Greens, Alliance 90, the OTL "United Left", etc.--got about 22 percent of the vote. The Christian Democratic-dominated Alliance for Germany got 48 percent, the Social Democrats 21.9, the Free Democrats 5.3 percent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_general_election,_1990 In other words, pro-unification parties got at least 75 percent of the vote. (It is true that the Social Democrats ideally would have preferred the unification to be on better terms for the ex-GDR, to have preserved more social benefits, etc.; but with the economic crisis, continuing flight to the West, etc., they would--even if they had dominated the government, which they did not remotely come close to doing--have quickly realized that they were in no position to dictate terms.)
 

Anchises

Banned
The E. Germans simply start walking while the economy is in the sewers. The ide of unification would always be far more powerful that propping up a state that was hated by its own citizens.

This. This scenario only works if the West goes "oh lord look at that mess, no thank you...", float some emergency credits to the Ostzone and closes the boarder again.

And this would need some tremendous PODs to not seem ASB.
 
A guy called Kristian Neimietz has written an alternate history of a continued Socialist East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the scenario the anti-GDR socialists end up in charge and unification doesn't happen. As an employee of a right wing think tank he is fairly sceptical of how that would work in practise so some socialists might find it biased but I liked it.



https://iea.org.uk/themencode-pdf-v...=111111011&lang=en-GB#page=&zoom=75&pagemode=
Leaving aside the fact that East Germany was a glorified soviet garrison state with no national identity, I'm deeply skeptical that a command economy is compatible with a representative democracy, in the long run. Are people going to vote every 2 years on whether the state factories should produce rubik's cubes or fidget spinners? Even if you can dismantle the surveillance state and the parliament doesn't vote to dissolve itself by joining the FRG, a system that makes major decisions every couple years (elections) can't adapt to the market for private goods fast enough. Building public schools and infrastructure are a world away from running agriculture, heavy industry, and producing consumer goods.
 
IMO the only way for East Germany to survive to modern day as anything more than a glorified soviet occupation zone is for East Germany to be less severely punished after the war(For example no concessions to the polish puppet state, keeping east prussia and the danzig corridor, no german ethnic cleansing, etc) and for a neo-prussian militaristic national identity to be promoted(which IMO isn't that hard considering the other nationalities that the USSR promoted like Moldova) over germanic unity.
This of course would require a much different attitude towards germany by the soviet union because OTL the attitude was revenge and keeping it weak, not having it be a strong counter to the west with a sense of national pride.
If this worked out you could see a highly nationalistic lefitst Prussia that could probably survive the fall of the USSR and would probably transition to a social democratic capitalist economy post-collapse assuming the USSR and soviet style communism still collapse.
 
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