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Sunday, July 09, 2006

DE: Writing on the Wall - the New Political Middle Class.

Today, a German Professor of political sciences at the

Göttingen University,

Mr. Franz Walter, who specialises in research on political parties, has published an

essay on

Spiegel Online [In German only, sorry] under the title "Parteienmisere - Bürgertum koppelt sich von Union ab" (Misery of political parties - middle class undocking from Christian Democratic Union"). Mr. Walter describes some results from recent empirical research saying that the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Ms. Merkel currently is in a process of dramatically losing ground amongst German middle class. In particular, he writes:

"[...] Wer in der CDU etwas werden und nach oben kommen will, den darf sein Beruf im Grunde nicht allzu sehr beanspruchen. Denn er benötigt ausgiebig Zeit für die Pflege der Seilschaften. Er braucht Zeit, um an den Info-Tischen auf den Marktplätzen zu stehen. Er muss über reichlich Zeit verfügen für die Ortsverbandsversammlungen, die Stadtratssitzung, die zahlreichen Kungelrunden und Kommissionen, für Feuerwehrfeste und Grillabende. Über ein solch üppiges Zeitbudget aber verfügen junge Bürger im wirklichen - nicht nur rhetorisch aufgeblasenen - Wettbewerb nicht. Sie sitzen am Notebook im ICE, wenn der christdemokratische Ortsverband tagt und zum gemütlichen Bierchen übergeht. Und sie wechseln häufig den Wohnort, statt sich in einer Stadt auf Lebenszeit niederzulassen und in der lokalen Honoratiorenschicht festzusetzen.

Dem modernen Bürgertum, kurzum, fehlt die Zeit für die traditionelle Honoratiorenpolitik. Die Organisation der CDU aber prämiert allein den Bekanntheitsgrad und die Verankerung vor Ort; sie belohnt die Vereinsmeierei, die aufwendige Ochsentour im Institutionengeflecht der Partei. Die grosse bürgerliche Partei der Republik löst dadurch sukzessive die Bindung zum hyperbetriebsamen Teil des Bürgertums. Und so schmilzt das Anhängerpotential der Union Woche zu Woche mehr zusammen; so wächst kontinuierlich die Gruppe, die sich hinter Westerwelle schart und von der Politik ungeduldig Tempo, Rigidität, Kompromisslosigkeit im ökonomischen Wandel fordert. Final und unumkehrbar muss das alles gewiss nicht sein. Gleichwohl: Das bürgerliche Lager in Deutschland gruppiert sich um - in einem Ausmass, das unzweifelhaft neu in der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte ist. [...]"

I would like to offer my own translation as follows:

"[...] Those who want to get ahead to occupy higher positions in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) should not be overly absorbed by a job as they need plenty of time for nursing insider relationships. They need time for serving at the party's info tables on the market squares. They need plenty of time for the meetings of the local chapter of the party, for the meeting of the town council, for numerous informal fiddling groups and commissions, for attending festivals of the local fire brigade, as well as for spending an evening at the barbecue grill. But in the real - not retorically overblown - competition, younger citizens do not have such ample time budget. When the local chapter of the CDU meets and moves to the casual part of the meeting drinking beer, they sit on the railroad in the ICE (Express-) train at their notebook computer. And they are moving frequently instead of settling down in a town for lifetime establishing themselves within the local tier of dignitaries.

In short, the modern middele class lacks time for traditional politics of dignitaries. But the organisation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) only rewards local publicity and rootedness. They only reward the efforts of lovers of club-life, the laborious formal step-by-step career within the network of institutions of the party. The big party of the middle class of the republic successively dissolves their ties to the hyper-active part of the middle class. This way, the potential of followers of the Christian Democratic Union melts away from week to week, the group congregating behind Mr. Westerwelle [leader of the Free Democratic Party, AHH] continuously growing and impatiently demanding acceleration, rigidity, and thoroughgoingness in the process of economic transformation. This is not necessarily final and irreversible. Nevertheless: The middle class in Germany regoups on a scale which undoubtedly is new within Germany's post-war history. [...]"

Despite the fact that Mr. Walter concentrates on the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the problems are essentially the same also with regard to the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Those readers of this blog who have sufficient command of the German language are recommended to read

a certain Blog entry created by Mr. Kristian Köhntopp, an IT Consultant seated in Karlsruhe, Germany, working for

MySQL AB in Norway. I shall introduce Mr. Köhntopp as an example pars pro toto and for illustration purposes only. Mr. Köhntopp surely belongs to those parts of the middle class which, while ever carrying a notebook computer with them, resemble some sort of highly skilled nomads of work life, living somewhere in Germany, working today in Paris, tomorrow in London, and in two days elsewhere on the planet. It is hardly conceivable that such sort of folks could ever be re-integrated into some sort of traditional localised dignitary politics as lived by organisations like the Christian Democratic Party. I think that Mr. Köhntopp with his specific kind of work-related lifestyle resembles, at least with regard to the upper echelons of the middle class, a vanguard of that what will show up more generally within the coming ten or twenty years. Needless to say that Internet savvyness is an absolute prerequisite for such doing.

Why do I quote Mr. Walter's essay here, on a Blog on Intellectual Property?

Well, people like

Mr. Florian Müller, the founder of nosoftwarepatents.com, together with the FFII crowd had, during the past years, a huge influence on the fate of the EU Draft Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. Now, after the Draft Directive has ceased to exist, there might perhaps have been a sigh of relief amongst some patent people because of high hopes that the entire anti-patent movement might fade and dissolve. But I fear this would be wishful thinking. Despite the fact that this time they did not manage to quantitatively overrun other stakeholders in responding to the

Consultation of the EU Commission on patent politics, those groups intending to defend and improve the patent system should be ceaselessly on the guard. Recently, Mr. Müller wrote in his

pre-published statement to be presented next Wednesday at the

Public Hearing on Future Patent Policy in Europe:

"[...] If the objective is to make Europe's economy more competitive, we don't need a system that makes litigation a more attractive option. We don't even need cheaper patents: if SMEs have problems with the patent system, it's not because of their own access to patents but due to the patents others can use against them. What we really need is fewer patents, and I don't see a strategy on the part of the Commission to counter the trend of patent inflation. [...]"

In my view this is a clear address directed to the European Commission, demanding not a constructive reform but a crippling reduction on a broad scale of the patent system as it stands now. Needless to say, this statement goes well with Mr. Pieter Hintjens' "no compromise" statement as picked up in

my earlier posting.

So I do not make any secret of the fact that my position on patent politics appears to be quite incompatible with that of Mr. Müller or Mr. Hintjens. But nevertheless I fear that I will have to state that many of the anti-patent activists, with regard to the modalities of their day-to-day political activism, appear to be quite up to date. While only a very few anti-campaigners turned their life temporarily into that of a full-time lobbyist funded by appropriate sources of money, many others assisted them in their spare time whenever and whereever they could, geographically completely dispersed, self-orchestrating themselves via the Internet. (BTW, here we are reaching again a

distinction between practical Internet smartness, on the one hand, and practical Internet ignorance, on the other hand - but in a different way as promoted by Mr. Hintjens.) If we look at the current fate of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany as researched by Mr. Walter as an example, it appears as if it resembles some sort of a writing on the wall conveying potentially bad news for the patent people within Germany and also abroad. Surely Mr. Walter's results are also more or less relevant for the entire EU, not only for Germany. If there is a pan-European trend amongst well-educated and highly skilled members of the middle class away from geographically determined mongering with local dignitaries towards Internet-based socialising by social software, IRC, Wiki and e-mail then, on the long run, structures modelled along the old-fashioned model of geographically based dignitary networks might not be as successful as expected in politically defending the patent system. An important question might be as to the true current structure of the social system of the patent people: Is it dominated by (more or less localised) dignitary networks or dominated by de-localised "nomadised" virtual networks orchestrated over the Internet? How will it evolve in future?

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