Shift to the right in science | Science as protection of the constitution?

From the perspective of the “test demonstrations,” the Constitutional Court should examine a ban on the AfD. However, it is difficult to counteract the shift to the right in science with loyalty to the constitution. Photo: dpa/Gregor Fischer On the evening of the AfD's electoral success in Saxony-Anhalt, there was talk of "ethnopluralism" on public television. The political scientist Christian Stecker brought the term into play on the ARD talk show “Caren Miosga” as a supposedly scientific, i.e. neutral, description of the AfD’s socio-political vision. However, the concept comes from the discourse of the radical right and is usually used there to justify a ethnic political community and its national borders. Ultimately, it primarily serves to legitimize violence against all those who are not seen as part of such a community.

The new normalization of ethnic language is not only taking place at regular meetings or on social media, but increasingly also in a scientific context. A new self-confidence can be observed with which historical and colonial revisionism, anti-feminism or even new biological discourses about race are presented. In contrast, the professor of public law, Fabian Michl, calls for a “duty of science in a democratic constitutional state not to provide anti-democratic concepts such as ‘ethnopluralism’ and ‘ethnocultural community’ with scientific legitimacy.” But what can such an obligation of science look like?

On the one hand, the criticism of ethnopluralism can refer to the Basic Law itself, more precisely to the NPD ruling of the Constitutional Court in 2007. It explicitly stated that the idea of ​​the "priority of the 'national community'" over the claims of individual individuals, which was formulated in the NPD's program, is incompatible with the principle of human dignity enshrined in the Basic Law. However, the discussion in science and the media always seems to ignore this clear judgment, as Michl rightly criticizes.

On the other hand, it seems dangerous to overestimate the robustness of this constitutional principle. Fundamental rights are subject to the protection of the “eternity paragraph” 79 GG. Nevertheless, it cannot be ruled out that a constitutional court with different personnel could also come to a completely different assessment of the (in)compatibility of certain institutional policy measures with fundamental rights. Germany would not be the first country in which such an upheaval occurs. Added to this is the lack of clarity as to which actors will still be in a position in the medium term to politically demand that science commit to democratic principles. On the contrary, with regard to the international situation, it is to be feared that “democratic” provisions will increasingly be directed against the supposed political center itself if the political landscape shifts further to the right.

The weakness of the constitutional argument is that a normative and an analytical dimension overlap. This makes it difficult to gain a clear view of the problem of normativity in science as a whole. The argument is that without a democratic constitution there would be no free science, and therefore free science would have to display a democratic attitude out of its own interest. This is a very weak conclusion from the well-known view of the legal philosopher Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, according to which the free, secularized state "lives on prerequisites that it itself cannot guarantee."

An alternative to this minimal position becomes conceivable if one recognizes that the sciences owe themselves not only to abstract principles of freedom, but above all to the concrete, material history of the origins of the states in question. Ultimately, free science is not simply the result of secularization and democratization, but also serves the functional requirements of an accumulation process. Historically, the democratization of administrative and training cultures is in many respects the result of an externalization of unfree and irrational power relations to other places.

With such a materialistically enlightened view of history, a truly compelling thesis could be formulated about where the line of conflict between “ethnopluralism” and the free-democratic basic order actually lies: “ethnopluralism” does not simply want to be an alternative concept of political community. Nor does he raise any legitimate concerns about the possibility of universal principles of justice and political-social order. Rather, the ethnic context of the discussion is consistently about the delegitimization of claims to justice that arise from the steep inequalities between the liberal welfare states compared to other countries, ways of life - and not least compared to the natural environment itself.

“Ethnopluralism” is not only unconstitutional, but scientifically wrong.

Ethnopluralism claims that there is a harmonious state of a ethnic nation state - as if modern political communities had not already been constitutively dependent on the conditions of inequality, both within and beyond their edges, from the very beginning. “Ethnopluralism” is therefore not only authoritarian in that it subordinates individuals to the community and does not only violate human dignity by allowing it to apply differently depending on their membership in different communities. It is also a thinly veiled attempt to prematurely check out of a global competition while one still has an advantage. And it is not only unconstitutional, but primarily scientifically wrong.

Why then does spiritual science in particular have so much trouble articulating this connection? The most recent debates about academic freedom and value neutrality - for example around Jan Philipp Reemtsma's criticism of some interpretations of right-wing radicalism or in Die Zeit and in the FAZ about sociology as an "agenda science" - suffer from an elusive shyness to reveal the fragility of the liberal normative frame of reference. Instead of an open discussion about the question of whether and to what extent the current regression has always been inscribed in the basic concepts with which the Federal Republic constructs its self-image, science is taking a conceptual defensive stance. Especially now, in the crisis, there is no longer any time for such fundamental questions. Even on the left, the discussion about the weaknesses and gaps in one's own reference system is quickly dismissed as a lack of solidarity with those affected by right-wing attacks.

One could argue that preserving the vested rights of the order that brought about this disaster is actually the acute problem. If the Federal Republic's welfare state arrangement, including its integration into an international order, loses popularity and attractiveness in some federal states, science cannot simply defend the advantages of the current order. A political and social science that really takes on this conceptual challenge does not need any constitutional guardrails.

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