Regime Change

• DOI: 10.1177/0022002706286956
• Author: Anne Sa’adah
• Published date: 01 June 2006
• Date: 01 June 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

303

AUTHOR’S NOTE:I wish to thank Barry O’Neill and Stathis Kalyvas in particular for comments on

earlier drafts of this article. All remaining errors are of course my own.

JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION, Vol. 50 No. 3, June 2006 303-323

DOI: 10.1177/0022002706286956

© 2006 Sage Publications

Regime Change

LESSONS FROM GERMANY ON JUSTICE,

INSTITUTION BUILDING, AND DEMOCRACY

ANNE SA’ADAH

Department of Government

Dartmouth College

As an instance of externally induced regime change, the postwar West German case is both highly

exceptional and importantly paradigmatic; it is more usefully read as a cautionary tale than as a recipe for

future action. Local circumstances, some tied to earlier patterns of social and political development but

many produced by the cold war and the particular nature of the Nazi dictatorship, promoted successful

institution building while attenuating postwar pressures for moral clarity. The rapid development of strong

institutions, combined with moral ambiguity on questions touching the Nazi past, helped build popular

support for the new democratic regime. West German success in the institutional realm was the result of

probably nonreplicable circumstances, while frustration in the quest for justice is built into the logic of

democratization processes and indeed persists after democratic consolidation has occurred. Externally

engineered democracies are likely to remain a rarity.

Keywords: Germany; Iraq; democratization; transitional justice; institutional change

For decades, the postwar West German transition from dictatorship, military

expansionism, and genocide to democracy and limited sovereignty has been mined

as a source of lessons or held up as a model (negative or positive) by otherwise polit-

ically diverse people whose common trait has been their announced interest in pro-

moting democracy. Germans themselves, both before and since unification, have

sought lessons in the developments of the postwar era; after the administration of

George W. Bush made “regime change” an official goal, American leaders looking

to defend American policy in Iraq, including the president and the secretary of

defense, cited the postwar German case in an effort to establish the plausibility of

the administration’s enterprise. Germans tend to draw skeptical, even pessimistic,

lessons from their experience, and they often emphasize its unique and disquieting

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aspects. The Bush administration, in contrast, has used the German example as an

enabling precedent, and its spokespeople have shown little inclination to dwell on its

details.1

In this article, I emphasize issues of institution building and legitimacy and argue

that as an instance of externally induced regime change, the postwar German case is

both highly exceptional and importantly paradigmatic. West Germany was excep-

tional because a set of local circumstances promoted successful and fairly rapid

institution building—the necessary condition for democratization and also the one

most difficult to achieve, in part (but only in part), because of the ways in which it

collides with the perceived imperatives of justice. The case was paradigmatic in the

ambiguities that attended its efforts to establish justice and moral clarity while win-

ning popular support for a democratic regime. Its “happy ending” notwithstanding,

the West German story should be viewed as a cautionary tale, not as a demonstration

that, even under what are (incorrectly) characterized as the worst possible circum-

stances, democracy can be produced by external intervention: German success in the

institutional realm was the result of specific and probably nonreplicable circum-

stances, while frustration in the quest for justice is built into the logic of demo-

cratization processes and indeed persists after democratic consolidation has occurred.

The recent emphasis (practical as well as scholarly) on transitional justice has

partially deflected attention and energy from arguably more important (and differ-

ently intractable) questions related to institution building. This, I will suggest, is part

of a more general—and, from a democratic point of view, probably less construc-

tive—contemporary tendency to focus on identity needs (who are we?) rather than

institutions (what rules organize our interactions?) and to consider the issues of tran-

sitional justice through the lens of identity questions rather than institutional devel-

opment. The relative inattention to the problem of institutional creation, combined

with tremendous public absorption with identity needs, has led us to underestimate

the ways in which democratic politics—transitional or established—is unable to

achieve moral clarity in the face of major breaches of justice.

GERMANY AS THE EXCEPTION: INSTITUTION BUILDING

AND DEMOCRATIZATION IN POSTWAR WEST GERMANY

Understanding institutional creation can be considered a central task of social

science, and yet efforts to address it have been by and large unsatisfying, especially

304 JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

1. Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks at the National Press Club on September 10, 2003, are indicative:“It

is going to be a tough job, but it’s a job well worth doing. And our folks,in my view, are hard at it, doing

a good job and proceeding purposefully, and, I would say,proceeding at a pace that very likely is faster

than happened in Japan, faster than happened in Germany,faster than happened in Bosnia, faster than hap-

pened in Kosovo” (see text of remarks at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030910-

secdef0661.html). On June 22, 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,testifying before the

House Armed Services Committee, still compared the occupation of Iraq favorably to the occupation of

Germany; see http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2004/sp20040622-depsecdef0521.html. The State

Department’s assessment of postwar possibilities in Iraq was always more sober (see Packer 2003).

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