The Pervasive Idea of Gaps

In 1977, the American economist John K. Galbraith published a book that would soon be widely translated: The Age of Uncertainty. His choice of title reflected a pervasive feeling that the era in which he was writing was witnessing new types of insecurity. This was not limited to the area of economics, where the oil crisis, inflation, unemployment, and growing public deficits could be felt in almost all countries outside the communist orbit. For Galbraith, in addition to these economic issues came terrorism, environmental hazards, the risks of atomic energy, and national (military) security (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1977; Rogers Reference Rogers2011).

One way these insecurities were debated in Germany was in terms of Lücken, meaning gaps, shortages, and deficits that were found nearly everywhere. In Germany, this discourse about gaps emerged quite rapidly after 1973 and was well in place by 1977. The political dramatization of these gaps in the media, on the streets, and in political debates was significant. With Reinhart Koselleck, one can argue that these gaps highlighted the prevalent feeling of a growing discrepancy between expectations and earlier predictions for the future, on the one hand, and actual developments, on the other. In other words, the “space of experience” clashed with the “horizon of expectations” (Koselleck Reference Koselleck and Koselleck2004).

Gaps were becoming evident, and thus new risks were in the offing. To begin with, there was heightened concern about an enduring Energielücke—that the flow of cheap and plentiful oil might be interrupted and thereby endanger the Western model of growth, prosperity, and even “national security.” In the wake of the energy crisis arose many other problems, even if their roots ran far deeper: Wachstumslücken (gaps in economic growth) caused a Beschäftigungslücke (unemployment) and Haushaltslücken (huge public deficits). The origins of these deficits were to be found in the decline of tax revenue and the increase of government expenditure. The latter was linked especially to the rapidly growing costs for social entitlements and the notorious case of “gaps” in funding for social services, in particular in the field of unemployment insurance and the public pension system. More than anything else, funding the public pension system troubled the Social Democratic coalition government in the winter of 1976–77, as the party had declared during the preceding federal election campaign that pensions were “safe” and could be increased. When this turned out not to be feasible, it was the political opposition and the press who talked about a “Rentenlüge” (pension lie). It became increasingly clear that the problems of the social security system ran deeper, not least because the earlier economic growth rates, on which so much fiscal and social policy had been based, could not be easily maintained. At the same time, warnings began to be voiced that the “birth gap,” the statistically measurable Geburtenlücke that West Germany had been experiencing since 1972, might do more than just aggravate problems in the field of social policy, due to its implications for the pension system. Indeed, some people began to argue that it could also endanger the German economy and society as a whole. Would all of these gaps translate into Erwartungslücken, gaps between expectations about the economy and the performance of the welfare state, or even worse, a fundamental Vertrauenslücke (a lack of trust)? This raised the more serious prospects of a “failure of the state” and a “crisis of legitimacy.” These latter discussions had a slightly dystopian cast and were well established among the Marxist left. Yet by 1977, such issues featured almost exclusively in the arguments of conservative and liberal critics of the expanding welfare state in what can be understood as a wider transnational debate over the “crisis of welfare state.” Quite typical for this “age of uncertainty” was the question of whether existing grand theories like Keynesianism could provide explanations or offer solutions (Geyer Reference Geyer2008: chs. 1 and 2).

The Temporal Order of Social Security

Although it is hard to say that feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, and risk were more widespread in the 1970s than at other times, such as at the height of the Cold War, many observers diagnosed a seismic shift in public awareness that also had substantial political repercussions (Conze Reference Conze2009). This development has to be read against the prevalent expectations of the preceding decade. In West Germany, the 1960s had witnessed the consolidation of both the state and the social order, accompanied by rapidly increasing standards of living and promises of overdue reform in various areas of social and economic life, including the rapid expansion of the welfare state.

Arguments for expanding the Sozialstaat (the German welfare state) had taken various forms: vague ideas of social and political justice in terms of a “social democratic consensus” after the war played as great a role as very pragmatic ideas of state guarantees for a “decent life.” Academically inspired reformers of the social-liberal coalition government could appeal to modernization theory in its various gradations: gross levels of social expenditure were tantamount to social progress, and market failure made state intervention necessary. Perhaps most important, social policies were seen not only as guarantees of social security, but also social security made possible social and political integration and thus political stability. This appealed to popular visions of social stability after the devastation of war as much as it did to the social ethics of scholars with Catholic backgrounds or to sociologists influenced by the work of the sociologist Talcott Parsons (Geyer Reference Geyer2007a; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2003a; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1998: 76–87).

The decisive term, then, was social security, not least in combination with modernization. Protection, reliability, certainty, trust, and safety were key elements that applied equally to the present and the future. In this context, the dictum of the German sociologist Franz-Xaver Kaufmann is often quoted: He notes “dass es in der Idee der Sicherheit stets um die ‘Vernichtung der Zeitlichkeit der Zukunft’ geht,” that the idea of security is always about the obliteration of temporality. That is, security is always about overcoming the contingency of the future (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 157, Reference Kaufmann2003). In other words, individual and collective risks in the near or distant future—health, disability, old age, and poverty—should and could be contained within a system of social security. Planning for the welfare state thus implied an effective management of the future. It became critical to know, for example, how labor supply could be guaranteed, in the light of national and international forecasts for robust economic growth that, up to the oil crisis of 1973, predicted continuous labor shortages. Likewise, how was uneven development in backward rural and urban areas to be prevented?

“Vernichtung der Zeitlichkeit der Zukunft” was based on optimistic projections not only of the economic future but also of the capacity to gear societies toward modernization: modernization was tantamount to social and economic security. Politicians and social scientists alike, in Germany as elsewhere, were infatuated with these optimistic economic projects. Statistical projections by the German federal government but also by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other institutions illustrate this point: social security, educational reform, or infrastructural development called for the planning of the future. In the slightly technocratic language of the time, the future in turn required the “production” of economic, social, and political security (Metzler Reference Metzler2005; Schmidt-Gernig Reference Schmidt-Gernig and Gerhardt2003).

Certain dimensions of this reasoning were rooted clearly in the historical experiences of two world wars, the Great Depression, hyperinflation and unemployment, and, last but not least, the rise of fascism. These “lessons of the past” provided constant justification for the welfare state, particularly among Social Democrats. Within the context of the social-liberal reform agenda of the 1970s and 1980s, the Sozialstaat thus became an essential element in the general project of reconstituting a “modern Germany” after the war (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1977).

Yet all the talk about the future and the failures of the past should not lead us to underestimate the long-standing assumptions that hovered around efforts to shape the present (even if this “project” was, by definition, never finished and thus remained future oriented). From the point of view of practical and rhetorical discourses of temporality, we may say that welfare-state policies and ideas of social security implied visions of social and cultural synchronicity (“Gleichzeitigkeit”) within the bounded national space. The temporal term synchronicity is another word for social and spatial integration. At the same time, however, it refers to ideas of synchronous life patterns within and between generations, that is, by way of the pension system, where the contributions of the younger generations pay for the retired in order to guarantee them an adequate living standard. This idea also thrived in another iteration, in Ernst Bloch's and others' diagnosis of “die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen” (the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous), which sought to characterize the ambivalent and potentially dysfunctional features of German modernity. In this latter sense, the concept of social and cultural synchronicity entered the American social theory of Talcott Parsons and played a considerable role in modernization theory (for the interwar period, see Geyer Reference Geyer and Hardtwig2007b).

In practical terms, the vision of synchronicity was associated with the effort to provide what Germans call “equal life conditions” (“gleichwertige Lebensbedingungen”), which covered a number of related aspects of social and economic life. As a project of equalizing living conditions between the city and the countryside, it had a strong spatial dimension. Historically, a significant element of this project has focused on shifting rural “provincials” and “backward” groups in the cities onto “modern time schedules,” for example, through the creation of industrial jobs, also in the countryside; the expansion of higher education; the growth of bureaucratic infrastructure; the establishment of train and bus connections; and even something as seemingly trivial as the installation of public telephone booths. The construction of new infrastructure for health services was also significant in this respect (Leendertz Reference Leendertz2008; Strube Reference Strube2013).

Social asynchrony, in the form of persistent institutional distinctions among classes and occupational groups, was historically a central feature of the German social security system. There existed separate schemes: Beamtenversorgung for civil servants, Angestelltenversicherung for white collar workers, and Bergarbeiterversicherung for miners, alongside the general social insurance covering most wage earners. The aim of overcoming this asynchrony informed not only the National Socialist vision of a welfare state based on the Volksgemeinschaft (plans for which were never realized, although its underlying ideas have their own tradition), but also that of a Fordist-type of Arbeitnehmergesellschaft, a society of salary earners characterized by a mass consumerist lifestyle. Although inequality of income continues to be one of the essential characteristics of this “society of employees,” the postwar reforms explicitly aimed at creating an Arbeitnehmergesellschaft did away with some of the status differences that underlay the old social insurance system (Nolte Reference Nolte2000: ch. 4; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1998: 76–91).

Last but not least, ideas of social synchronicity informed the concept of a “Solidar-Vertrag zwischen den Generationen”—a contract of solidarity between generations, as the Catholic social reformer Winfried Schreiber called it. This generational contract became the “ideological basis” of the 1957 reform of the old-age pension system in West Germany (following experiments with reform in the 1920s and early 1940s). One of its main provisions was to establish a fixed relationship between the income of the working and the nonworking population through individually accrued social entitlements, which were unequal but universally indexed to wages. In this context, synchronicity pertained not only to a politico-moral equality between generations, but also to a very concrete equality in retirement that was guaranteed by basing on former income and thus ensuring a standard of living comparable with one's peers in a given income and social status group. These ideas went hand in hand with the shift to financing old-age pensions on a “pay as you go” basis, such that pensions and other benefits are paid out of current contributions by employers and employees (as opposed to actuarially calculated contributions, as is common in private insurance). This close linking of the incomes of benefit recipients to the income of the working population made possible a considerable increase in pensions and other social benefits in the following years. By the early 1970s, this solution had been extended to most other beneficiaries of the welfare state, such as disabled veterans (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1998: 76–88; Schreiber Reference Schreiber1955).

These efforts to “synchronize” society were driven by new concepts of a better future that also offered a normative scale by which to judge the deficits of current social policy against the backdrop of past experiences. However, the optimism of those years can easily obscure the fact that the underlying prognoses with respect to the future were very vague, indeed, if they existed at all. In many respects, people were counting their chickens before they hatched. At least, that was how it looked to most critics, and not only in Germany, after the serious recessions that followed the two oil crises of the 1970s (Geyer Reference Geyer2008: 115–30; OECD 1981; Rosa Reference Rosa1982).

“Crisis” and Risks

Within a relatively short span of time, the pervasive “climate of reform” with its optimism about a manageable future turned into a “climate of problems” clouded with lingering pessimism about the immediate and distant future (Zapf et al. Reference Zapf1987: 49). Earlier optimistic welfare reforms were criticized as being unrealistic, if not “utopian” or outright dangerous and risky. Political debates over “crisis” thrived on this argument. By the second half of the 1970s, rapidly growing social expenditure and fiscal deficits fueled doomsday prognoses of “social overload” and even economic breakdown. The “English disease” was a recurring metaphor used to describe the combined prospects of inflation, high unemployment, fiscal deficits, and labor unrest, however benign these phenomena might be in Germany by comparison with other countries. “Hard” economic data fueled the laments of the self-proclaimed Cassandras. After the recession of 1974–75, the business cycle picked up again. Yet by 1977, it had already become clear that the previously high economic growth rates—so important for financing the welfare state—could hardly be recovered. Unemployment became “structural,” which was another way of saying that it could only be tackled through “structural reforms.” The sharp recession that followed the second oil crisis of 1979–80 destroyed even moderate expectations of economic growth and brought about new efforts to “manage” crisis by introducing the first wave of cuts in social programs without fundamental changes of the system. At least in Germany, institutional conservatism prevented change. No doubt this had to do with Germans' positive view of the social state as a mechanism for coping with crisis, a view apparent in the recession of the early 1980s and still powerful in the period of unification (Geyer Reference Geyer2008: 168–81; Metzler Reference Metzler2005).

However, one of the most conspicuous developments of this time was the speed with which the concept of “reform”—originally associated with the expansion of the welfare state—was “hijacked” by its critics. Within little more than a decade, the term reform was stripped of its meaning of a better future; reform became tantamount to stabilizing the systems of social security and undoing earlier enhancements through incremental cuts and institutional changes. A new argument gained currency: the welfare state or, for that matter, the political modernization program of earlier years, had created the very problems and risks they proposed to solve. In 1998, the sociologist Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, who had been so certain early in the decade that most issues of security and safety, including innere Sicherheit (domestic security), had been or could be resolved, struck a chord that reverberated in a larger debate when he spoke of “second order” social intervention—treating the negative side effects of past decisions with new policies (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann and Ruhland1998; Nullmeier and Rüb Reference Nullmeier and Rüb1993).

By the time Kaufmann made this argument in the 1990s, it was anything but new. With respect to atomic energy policy, his fellow sociologist Ulrich Beck was propagating the “modernization of modernization” by way of new strategies of “reflexive modernization” (Beck Reference Beck1986). In a similar manner (while always scornful of his sociologist colleagues for confusing things, in this case security and risk), Niklas Luhmann delivered the most devastating critique the project of “Vernichtung der Zeitlichkeit der Zukunft” and its underlying idea of neutralizing risks. For him, the whole notion of creating security was nothing but a social fiction. According to Luhmann, any decision or any nondecision implied risk, and decisions and nondecisions stood in relation to an unknown future, which could not be controlled and could even develop diametrically to the intentions of the decision makers. Although Luhmann developed his argument on the sociology of risk in the early 1990s, we should keep in mind that his ideas were already emerging in his 1981 critique of the welfare state. At that time, he maintained that providing social security and intervening in social matters implied the creation of new risks, which in turn would feed the expansion of the welfare state (Luhmann Reference Luhmann2003) in a way that evokes the image of the popular children's story The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The contingency of new risks, not least risks induced by earlier reforms meant to guarantee “security,” came to dominate debates about social policy. Unlike the ecological or peace movements, where nonexperts challenged dominant assumptions of security propagated by experts by politicizing the issue of risk, the new risk debates with respect to the welfare state had a decidedly technocratic tone. The “crisis of the welfare state” was discussed extensively in most countries, including Germany, where plugging “gaps” had been a central focus since 1975. There was widespread consensus that the “crisis” of “cost explosions” had to be “managed” as quickly as possible. Therefore, the emphasis was on implementing practical measures in the short term. Fiscal consideration became paramount, as costs were cut and shifted, contributions were raised, and self-payment (Selbstbeteiligung) was introduced. There were new risk perceptions. A good indication for this is the growing number of analyses and projections of the future premised on rapidly changing circumstances: various degrees of economic growth, different levels of unemployment (as a result of different levels of economic growth), and their impact on public finances in general and social insurance in particular. Gaps in economic growth and the job supply threatened to kill the hen laying the proverbial golden eggs; in turn, these gaps created a “crisis of legitimacy” and “expectation gaps.” Was it not a matter of rational choice to abuse the system, to get as much “out of it” as possible? Did the social net not only prevent individual economic initiative and self-help but also favor risky individual behavior, which in turn undermined the welfare state? These were just some of the questions raised during the long renegotiation of collective and individual risks.

The “Birth Gap” and the New Political Discourse of (Missing) Generations

It was in this context that the “birth gap” entered the debate, both as a statistical diagnosis of demographic developments in German society, past and future, and as a political argument about new risks and the feasibility of social security. The year 1972 was not an annus mirabilis that came as a surprise to demographers, who were aware of long-term trends of mortality, births, and patterns of reproduction. The West German birth rate had been falling continuously since the mid-1960s. However, it was the dawn of a “birth gap,” which has been pinpointed on graphs many times since, that made 1972 a symbolic turning point: the point had been reached where births no longer compensated for the number of deaths, or in the words of demographers, fertility had fallen below replacement level. The German population was shrinking and would have shrunk still further if there had been no immigration; at the same time, the population was aging. By international standards, the Federal Republic was quite advanced in this respect in 1972 (next to Japan, South Korea, and number of communist countries), although most other European countries were experiencing the same trend by the end of the decade. The German Democratic Republic had witnessed a similar phenomenon a couple of years earlier, but it seemed to have been able to reverse this trend by implementing family friendly policies. Only unification was to bring about a dramatic fall in the birth rate in eastern Germany. But by then, the Federal Republic had become a “schrumpfende Gesellschaft” (a shrinking society) (Birg Reference Birg2003; Conrad Reference Conrad and Lessenich2003; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2005).

Putting these developments in a larger context was a slow process, in Germany as well as in other countries. As early as the mid-1970s European demographers voiced a growing awareness of an altogether “new situation” with respect to population developments in industrialized countries (Grebnik Reference Grebnik1978: vii), and there emerged a growing stream of academic literature on this subject. It was in this intellectual environment that Dirk van de Kaa and Ron Lesthaege, two demographers from the Netherlands, developed their ideas about a “second demographic transition.” The trends seen in Germany, South Korea, or Latvia rapidly spread to almost all industrial countries (with the United States being a controversial exception). While the trends could hardly be denied, the explanation that these resulted from the impact of “postmodern value changes” like consumerism and individualism—an idea that van de Kaa and Lesthaege picked up from sociologist Ronald Inglehardt—remained contested (Lesthaege and van de Kaa Reference Lesthaege, van de Kaa, Lesthaege and van de Kaa1986; van de Kaa Reference Van de Kaa1987, Reference Van de Kaa2002).

Academic debates do not necessarily turn into political ones, but in Germany the “birth gap” had already become a political issue by the second half of the 1970s, in the context of multiple diagnoses of “gaps” and “crisis.” More than anything else, demography was used in the beginning as a means to challenge the optimistic expectations of the future that had underlain the reform agenda of the social-liberal governments of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. Any approach to population policy as such was inconsistent with the social-liberal reform agenda, and it was also beyond the horizon of economists. In the words of a policy planner at the chancellery, the problem was not just that the topic was “occupied” by the opposition: “an active population policy contradicts both the spirit and the substance of such social policy tenets of the coalition parties as the idea that women should also have a right to work” (Müller to Schmidt 1976). To be sure, this reluctance was also prompted by memories of the National Socialist version of an active Bevölkerungspolitik. To this day, it is still sometimes said that this is why demographic arguments were never truly accepted in Germany (Besters Reference Besters1980; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2005: 11). In fact, there are a good many reasons to doubt that Germany was a laggard in the new demographic debates that started in the 1970s, and there is a case for arguing quite the contrary (for France, see Dumont and Sauvy Reference Dumont and Sauvy1983; cf. Rosental Reference Rosental2003).

The implications of the Geburtenlücke and thus the “missing generation” (Birg Reference Birg2005) became an object of statistical and political controversy. Certain figures were repeatedly cited, such as that of the 9.5 million people who would not be born in the 1970s and who would, in turn, not have children of their own. This figure was sometimes used in connection with the incidence of abortion, and certainly such arguments must be seen in the context of debates over abortion, which had been legalized in 1974. More often than not, such figures became intertwined with economic reasoning. Today references are made to an “Investitionslücke” (investment deficit) of 2.5 billion Euros that was said to result from the deficit of German human capital due to low fertility rates (Birg Reference Birg2005; Gerhards et al. Reference Gerhards1998; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2005: 81f.). From the beginning, this gap made the future appear fraught with new risks connected to the birth decline. From the perspective of the 1970s, this was a distant future, one that would materialize at a point far into the first third of the twenty-first century. But it still impinged upon the present. As common as this argument is today, at the time it was quite new, surprising, and puzzling. It was expressed in books, articles, and special television reports with rather sensationalist titles like Sterbendes Volk? (A Dying People?) or Sterben die Deutschen aus? (Are the Germans Dying Out?). There was a decisively catastrophic if not dystopian dimension to these diagnoses—certainly nothing new in the history of German Bevölkerungspolitik. The “tree of life”—the shape of the German demographic composition by age as depicted by a healthy tree—was a thing of the past; the modern composition more closely resembled an “urn” (an image that caught the eye of this author even back in high school) (Der Spiegel 1975; Etzemüller Reference Etzemüller2007: 135, 361–71; Franke and Jürgens Reference Franke and Jürgens1978; Gründel Reference Gründel1973; Nullmeier and Rüb Reference Nullmeier and Rüb1993).

It became a thriving business to forecast the demographic future of an industrialized country like West Germany in terms of an “endangered species.” Within a few years, these prognoses, which ranged from the scientifically tedious to the politically polemical or esoteric, came to play a growing role in both public debates and public policy. If the second half of the 1970s had been a phase in which the problem was raised, the early 1980s witnessed the first outpouring of new model calculations for the future, particularly as new steps were being taken to “consolidate” the welfare state in the wake of the serious recession of 1980–81. The projections produced by various government institutions, economic research institutes, and individual academic studies varied, depending not only on their underlying time frame and assumptions about demographic development—would the decline in the birth rate since 1972 continue or not, and if so, how sharp would it be?—but also on the assumptions they made about the parameters of economic growth, gender-specific employment rates, labor migration, and so forth. Uncertainty abounded. This was more than just a squabble among academics and politicians; it was about who would shape the future and, in turn, define “the imperative consequences that had to be drawn for the future from the changes in the population structure” (Bundesminister für Arbeit und Sozialordnung (BMA), January 20, 1981, italics added; Deutscher Bundestag Reference Deutscher1980a, Reference Deutscher1984a; earlier, the Sozialbeirat had produced a similar report Sozialbeirat: Deutscher Bundestag Reference Deutscher1981, Reference Deutscher1984b; see also Buttler and Hof Reference Buttler and Hof1977; Wiss. Beirat beim BMWi 1985). Most of the arguments that still dominate the demographic discussion today were formulated in one way or another in the period between 1977 and the mid-1980s, although it took another decade before these ideas became influential and were integrated into new institutional solutions.

These new and more often than not pessimistic scenarios came to play an increasingly important role for various reasons. First, the birth decline seemed to have threatening implications for the country's ethnic composition. The nonnative population living in Germany was growing faster than the native population. The questions of how this population of non-Germans should be counted statistically and whether increased immigration was a solution to the looming demographic impasse became highly controversial. Unemployment was rising, and immigration was a source of political and social headaches because of the rise of anti-immigration sentiment since the recession of the early 1980s. Many commentators considered a significant increase in the numbers of immigrants to be even more threatening than population decline (Etzemüller Reference Etzemüller2007: 144; Herbert and Huhn Reference Herbert, Huhn and Geyer2008). Second, the idea of an impending demographic crisis legitimized the introduction of altogether new fields of social policy. It is no accident that in 1975–76, social reformers within the CDU/CSU started to include child- and family-related benefit schemes in the party's platform (as a move both to oppose and to compete with the ruling Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands's (SPD) gender equality policies). This appealed not least to the Catholic Church, which decried the secularization of the family represented by new divorce laws and, in particular, abortion reform (Dettling Reference Dettling1978; for a critical evaluation of earlier efforts: Schwarz Reference Schwarz1988). With the CDU in power after 1982, this new agenda was pursued at best half-heartedly, primarily due to the financial cost. The only notable exception was the pension reform of 1986 that benefited women who did not return to work immediately after the birth of their children. But the conservative agenda was now and would continue to be set within the context of perceptions of demographic change. Third, the catastrophic demographic scenarios were a powerful vehicle by which to communicate a “crisis” and to press for swift action in specific fields of social policy on the basis of “hard” statistical facts. The new demographic scenarios of the future were used to “correct” past decisions and delegitimize as “political” arguments for shaping a new future by expanding the existing welfare state. They thus became (and still are) a key rationale for an alternative solution: “structural” reforms.

It is quite noteworthy how the argument for structural reform blossomed in the wake of the economic crisis in 1980–81. At a conference in 1982, the statistician and demographer Heinz Grohmann, who worked as an adviser in the field of German pension reform, recalled that he had been doubly “shocked” by the results of a doctoral thesis (!) of one of his students six years earlier:

Grohmann's track record meant that he played a considerable role in policy debates. In the 1960s, he had delivered strong arguments for the generational contract and for increases in contributions and benefits. In models that were in tune with contemporary modernization theory, he predicted demographic stability within the continuing pattern of the two-child family. Indeed, in 1980, he wrote in a report for the Ministry of Labour that “it's easier to find reasons to predict an increase in births than a decrease” in both the near and distant future. However, at the same time, he was careful to outline other models predicting much lower birth rates. Furthermore, Grohmann, serious statistician that he was, was reluctant to venture beyond a time frame of much more than fifteen years (Grohmann Reference Grohmann1965; Reference Grohmann1980: 103). Then, within a relatively short time, it appears that his outlook changed. Grohmann began to place more emphasis on the need to adapt the social pension system to future demographic developments and proposed that a “demographic factor” be introduced into the pension formula, in order to spread the burden of pension insurance among contributors and pensioners in the future.

Grohmann's views reflect the perspectives of technical experts and advisers in the field of social security. Some of them were critical of the political decisions of the preceding decade, and the debates about a planned Rentenreform '84 fueled their critique (Geyer Reference Geyer2008: 171–81; Grohmann Reference Grohmann and Birg1984b; Meinhold Reference Meinhold1983; Nullmeier and Rüb Reference Nullmeier and Rüb1993: ch.3). In turn, they influenced government planning, in which fiscal considerations played a considerable role. As early as 1981, the Ministry of Economics published a report on pensions that maintained that “the demographic predictions differ in detail, but concur in the general assessment of trends. In order to absorb the cost burden of the pension insurance caused by the rising percentage of pensioners, the current contribution rate would have to be increased by about thirty percent by 2030 in order to maintain the pension levels of 1990. Should the contribution rates remain constant (18.5 percent), the pension levels of 1990 would fall far below the level of welfare benefits.” The alternatives were to increase the age at which pensions could be drawn or to introduce a “demographic factor” into the calculation of pension levels. Both made up the emerging new consensus of experts (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft, November 17, 1981).

A New Biological Governmentality: The Economists Enter the Debate

It might seem a curious coincidence that Michel Foucault was speaking about “biopower” at just about the same time (1977–78) as this new demographic discourse emerged in Germany. Although he was very well informed about Germany, it is hard to imagine that Foucault had picked up on ideas that were still shrouded in a slightly esoteric aura and were usually expressed only at the fringes of debate. As was often the case when he spoke about the present, Foucault was referring to an unspecified past located somewhere in the late eighteenth century, when regulation of the population moved to the center of policy considerations (Foucault Reference Foucault, Defert and Ewald2005). Biopolitics was nothing new, particularly in France, but Foucault's philosophical approach easily transgressed time and space, at times quite disconcertingly for the historian. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy how, at the time, he combined the notion of biopolitics with thoughts about “neoliberal governmentality,” which he said had developed both “in structure and profile” within the “German model.” Following up on these altogether vague notions, a number of authors have applied the concept of governmentality to describe the neoliberal restructuring of state and society since the 1980s, interweaving technocratic ideas of risk management with more fundamental questions regarding its character and institutional arrangements (Foucault Reference Foucault2004, 2: 269; Hesse Reference Hesse, Krasmann and Volkmer2007).

The power of biopolitical arguments for domestic structural reforms can be understood in the light of approaches to the problems of the developing world, which were catching the attention of mainstream economists as German policy makers were rethinking the European future. The “population bomb” (Ehrlich Reference Ehrlich1968) threatened not only economic growth but also social and political stability, and the 1970s saw reinvigorated efforts by American and international agencies, self-declared expert groups, and concerned individuals to slow down world population increase through family planning and birth control measures in developing countries—some verging on the criminal. The entrenched aim of putting these developing countries on the track of “demographic stability” pioneered by the countries of the “advanced” industrialized world was anything but new in the postwar period (Connelly Reference Connelly2008: chs. 6–8). But this model of modernization had already fallen out of tune with reality in the “model” Western societies, among them countries like Germany, and it is noteworthy that it was in this very specific historical context that mainstream economists started to appropriate the field.

This is a fascinating though as yet little studied development, especially when we consider the prevailing lack of interest by economists in such issues in the postwar period. Suddenly they were seeing specific challenges to economic growth in both the “Geburtenlücke” and increasing social expenditure. While their diagnoses were clearly linked to domestic economic problems and the rapidly spreading “crisis of the welfare state” in industrialized countries in the early 1980s (Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber, Kott and Droux2013), the recession of those years also had far-reaching implications for the assessment of future problems in the developing world. The emerging global debate over social policies was influenced by such assessments, particularly in light of the debt crisis in the Latin American countries (which spread like wildfire starting in 1981), on the one hand, and the comparable successes of the “Asian Tigers,” on the other (Esping-Andersen Reference Esping-Andersen1996; Smith et al. Reference Smith1985; Walton and Seddon Reference Walton and Seddon1994: 3–22, 97–134).

It was in this context that demographic arguments came to figure prominently in economic reasoning, but as the decade progressed the emphasis shifted from fears of overpopulation to the vision of an aging population. Demographers collaborated with economists and social policy experts, on the national and the international level. As early as 1988, the OECD was addressing “the social policy implications” of “aging populations” by providing detailed data and graphs for each of its member countries and various scenarios reaching as far into the future as 2050. A few years later the World Bank followed suit by addressing demographic developments with proposals on ways to avert the “old age crisis” and to “promote growth” (OECD 1988; United Nations 1985; World Bank 1994). Social security provisions were said to threaten economic development, at least in the long term. The scenarios of the World Bank encompassed not only the older industrialized countries but also the developing world, including China and India. There, they predicted similar trends of long-term fertility decline, whose impact would be felt far into the next century. Widely disseminated graphs published by the World Bank depicted the new issue of aging as a global one: future “cost explosions” caused by aging populations supplanted the picture of the “population bomb.” Such OECD and World Bank publications represented just the tip of an iceberg of expert opinion, of which we know very little (Birg et al. Reference Birg1984; Felderer Reference Felderer1983; Steinmann Reference Steinmann1984).

These mainly pragmatic and technocratic initiatives were associated with a more fundamental critique of the pension system, particularly of the underlying idea of the generational contract. Although this critique did not originate among economists (at least in Germany), by and large they came to appropriate its arguments and to develop their own agenda (Véron et al. Reference Véron2007). The doyen of Christian social doctrine, the Catholic Oswald von Nell-Breuning, had argued in 1977 (as he had done earlier) that the generational contract, as embodied in the pension law of 1957, could not work and would end in disaster. Under the prevailing pay-as-you-go system of financing pensions, people of a working and reproductive age actually could expect to be supported in their old age by the next generation, just as they were paying the pensions of the elderly generation ahead of them. Nell-Breuning pointed out that a crucial link in the generational chain was missing, in that the current working generation had failed to produce the next generation that was necessary to support it (Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt1985; Kaufmann and Leiserung Reference Kaufmann and Leisering1984; Nell-Breuning and Fetsch Reference Nell-Breuning and Fetsch1981; Nullmeier and Rüb Reference Nullmeier and Rüb1993: 376–81). It should be stressed, that this line of argumentation was not altogether new. It had been brushed aside both in the 1950s and later in the context of the pension legislation vastly extending benefits in the early 1970s, when the issue was also raised within the Ministry of Labour (H. Löwe Reference Löwe1971, Reference Löwe1978; L. Löwe Reference Löwe and Schubnell1981; Nullmeier and Rüb Reference Nullmeier and Rüb1993: 361–65).

This argument offers an example of how the “birth gap” and the “missing generation(s)” became politicized. On a very general level, critics like Nell-Breuning argued that Gesellschaftspolitik in general and social and economic modernization policies in particular needed to place a greater emphasis on the biological reproduction of society. This could be and was used as a rationale for shifting and extending social benefits to families with children and even for extending the social welfare state (Geyer Reference Geyer2008: 226–31; Hockerts Reference Hockerts and Hockerts2011: 300f.). In fact, this was the intent of Nell-Breuning and most of his followers. However, at the same time they challenged the emancipatory optimism at the heart of earlier assumptions about social policy. Thus, relaxed diagnoses of the “second demographic transition,” like that of Lesthaege and van de Kaa, which attributed population change to the emergence of “postmodern” values, could be and were read “against the grain” to indicate that the welfare state was promoting values that threatened to undermine its foundation. According to this line of thought, the welfare system made it more attractive, particularly for women, to enjoy the benefits of work and later social security, and not to raise children (to say nothing of the supposed “hedonism” made possible by the false feeling of security that the social safety net provided). Virulent antifeminists attacked value change and decried nearly everything from “emancipation” to women in the workforce (Geyer Reference Geyer2008: 226f.).

Economists easily fed this discourse (and expressed some of its underlying value judgments) when they argued that the present system was not tenable. Wasn't it a matter of “rational choice” not to have children? Weren't the foundations of the social security system altogether misconceived with respect to the distribution of wealth between generations? Like others before him, Milton Friedman spoke of “the biggest ponzi scheme on earth” (Famulla and Spremann Reference Famulla and Spremann1980; Friedman Reference Friedman1999). In the 1990s, economists started to draw up “generational balance sheets” to calculate the net costs and benefits of social policies for individual birth cohorts and thereby demonstrate the mal-construction of the public pension system (Boll et al. Reference Boll1994; Raffelshüschen and Risa Reference Raffelhüschen and Risa1997).

The proposition that the present system of social security lacked “sustainability”—the new catchword of the 1990s also in Germany (Rödel Reference Rödel2013)—became one of the basic assumptions of these discussions. Similar criticism had been voiced much earlier by those who attacked the effects of redistribution, arguing that the elderly received too great a share of the economic pie. By the 1990s, the term generational equity—apparently coined in 1984 by the organization Americans for Generational Equity—had gained considerable prominence in Germany as elsewhere. David Thompson wrote about the “conspiracy” of the older generation against the younger, and in Germany, books appeared with such titles as Die gierige Generation (the greedy generation) or Generationsbetrug (generation scam) (Gronemeyer Reference Gronemeyer1991; Klöckner Reference Klöckner2003; Thompson Reference Thompson1989; Tremmel Reference Tremmel1996). These polemics went far beyond the lament over “unintended” side effects of the welfare state that called for past errors to be mended by “secondary” interventions. For these authors, the public had been fundamentally misled by the introduction of Adenauer's pension reform of 1957 and the expansion of the system, especially in 1972. In fact, this verged on a “generational conspiracy” that left future generations with the burden of paying tremendous costs. These polemics, like the idea that the whole social security system was a “Ponzi scheme,” radically questioned the principles of social synchronicity that had been embedded in the German social pension system of 1957. This contract was not “sustainable”; it was based on wrong assumptions about the future.

The threat of “social burdens” resulting from an aging society in both the intermediate and (especially) the distant future was used as a strategic argument to call for institutional reforms, whether the adjustment of pension levels, the partial privatization of social security, the establishment of a three-pillar system of pensions similar to that in Switzerland, or the replacement of pay-as-you-go financing with a partially or fully funded system. All of this was hotly debated in Germany, as in most other countries, during the 1980s, and Central and South America became the testing grounds for major reforms in the context of “structural adjustment” (with, e.g., the fully funded Chilean pension system serving as an important model) (Geyer Reference Geyer2008; Huber Reference Huber and Esping-Andersen1996; Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber2012; OECD 1981, 1988; Valdés Reference Valdés1995). The German discussion threw up the question initially raised by Grohmann at the beginning of the 1980s: how could biological reproduction—with its implications for the future—be factored into the calculation of benefits? That kind of calculation was only implemented in the pension reform of 1997, and the solution that was found did not necessarily please those who had raised the question. More noteworthy is the fact that Germany is apparently the only country to have tried to make the calculation of the level of pensions dependent on future demographic changes, and thus indirectly on both biological reproductive and immigration levels (for an overview see Reinhard Reference Reinhard2001). Some elements of this reform were suspended following the change of government in 1999, and when the policy was reintroduced in 2004 it was only as a Nachhaltigkeitsfaktor, a calculation of sustainability that takes into account (by way of a complicated mathematical formula) changes in population development. This reform lowers pensions substantially: from a factor of 70 percent (based on a figure derived from an individual's last income) in 2001 to 58 percent in 2030. Because the taxation of pensions was introduced at the same time, the pension level will actually will be well below the 50 percent level (Berner Reference Berner2009: 150; Roloff Reference Roloff2003; Sachenverständigenrat 2005: 294–309).

This abstract factor of biological “sustainability”—that is, the future and thus the risks of population development—is a good example of a “neutral” mathematical figure that works as a check to protect the pension system against “political meddling” and claims revolving around themes of equity and social justice. The decision to retain a restructured pay-as-you-go system with a demographic gearing in preference to (for example) a fully funded system based on actuarially calculated contributions is a key biopolitical one. It represents a governmentality that places the reproduction of life squarely at the center of the public pension system. And it has a further important consequence for the relationship between the individual, society, and the future: pensions based on a demographic factor make individuals responsible for sustaining not only the national economy but also the future population size.

In the same spirit, restructuring went hand in hand with a renewed emphasis on strengthening individual provisions for future risks by way of private—in part, publicly subsidized insurance (Hockerts Reference Hockerts and Hockerts2011: 305–22; Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber, Sattler and Boyer2009). This was seen as but another way of eliminating the threat of “gaps” facing public social institutions—pensions as much as health insurance-, by turning those collective risks looming in the future into risks that could be better managed and provided for by individuals who knew their specific needs. It was left up to the ability of individuals, each with their own specific “risk profile,” to take care of the “income gaps” that result from lowered pensions. Similar trends can be seen in the whole system of social security in Germany, as in many other countries where this trend is often much more pronounced. On the individual level, economic performance still matters in the social security system. But together with the “privatization of risk” go strategies of bodily self-governance and new technologies of the self, in terms of a new responsibility for sustaining one's own physical as well psychological well-being. At the heart of this governance are ideas about individualized—as opposed to social—time (Bröckling et al. Reference Bröckling2000; Maasen et al. Reference Maasen2011; Rose Reference Rose1996).