Twenty years ago, the German author and commentator Henryk M. Broder published Hurra, wir kapitulieren! Von der Lust am Einknicken – Hooray, We’re Capitulating! On the Pleasure of Giving In.
Broder’s purpose was not merely to criticise Islam or the demands Muslim minorities were making of European societies. His real focus was Europe itself.
He described a mechanism he called vorauseilende Kapitulation – pre-emptive capitulation: rather than waiting to be forced to give way, you rush to meet the demand and make the accommodation in advance.
Broder was writing in the aftermath of the Muhammad cartoons crisis, the murder of Theo van Gogh and an increasingly visible European reluctance to stand up to Islamist demands and threats.
Twenty years later, what is striking is how little the mechanism itself has changed.
But something crucial has been added.
The pre-emptive capitulation Broder described was driven largely by fear, conflict avoidance and an unwillingness to defend one’s own norms. Since then, an identity-political and woke mindset has emerged that has furnished capitulation with a new moral vocabulary: accommodation, inclusion, identity, safety and protection from offence.
We no longer give way simply to avoid conflict. Accommodation can now be presented as the morally right choice.
Capitulation has become a virtue.
A Handshake and a Supreme Court Ruling
A Danish Supreme Court ruling of 13 May this year could almost serve as a textbook example.
A Muslim student teacher refused on religious grounds to shake hands with men. The school in Albertslund Municipality where she was due to undertake her teaching placement had a clear rule: if you shook hands, you shook hands with both men and women. The purpose was equal treatment of the sexes.
The case ended up before the Supreme Court. The parties agreed that the handshake requirement pursued the legitimate aim of ensuring equal treatment and that it was an appropriate means of doing so. The question was whether it was also necessary.
Six of the seven Supreme Court justices said no.
The woman could, for example, refrain from shaking hands with either men or women and instead greet them by placing a hand on her chest and bowing her head.
The visible discrimination had thereby disappeared.
But its cause had not.
The woman still refused to shake hands with men because they were men. By also refraining from shaking women’s hands, her behaviour became formally gender-neutral, while the religious belief that had created the conflict remained untouched.
The Supreme Court thus made the conflict between the common secular norm and the religious demand for special accommodation appear to disappear. But in reality, it had been resolved: the common rule had to give way to the religious demand.
From Principle to Personal Experience
When Broder wrote his book in 2006, woke ideology and modern identity politics did not yet exist in the form they have since acquired. They did not create the European appeasement he described, but they have furnished it with a new moral vocabulary.
And with that has come a crucial shift.
The classical liberal society asks: What common rule should apply?
The identity-political mindset asks: How does the individual experience the rule?
The first is about principle. The second is about personal experience and feeling.
And principle is at a disadvantage in that contest: it has no feelings. It cannot feel offended, and it cannot demand consideration.
A person can.
When institutions simultaneously reward accommodation, consensus and conflict avoidance over adherence to principle and acceptance of the friction that common rules inevitably create, personal experience acquires moral precedence.
But an open, secular society can survive only if its foundational principles are actually upheld. Our civil liberties are not given by nature. They endure only for as long as the state and its institutions are both able and willing to defend them.
The Liberal Paradox
This is where Broder’s old diagnosis becomes more sinister.
The strength of liberal democracy lies in its openness. It grants the individual rights against the state, protects the minority from the majority, religion from political coercion and speech from interference by those in power.
That openness becomes a vulnerability when it entails continually reshaping society’s common norms around the convictions of the individual.
Freedom of religion gives the individual extensive freedom to hold and practise a religion. It does not mean that the common secular norm must be reshaped whenever religious precepts collide with it.
That is why the handshake ruling matters far beyond its specific legal substance.
The Supreme Court does not abolish equality between the sexes or declare Islam superior to Danish norms. The principle of equality remains, but now in a construct in which the religious demand for special accommodation can remain intact as well.
When two norms genuinely collide, a society must choose which one it intends to uphold. In the handshake ruling, the Supreme Court chose the religious demand for special accommodation over the common secular rule.
Selling Off the Family Silver, Piece by Piece
Fundamental social principles rarely disappear overnight.
No one needs to declare equality between the sexes abolished, the secular legal order suspended or common rules henceforth subordinate to religious demands. It happens far more quietly:
A concrete conflict arises. A belief or identity collides with the common norm. The institution wants to avoid the conflict and finds an accommodation, a compromise, a concession.
Each individual accommodation may look insignificant. But civilisations consist precisely of those norms and principles that have become so self-evident that we barely notice them.
They are our family silver.
And we can sell them ourselves, piece by piece, every time we decide that this particular principle is not worth fighting for.
From Pre-emptive to Morally Legitimated Capitulation
Broder identified Europe’s vorauseilende Kapitulation.
Europe did not always need to be forced to give way. We could do it voluntarily.
Twenty years later, the problem has become both more extreme and more sophisticated: more extreme because woke ideology and identity politics have pushed subjective experience, minority identity and accommodation ever higher in the moral hierarchy of our institutions.
More sophisticated because the same development has furnished capitulation with its moral legitimacy.
We therefore no longer necessarily give way with the feeling that we have capitulated. We do so in the conviction that we are being inclusive, considerate and progressive.
Eventually, upholding the common rule can come to appear morally suspect, while accommodation appears decent and humane.
That represents a far deeper shift than the conflict avoidance Broder described. For it is one thing not to dare to defend the principles of your civilisation. It is quite another to have become convinced that defending them is morally wrong.
And perhaps that is where we stand, twenty years after Hurra, wir kapitulieren!:
No longer merely at the point of pre-emptive capitulation.
But of morally legitimated capitulation.
