SWEEPING GENERALISATIONS, or 2001 was last year.

'Das Ende des Menschen' Francis Fukuyama,DVA,ISBN3-421-05517-3 'Menschmaschinen' Rodney Brooks, Campus, ISBN 3-593-36784-X 'Dampflok, Daimler, DAX, Paul Erker, DVA, ISBN 3-421-05485-1 ein unvollendetes projekt, Oskar Negt (HG.) Steidl, ISBN: 3-88243-851-7

This is an election year in Germany, where the coalition government of Gerhardt Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens (Gruene Partei/Bundnis 90) is likely to lose its majority, with the outcome, either of a realigned coalition based on the SPD, or the right of centre Union of Christian Democrats, CDU/CSU, led by Chancellor candidate Edmund Stoiber, who is currently regional 'Minister President' in Bavaria.

No-one, least of all the polling organisations, is very clear about who will do best, or which amalgam of minor parties can be botched together to form a coalition. The main parties outside the government are the conservative socialists of the PDS, most of whom are former DDR communists and the opportunist wing of German politics, the right wing 'liberal' party or Free Democrats (FDP). The PDS have offered to support the SPD without entering a coalition. The FDP regard themselves as coalition makers with either of the major parties, though a leading light in the party Juergen Moellerman seems intent on stunting his way to electoral disaster and may pull his party down around him. He has recently sent a circular letter to constituents criticising Michael Friedmann, who plays a very public role as commentator and tv interviewer, and as a representative for the Jewish community in Europe. This is only the latest in a series of spats from Moellermann, FDP who seems increasingly to fit the anti-semitic profile his detractors have suggested. ZentralRat der Juden (Central Council of Jews)

The election will be held on September 22, but the outcome will probably depend on several weeks of subsequent haggling and coalition building. Germany is a country where the voters cannot know which government they are voting for, nor can they know which platform of policies they are voting to support. The real election issues emerge after the election, when the polical sticking points between potential coalition members are defined and smoothed over to become a policy framework for government. Whatever the electorate might suppose, the critical issues are often arcane details of policy that have scarcely been discussed during the official campaign before the election. Political horse trading transforms manifesto commitments into immediate priorities, or sees them deferred as longterm objectives; programmes receive greater or lesser tranches of funding; people are promoted to posts of importance, or disappear into the political wilderness. The eventual government is therefore unlikely to represent any particular political standpoint, nor reflect any of the various contrasts in policy debated during the election campaign.

This time the campaign has been dominated by a series of crisis' caused by flooding and all the disadvantages of running political campaigns during the holiday season, when electors are more likely to be toasting themselves in the Mediterranean sunshine than wondering about social and economic policy. This lack of direct involvement has given German television the opportunity to try and build on a curious concept that they have been trying to develop for several years. This is the idea of a 'media democracy', an attempt to create an official role for the television as the focus for democratic discussion and debate. This might be an interesting proposition were the German media more politically critical, however the attempt to stage a series of US-style Presidential debates led to a couple of flaccid programmes and a lot of generalised comment about the candidates performance. Both candidates are competent performers on tv, have appeared daily on people's tv screens for years and neither was particularly impressive, so nothing emerged from the exercise. The main loser was the media, which despite very large viewing figures demonstrated its inability to find the key to range of choices the electorate think they face. Only two people to have done any good for themselves during this campaign. Renate Kunast the Green Party Minister for Consumer Affairs has demonstrated her competence as a minister, dealing first with the self inflicted wounds affecting Germany's farmers as scandal after scandal hits European agriculture, then with the flood damage that brought real hardship to its victims. The sacked defence Minister, SDPer Rudolf Scharping also bettered his situation by leaving politics to spend more time in the arms of his lover. By getting fired just as the election campaigns began, he not only avoiding the tedium of the campaign trails, but also relinquishing the thankless role balancing the interests of conscript based armed forces and those of a sophisticated cash hungry defence industry.

Of course, the main problem facing any European leader, or candidate, is that the main tendencies of policy are developed and implemented via the European Union in Brussels, where the democratic process is little more than a figleaf for an unequally balanced regime of meritocrats. It is difficult to understand why anyone with a modicum of talent should now wish to spend a career in the national ministries, where the work is clearly endless, but the decision making elsewhere and local players can leap-frog their regional and national administrations to exercise their credit cards winning hearts and minds around the restaurant tables of Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg.

Against this background, Oskar Negt's decision to edit and publish a series of open letters to the Schroeder administration is an interesting demonstration of traditional electoral tactics. His contributors are all established figures on the red/green German left and obviously consider themselves to be important figures around Schroeder and his Ministerial colleagues. The essays, each addressed as an open letter to various Ministers, are littered with references to 'the last occasion on which we chance to meet', or private discussions and other references intended to highlight the authors' privileged access to the Ministerial ear. Given that all these authors consider themselves to be fully integrated with the political process and public debate, it is interesting that several essays in 'ein unvollendetes projekt' (an incomplete project), refer directly to the author's doubts about the political process. Regina Becker Schmidt, professor of social psychology at the University of Hannover, addresses Oskar Negt, rather than the politicians he seeks to engage with, "In Federal Germany, there are few independent forums for intellectual influence over the redefinition of responses to developing social issues. Social movements have difficulty, as our press tends to report protest out of context, lumping together issues in generalisations, while art or academic investigation rarely opens up an arena here for the discussion of pressing current crisis' with the specific intention of changing things for the better. So, we lack the presense of constructive critical individual voices from institutions, to provide an interpretative and explanatory role in the development of opinion. It is clear to me, that there is an immediate connection linking these difficult initial conditions for criticism that demonstrates the importance of critical debate as the most important and indispensible medium of democracy. The question is merely, "By whom? Where are the 'thinking public'?"

If Becker Schmidt is correct and the press is inadequate for these purposes, (and she is equally critical of political advisors) then what hope for the 'media democracy' so beloved by television managers? Where indeed is her 'thinking public' to be found?

The assumption that there is a 'thinking public' and in many ways the expansion of higher education and the universities means that the public are better equipped to think than ever before, also lies behind a range of publications by specialists and academics, who want to bring their ideas into the wider arena. Rodney Brooks, "Menschmaschinen" (Flesh and Machines) is the work of a thinking technologist, who describes the astonishing achievements linking the human organism to technology as prosthetics and provides a fascinating account of the early development of robotics that has progressed from very simple, though often subtle beginnings in the last half century to exploit sophisticated devices providing solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems for people with disabilities. As Director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, however, Brooks' background is as a computer scientist and it seems unlikely that his early ambitions would be to help the 'blind to see' and the 'lame to walk', though these among the clear achievements of he and his colleagues work. Brooks appears to be writing for the general reader and in addition to describing the development of robotics, he embarks on a speculative series of propositions about the relationship between people and technology in the future, in particular proposing that the widespread integration of technical systems in people's bodies will lead to a blurring and eventual dissolution of the distinction between people and machines. His expections all rest on the assumption that the 'artificial intelligence' project can succeed and that technical assemblies will acquire a sense of consciousness comparable to that we associate with living beings. The key to all this is the notion that the brain functions like a computer and that a sufficiently sophisticated computer will eventually assume the characteristics we associate with the human mind. This is a highly contentious claim and Brooks knows that he cannot ignore those who challenge the assumption. At this point his arguments become less than pursuasive. It is hardly a reply to Roger Penrose's proposition for a quantum theory of consciousness, simply to assert that he has misunderstood Goedels theories and their relationship to Turing machines, or to dismiss Searle's 'Chinese Walls' thought experiment. The crux of Brooks argument (pg194) is that we are machines with feelings....therefore it is in principle possible for all machines to feel. Brooks is a very long way from being able to prove the truth of his assertion and his desire to describe people as machines seems little more than a grammatical sleight of hand, a misleading and inappropriate generalisation.

What puzzled me as I read 'Menschmaschinen' was the question of who Brooks thinks he is addressing? Clearly professionals within informatics will be familiar with his position, so they are not his real public. His account of the development of robotics is fascinating to the non-specialist like myself, but there is an urgency and an insistence in Brooks' style that made me wonder whether he is really addressing those very political advisors and generalisers of the media that Becker Schmidt finds so inadequate as a forum for democratic debate. What is at stake here? A visionary's perception of the future of humanity, or an academic who needs to impress the decision makers who will confirm, or deny funding and resources for his projects?

A very different vision of the future is presented in Francis Fukuyama's "Das Ende des Menschen" (The End of Mankind), which is a much more successful book than his earlier, 'End of History' response to the end of the cold war. This time, Fukuyama has trawled a very new body of work, relating the scientific achievements in genetics and biotechnology to social thought, policy development and their potential consequences. Kukuyama is especially strong linking the relevant legal framework , for example, the Nuremburg Codex on Human Experimentation and the limits encountered by stem cell research, the genetic manipulation of embryos, or the seldom discussed issue of chimeras, crossing the species barrier.

Fukuyama is acutely aware that whatever developments emerge, their distribution will be unequal, in particular the capacity to lengthen the human lifespan, or in its gloomier aspect the prolongation of old age.

These are issues that are exercising the minds of policy makers everywhere, influencing thinking on welfare provision and pensions, the future of work and employment, individuality and humans rights. As the local nature of the German election becomes ever more clear, Michael Schneider's contribution to the Oscar Negt collection of open letters adds a new dimension to the idea of a 'media democracy'. Schneider, who is a professor of film at the Film Akademie in Baden Wuerttemberg, has scripted an imaginary tv discussion between a presenter and three figures from contemporary life, Craig Venter,(geneticist), Erwin Chargoff, critic of biotechnology and Andrew Niccol, the scriptwriter of Gattaca. Trawling interviews for pertinent quotes, he weaves an amusing anecdotal discussion, padded by lengthy explanatory speechs from his imaginary interviewer. What has he achieved? Just as Becker Schmidt had warned us, this is a discourse pulsing with the irrelevance of sweeping generalisation.

Anyone trying to understand the specifically German character of the recent election, an up to date introduction to German industrial and economic history could be a valuable accessory. Paul Erker's "Dampflok, Daimler, Dax - Die deutsche Wirtschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert" is well worth acquiring and some enterprising publisher should ensure it is available in english translation. As well as providing a survey of the principle phases of the German economic development from the industrial revolution up to and beyond German Reunification, Erker uses contemporary economic terminology to describe a history very different to the dynamics of industrialisation in the UK, or North America. He also provides an extremely informative account of the development of institutions within the German economic, in particular revealing the long standing links between industry, finance and politics that is the distinctive feature of modern Germany, but whose roots Erker clearly traces to the early determination to industrialise. For anyone viewing Germany from a distance, either geographic, or cultural, Erker's book will probably provide more clear information to enlighten your understanding of the forces at work during the election, than the other books mentioned here.

JC