Summary: Depoliticalization, Deterioration of Institutions
Reflections on the Basic Threats to Internal and External Security
Michael Wladika
Starting out at Hegel’s philosophy, the author regards the depoliticalization and deterioration of institutions as a basic threat to external security. As mediating authorities, institutions give structure to a system and set the conditions for people, personalities, cultures, selfunderstanding and world perception. According to the anthropologist and theoretician of institutions Arnold Gehlen, the initial category of decision making is crucial, consisting of whatever behavior that raises facts above the arbitrariness of events. The primary institutions thus established are not only stabilizing functions but first and foremost ethical realities.
For anthropological reasons, man is never without institutions. Without them he would be unable to make decisions, be undetermined in a direct manner and therefore fictitious, and unthinkable even as a biological being. In this sense, an institution means permanent objective examining, putting into concrete terms, and gaining freedom.
The family and the state, as the two essential moral entities and institutions per se, are increasingly getting under pressure by alternative models that are characterized by individualism and personalized freedom and interests. Through the assimilation of institutions and cosmopolitanism or globalization, to use a more current term, the state is running the risk of losing institutions like marriage and family to alternative forms of cohabitation, that were sparked by the sexual revolution.
Since the great institutions are a reservoir of stored experience, the deterioration of institutions results in more primitive thinking and acting. Institutional decay thus leads to disorientation and destabilization. Unstable communities lose their power of resistance, while the institutional parameters for nation, war, and peace become blurred.
Depoliticalization expresses itself in the fact that political issues are perceived only insofar as they bear relevance to private and professional experiences. Moralizing presentations are to blame for today’s omnipresence of politics, which results in a depoliticalization from within. Possible ways out of this may only be found in education, asceticism, and perception, as institutions can neither be established directly nor be restored.
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