We have seen in the previous chapters how important culture and values are to determining whether a policy works and whether it is seen as legitimate, and the role of politics in managing values-based conflicts. These discussions leave open a rather large question: can governments actually affect culture and values at all? If they can’t, then the options for the policy maker to address the issues raised so far are limited. Taking culture seriously would become a matter of managing what exists, rather than shaping it pro-actively. This chapter addresses this question of whether governments can affect culture and values, and also whether they should.

Can governments affect culture and values?

The 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin! was a huge hit, making around $80 million at the box office and winning numerous awards. It told the story of a family in Berlin struggling to cope with the level of change and dislocation brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall and imminent German unification. The difference in culture in the two Germanies comes out powerfully through the humour in the film. The division of Germany created a natural experiment in what impact governments can have on culture and values. Where there had been one country before 1949 there were now two, run by regimes with completely different sets of values and contrasting world-views. Did the democratic capitalist regime in West Germany lead to the population holding different values to those found in the Communist East?

The ‘experiment’ in Germany was particularly extreme because of the nature of the East German regime. It was a totalitarian system, which regarded the mindsets and values of citizens as not just something the state could influence but as a domain in which it absolutely had to take a central role. As Service (2007) argues, this desire for control over every aspect of life, culture and values as much as laws and institutions was a hallmark of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The East German state pulled every possible lever to influence the way citizens thought and acted. The official purposes of East German social policy were set out by the DDR's Institute for Sociology and Social Policy in 1985 and placed values firmly within the ambit of the state (Scharf, 1988).