Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Semisovereignty Challenged
- 2 Institutional Transfer: Can Semisovereignty be Transferred? The Political Economy of Eastern Germany
- 3 Political Parties
- 4 Federalism: the New Territorialism
- 5 Shock-Absorbers Under Stress: Parapublic Institutions and the Double Challenges of German Unification and European Integration
- 6 Economic Policy Management: Catastrophic Equilibrium, Tipping Points and Crisis Interventions
- 7 Industrial Relations: From State Weakness as Strength to State Weakness as Weakness. Welfare Corporatism and the Private Use of the Public Interest
- 8 Social Policy: Crisis and Transformation
- 9 Immigration and Integration Policy: Between Incrementalism and Non-decisions
- 10 Environmental Policy: the Law of Diminishing Returns?
- 11 Administrative Reform: Is Public Bureaucracy Still an Obstacle?
- 12 European Policy-making: Between Associated Sovereignty and Semisovereignty
- 13 Conclusion: Semisovereignty in United Germany
- References
- Index
13 - Conclusion: Semisovereignty in United Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Semisovereignty Challenged
- 2 Institutional Transfer: Can Semisovereignty be Transferred? The Political Economy of Eastern Germany
- 3 Political Parties
- 4 Federalism: the New Territorialism
- 5 Shock-Absorbers Under Stress: Parapublic Institutions and the Double Challenges of German Unification and European Integration
- 6 Economic Policy Management: Catastrophic Equilibrium, Tipping Points and Crisis Interventions
- 7 Industrial Relations: From State Weakness as Strength to State Weakness as Weakness. Welfare Corporatism and the Private Use of the Public Interest
- 8 Social Policy: Crisis and Transformation
- 9 Immigration and Integration Policy: Between Incrementalism and Non-decisions
- 10 Environmental Policy: the Law of Diminishing Returns?
- 11 Administrative Reform: Is Public Bureaucracy Still an Obstacle?
- 12 European Policy-making: Between Associated Sovereignty and Semisovereignty
- 13 Conclusion: Semisovereignty in United Germany
- References
- Index
Summary
What has been the effect of unification on Germany? Was it negligible, as Tocqueville famously argued for the effect of the French Revolution on post-revolutionary France? Was it transformative, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher feared at the time, as she watched what to her looked like a new German colossus poised once again at the apex of the European hierarchy of status and power? Or was it moderate, as I argue here, conforming to a pattern of change that typifies Germany well before 1989? The chapters in this volume provide an updated answer that gives me a welcome opportunity to revisit a book that I wrote almost two decades ago: Policy and Politics in West Germany: the Growth of a Semisovereign State (Katzenstein 1987).
I adapted the book's title from one of the classics of American political science, E. E. Schattschneider's (1960) The Semisovereign People. Schattschneider offers a sophisticated analysis of American political institutions and organisations as a mobilisation of class bias. ‘The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent’ (Schattschneider 1960, p. 35). Analogously, Germany's semisovereign state creates a bias for incremental action. What Stanley Hoffmann (1968) argued for the United States' foreign policy in world affairs, holds also for Germany's semisovereign state in domestic politics. A semisovereign state is not free to act as it pleases.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Governance in Contemporary GermanyThe Semisovereign State Revisited, pp. 283 - 306Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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