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
6 - Economic Policy Management: Catastrophic Equilibrium, Tipping Points and Crisis Interventions
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
Weak State, Incremental Bias: Semisovereignty in Comparative and Historical Context
Occasionally a book so successfully defines the central characteristics of a political system that it comes to inform the core assumptions, basic interpretations and agenda pursued in later studies. This applies with particular force to what are seen as its distinctive biases in economic policy management. It was Peter Katzenstein's (1987) seminal achievement to offer such an account of economic policy management in West Germany. Katzenstein's narrative was born out of a very different historical, institutional and ideational context from that of other countries such as France. The post-war reconstruction of West German economic policy was haunted by memories of the economic, social and political breakdown caused by hyperinflation in the 1920s and 1940s, by memories of the misuse of economic power by large firms and cartels, and by their association with the collapse into the barbarism of the Nazi period. Against this background, ‘economic stability’, the competitive market economy and ‘social partnership’ took on a deeply symbolic as well as practical value as guarantors of post-war liberal democratic stability. They decentralised and shared economic power (notably through competition policy and through co-determination in corporate governance), and put in place an institutional framework that was designed to prevent irresponsible political management of monetary and financial policy (in particular an independent central bank).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Governance in Contemporary GermanyThe Semisovereign State Revisited, pp. 115 - 137Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
- 8
- Cited by