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
12 - European Policy-making: Between Associated Sovereignty and Semisovereignty
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
Conceptions of sovereignty are linked so closely to domestic structures that it is difficult to untangle the role of ideas from that of political organisation and practice.
(Keohane 2003, p. 322)It falls to very few social scientists to coin a term that defines a polity but this is precisely what Peter Katzenstein achieved with the concept of semisovereignty (Katzenstein 1987), which forged an indissoluble association between the old Federal Republic and semisovereignty. Moreover, this term is not just a convenient label, but a carefully worked-out explanation of the politics and policy style of the old Federal Republic. Many who have not read the book but who have encountered the term also assume that it refers to West Germany's sovereignty deficit in the international arena.
In Katzenstein's 1987 work, however, the emphasis is almost exclusively on internal constraints, many of them self-imposed, that limited the sovereignty of the West German state and by which, in Katzenstein's words, ‘The West German state has been tamed rather than broken’ (p. 10). These internal constraints included the system of co-operative federalism and the role of parapublic institutions, most notably the Bundesbank. It is, of course, Katzenstein's internally grounded conception of semisovereignty that most obviously suggests a continuing relevance to the post-unity polity.
Context: the Pre-Sovereign Years
The external dimension remained very largely unexplored, though Katzenstein enumerated, but did not analyse, a series of factors which informed his argument that ‘Semisovereignty is an external condition of West German Politics’ (Katzenstein 1987, p. 9).
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- Information
- Governance in Contemporary GermanyThe Semisovereign State Revisited, pp. 261 - 282Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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