The enlarged Federal Republic of Germany that emerged on 3 October 1990 as a result of the accession of the five new Länder (federal states) created out of the former GDR was a distinctively new and somewhat lop-sided entity. It differed considerably from its West German predecessor, however much the latter had determined the conditions of unification and provided the basic constitutional and institutional framework for the unified Germany. The differences had to do with an uneven domestic economic, social and political profile, and with the dramatic changes in the wider international scene consequent on the collapse of communism and the end of a bi-polar Cold War world. The Berlin Republic represented, for a range of reasons, a distinctively new stage in German history.

The dislocations of the unprecedented historical experiment of integrating a collapsed communist state into a successful capitalist economy in the event proved far greater than the optimists in the hour of unification had expected. Major and unanticipated costs of reconstruction fell on West Germans in the form of increased competition for jobs in an era of rising unemployment, and increased taxation to help fund the modernisation of the East German infrastructure. The old, affluent, relatively self-satisfied West Germany which could agonise over its own past and proclaim it was the first ‘post-national nation’ found, too, that it was expected to take a more proactive role not only on the European, but also on the international, stage.