Seen from a historical perspective, German unification will be perceived as a major social change which represented gross interruptions in the routines of the lives of many, and yet with surprisingly small and circumscribed effects, at least in the short run. In contrast to widely held expectations, soon after unification, East-West differences in adolescents' development appeared quite minimal or even non-existent, in spite of the remarkable differences in the political fabric of the two Germanys. Looking more closely, however, it was quite clear that life was much more similar to begin with, and that the changes concerned primarily those dimensions of development directly affected by social institutions (Silbereisen and Zinnecker, 1999).

Unification was engineered by the transfer of basic social institutions, namely, parliamentary democracy, the legal system, and the capitalist economy, from the West to the East. By providing such institutions according to the Western model, the lack of differentiated social structures in the East – together with the reliance on central planning presumed to be the main cause of the East's failure in face of new technological and political changes – was expected to be resolved. Given the existence of a civic society in spite of all the havoc, many scientists believed that people would feel encouraged to develop these structures further by their own agency (Zapf, 1996).