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).