What has been the effect of unification on Germany? Was it negligible, as Tocqueville famously argued for the effect of the French Revolution on post-revolutionary France? Was it transformative, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher feared at the time, as she watched what to her looked like a new German colossus poised once again at the apex of the European hierarchy of status and power? Or was it moderate, as I argue here, conforming to a pattern of change that typifies Germany well before 1989? The chapters in this volume provide an updated answer that gives me a welcome opportunity to revisit a book that I wrote almost two decades ago: Policy and Politics in West Germany: the Growth of a Semisovereign State (Katzenstein 1987).

I adapted the book's title from one of the classics of American political science, E. E. Schattschneider's (1960) The Semisovereign People. Schattschneider offers a sophisticated analysis of American political institutions and organisations as a mobilisation of class bias. ‘The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent’ (Schattschneider 1960, p. 35). Analogously, Germany's semisovereign state creates a bias for incremental action. What Stanley Hoffmann (1968) argued for the United States' foreign policy in world affairs, holds also for Germany's semisovereign state in domestic politics. A semisovereign state is not free to act as it pleases.