Fifty Years of German Federalism: An Overview and Some Current Developments

Abstract

German federalism has been a subject of controversy since the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949, as it was in the Bismarck Reich and the Weimar Republic. According to certain key provisions of the Basic Law (constitution), the German Länder seem to have been granted more powers than they actually have, and developments over the years have eroded many of the powers they did receive. By the early 1960s the Federal Republic was being described as a ‘unitary’ (unitarisch) federal state, that is a federal system with strong centralising features. By the early 1970s it was also characterised as a system of cooperative federalism, and by the late 1970s as a system of Politikverflechtung, a complex form of joint decision making different in some important respects from the related American concept and practice of intergovernmental relations. In spite of the constitutional protection of federalism offered by Article 79, paragraph 3, of the Basic Law, many observers came to believe that federalism had become a facade for an increasingly centralised state, especially win regard to public finances; that the Länder were essentially administrative units; that the Land governments were not much more than training grounds and recruiting agencies for federal offices; and that the parliaments in the Länder had lost much of their relevance as legislative bodies, if not their reason for existence, except perhaps as preparatory schools for the elected national Bundestag. These harsher views can still be found and supported, but there is also a case to be made that, in spite of certain losses of power by the Länder, they not only remain important political and administrative units in a highly decentralised system of government but have also benefited from certain developments in recent years. Some examples of politically controversial actions taken by some Länder over the decades also suggest that dismissing them as mere administrative units is very misleading.