German Federalism Past, Present, Future Edited by Maiken Umbach New Perspectives in German Studies General Editors: Professor Michael Butler, Head of Department of German Studies, University of Birmingham and Professor William Paterson, Director of the Institute of German Studies, University of Birmingham. Over the last twenty years the concept of German studies has undergone major transformation. The traditional mixture of language and literary studies, related very closely to the discipline as practised in German universities, has expanded to embrace history, politics, economics and cultural studies. The conventional boundaries between all these disciplines have become increasingly blurred, a process which has been accelerated markedly since German unification in 1989/90. New Perspectives in German Studies, developed in conjunction with the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham, has been designed to respond precisely to this trend of the interdisciplinary approach to the study of German and to cater for the growing interest in Germany in the context of European integration. The books in this series will focus on the modern period, from 1750 to the present day. Titles include: Michael Butler and Robert Evans (editors) THE CHALLENGE OF GERMAN CULTURE Essays Presented to Wilfried van der Will Michael Butler, Malcolm Pender and Joy Charnley (editors) THE MAKING OF MODERN SWITZERLAND 1848–1998 Wolf-Dieter Eberwein and Karl Kaiser (editors) GERMANY’S NEW FOREIGN POLICY Decision-Making in an Interdependent World Jonathan Grix THE ROLE OF THE MASSES IN THE COLLAPSE OF THE GDR Henning Tewes GERMANY’S CIVILIAN POWER POLITICS The Western Integration of East Central Europe Since 1989 Maiken Umbach GERMAN FEDERALISM Past, Present, Future New Perspectives in German Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–92430–4 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England German Federalism Past, Present, Future Edited by Maiken Umbach Lecturer in Modern European History University of Manchester Editorial matter, selection and Chapters 1 and 3 © Maiken Umbach 2002 Foreword, Chapters 2 and 4–10 © Palgrave 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–96860–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German federalism: past, present, future/edited by Maiken Umbach. p. cm. – (New perspectives in German studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-333-96860-3 (cloth) 1. Germany–Politics and government–History. 2. Federal government–Germany–History. I. Umbach, Maiken. II. Series JN3221 .G474 2002 320.443’049–dc21 2001038905 10987654321 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Acknowledgement vi Foreword by Hagen Schulze vii Notes on the Contributors xiii 1 Introduction: German Federalism in Historical Perspective Maiken Umbach 1 2 Federal Habits: the Holy Roman Empire and the Continuity of German Federalism Joachim Whaley 15 3 History and Federalism in the Age of Nation-State Formation Maiken Umbach 42 4 Federalism and the Heimat Idea in Imperial Germany Alon Confino 70 5 Political Unity and Linguistic Diversity in Nineteenth-Century Germany Martin Durrell 91 6 Federalism in the Nazi State Jeremy Noakes 113 7 Democratic Centralism and Regionalism in the GDR Mary Fulbrook 146 8 German Federalism from Cooperation to Competition Charlie Jeffery 172 9 Challenges and Perspectives for German Federalism Wolfgang Renzsch 189 10 German Federalism in History: Some Afterthoughts Anthony J. Nicholls 206 Index 211 Acknowledgement The lecture series and symposium on which this volume is based was generously supported by the Anglo-German Foundation, London, and the Goethe Institute, Manchester. vi Foreword Hagen Schulze Never in history has the political unity of the Germans been something to be taken for granted. After the Middle Ages the world of nations devel- oped that was to determine the history of Europe right up to the present day: England, France, Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Sweden, and then later the United Netherlands and Denmark – all sitting on the periphery of Europe, blessed with more or less natural borders and fairly similar geographic, political, economic and cultural centres. In the midst of this lay European no-man’s-land, a profusion of ‘Germanies’ – ‘les Allemagnes’, as they say in France – a multitude of larger or smaller territories between Maas and Memel, Etsch and Belt, where although German was generally spoken, allegiance was given to the ruler and his religion, and the Kaiser and Empire were perceived at best as a sort of colourful fata Morgana: stirring, but very distant and without substance. The weakness of the Empire compared to Western Europe became apparent by the thirteenth century, if not before. The low concentration of centralized power in the Holy Roman Empire can largely be explained by the fact that the German King and Roman Emperor were almost entirely dependent on the agreement of the Empire’s great nobles. An elective monarchy is weak by nature and therefore backward in its development into a modern, centrally governed state. There are a number of reasons why a modern great power did not develop in this area as in the rest of Europe: the absence of a natural centre, the lack of natural boundaries; the country was dispersed, open on all sides, and, what is more, transportation was impeded by a land- scape criss-crossed by rivers and mountains. At the beginning of the sixteenth century there was indeed an attempt to form a united German state out of the transnational, somewhat metaphysical struc- ture of the Holy Roman Empire. In the following period, however, German unity fell victim to the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. While the struggle between the confessions was decided one way or the other in every other European state, it remained unset- tled in Germany, petrified to a certain degree in the territorial state principle of cuius regio, eius religio. The territorial division was arched over by the religious one, with consequences for the political culture of the Germans that remain visible up to the present. vii viii Foreword This fragmentation was the abiding constitutional principle of the Holy Roman Empire, a structure without its own statehood, organiza- tion or power. All of these had been transferred to the territories and Imperial cities and, furthermore, after the Thirty Years’ War, their ‘lib- erties’ (Libertäten), their sovereign rights, were guaranteed by an inter- national treaty, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Henceforth, the constitution of the Empire – ‘an irregular body of state which resem- bles a monster’, as Pufendorf puts it – was considered to be an element of international European law. In other words, the organization, order, and basic principles of the German Empire’s internal politics were the business of all the European powers. This constellation was no accident, but the logical outcome of the European order. It was only the amorphous character of Central Europe that kept the continent in balance, and a glance at the map shows why: whoever possessed this region, be it one of the European great powers or a power that emerged in Central Europe itself, could be the master of Europe. Hence every concentration of power in Germany was seen as a threat to Europe’s equilibrium. The inevitable conse- quence was the formation of hostile coalitions, and these were all the more likely to succeed because any Central European hegemonic power had to assert itself on several fronts at the same time, and had no defensible natural borders. For this reason, the European neighbours regarded the ‘liberties’ of the more than three hundred small German states as the guarantee of European freedom, the equilibrium of the states and their survival. The states of Europe as a whole therefore guaranteed the survival and the independence of the minor German principalities and the Imperial cities. Any encroachment by a great power inevitably led to competi- tion. During the earlier period the Habsburgs’ attempt to transform the semi-metaphysical Imperial conglomerate into a more or less modern- ized state power had already failed for this very reason. Subsequently, therefore, Austria-Habsburg oriented itself increasingly towards the European periphery, towards Eastern and South Eastern Europe as well as Italy, and in the same measure lost power in Central Europe. This was Austria’s long migration out of German history, which came to an end provisionally in 1866, and definitively in 1945.